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Kagi for Kids

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Re: Kagi for Kids

#91

Post by philips »

I love Kagi and I think the basic ideas here are a step in the right direction. I would really like to see the curation be social so I can share and collaborate with friends and my kids school. As it is I help my kid use an EOL Chromebook to find Origami designs but it is always side-by-side and I have tight NextDNS controls to keep weird weird ads away from my kids.

On this topic I have been drafting and collecting thoughts on internet and digital media curation the last few nights. Here is what I have so far:

Thesis: The role of children's teachers and caretakers in curating an environment for children to learn and grow is more important than ever with the overwhelming variety of books, videos, shows, etc all of varying quality and alignment with caretaker and child interests. However, curation in the digital age is also more difficult than ever. The web is a collection of walled gardens which give parents limited and inconsistent controls over what the child will see once inside the walled garden. And, adding controls on-top of a walled garden is impossible or only possible by very computer savvy users (e.g. YouTube frontends).

What are ways care takers can practically and easily curate today?

Examples

- YouTube Kids: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids

- Jellyfin or Calibre for ebooks

- Open WebUI with a custom system prompt for kids

Counter Examples

- Netflix, Disney, Amazon, etc: difficult to non-existent curation controls - all or nothing

- Kindle Kids: there are controls but for Library books the process is 12+ clicks between the Libby and Kindle app: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/can-you-share-kindl...

"Our young students are just beginning to develop their powers of discernment. By curating a good library collection, we can help them learn to weigh the merits of a few authoritative works on a subject rather than plowing through hundreds of internet sources of uneven quality. And while a computer search is undeniably efficient, we firmly believe that browsing a shelf of books is more rewarding and more educational. It deepens students' understanding of organizational principles, brings them unexpected discoveries, and rewards patient exploration rather than offering instant gratification"

Re: Kagi for Kids

#92

Post by Barrin92 »

mvieira38 wrote: post #29
skydhash wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice would be hobbies. Learning and practicing stuff can take a lot of your free time if you’re passionate about it, meaning you give it your full attention.

Maybe I'm weird, but hobbies just feel like work anyways, except maybe reading. Learning Japanese just doesn't have the same feedback loop as grinding Dota or something... Alas, how would I tackle this issue with a kid? Maybe just throw a bunch of activities at him and see what sticks as a hobby?

> Alas, how would I tackle this issue with a kid?

by teaching them that work is good and necessary. There's a book by Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death, the central idea of which is that "form excludes content". The problem with Youtube, or in his time TV, isn't just the content, it's that all content by the nature of the medium must be entertaining. If it isn't entertaining, it isn't content.

Hobbies feel like work because they are like work, because most things worth doing have a component of work to them. Rather than just trying to see what sticks, the best thing you can teach kids these days is that they should stick to the thing and that expecting "fun" at all times is a bad expectation to have.

Re: Kagi for Kids

#93

Post by philips »

aNapierkowski wrote: post #28
MostlyStable wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a lot of frustrations with the Youtube Kids app until I realized that if, when setting it up, rather than choosing the appropriate age range, you picked the "custom" (or whatever it was, it was annoyingly hidden all the way to the right, so you can't even see it at first), you are able to white list channels and videos, rather than just blacklist. Why this feature is hidden behind a different age selector rathe…

wait is this real? this is a thing ive been wanting, some channels that are fine are not in ytkids and some of the stuff in ytkids is just junk if we could curate a whitelist that would be perfect

Yes, it is real, but a bit tricky to setup with caveats: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids

Re: Kagi for Kids

#94

Post by tombert »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #83
tombert wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. Mostly agree, though not completely. There are actions that are kind of deemed "moral" that I don't think are good, e.g. Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy. Or Moses killing all the first-born children of Egypt with the Angel of Death. That's pretty evil, and Abraham and Moses are kind of…

> I think I'd save the stuff about murdering and mutilating concubines until you're comfortable with them watching R-rated movies. Really? Do you feel the same way about Bluebeard? Cinderella? This isn't a rare motif in children's stories.

I'm not sure I know what Bluebeard is, so I can't comment on that.

The original somewhat gory Cinderella stories? I might wait until they're a bit older.

I don't have kids, so this is all hypothetical, of course.

Re: Kagi for Kids

#95

Post by philips »

bombcar wrote: post #76
skydhash wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not curate a video repository? I think novelty is actually overrated and even harmful for kid. Deeper exploration on familiar subject may be beneficial as that would let his/her imagination to take on the job of inventing new things.

Jellyfin + ytdlp + playlists = pretty good, in general. and avoids ads; the ads are worse than almost anything else you can find.

Do you have any automation on ytdlp and Jellyfin?

I built this with Jellyfin and Home Assistant for my kids: https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast

Re: Kagi for Kids

#96

Post by carlosjobim »

tombert wrote: post #78
carlosjobim wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. A lot of the tales is also sins and mistakes normal people make, because they aren't saints. You need to have a certain level of maturity to be able to read and understand the Bible and other ancient books. If you don't have that, it's like believing that the TV news is endorsing serial killers, wars, and natural disas…

> A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. Mostly agree, though not completely. There are actions that are kind of deemed "moral" that I don't think are good, e.g. Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy. Or Moses killing all the first-born children of Egypt with the Angel of Death. That's pretty evil, and Abraham and Moses are kind of…

> Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy.

Sacrificing your own children is a human behaviour so common through history and with different cultures, that it's basically a biological instinct. Even today parents send their sons to die in industrialized war to prove their faith for the government, as well as sacrifice their children in ways that are less explicit than that - always to prove their faith and loyalty to the entity they worship religiously, whether that's a man worshipped as a god, or a disembodied concept that they worship, such as "the state".

The story of Abraham is a way to break that spell. The primitive human instinct is to worship by giving gifts, and then naturally giving the greatest gift you can give to prove your faith, which is your child. I interpret the story of Abraham as a clever way to break one of the most evil and persistent traditions of humanity, which is child sacrifice. And the story is much more efficient than simply saying "You shouldn't sacrifice your own children".

Put yourself in his shoes (there have probably been thousands of Abrahams through time). If he says "I'm not going to sacrifice my child", the tribespeople will say that his God is weak because Abraham dares to give less of a sacrifice than the best, or that Abraham puts his own desires in front of what's good for the tribe (pleasing God or any god). If God told him to sacrifice his son and God later changed his mind, that's another thing.

The story puts an effective limit on the level of worship. Sacrifice animals sure, but don't sacrifice your own children.

Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalistic wars of genocide is the natural condition of humans as a species. That is the simple answer to why humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without making any progress before something strange happened and we became enlightened.

Seeing as the Bible is a collection of stories that where told for thousands of years before being written down, I would think that there are entire generations and cultures who have live by those stories and commands for longer than the Bible has existed in any form. Pre-civilization tribes that we know nothing about. The Bible is our deepest probe into deep time, and absolutely fascinating.

Re: Kagi for Kids

#97

Post by albumen »

Minor49er wrote: post #59
kridsdale1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this. I set up a plex server in my home that connects to a NAS which has the full runs of every PBS style kids show that I could find and found good reviews of. Along with classic movies. Just trying to recreate the media conditions of my youth, with modern content as well as long as it’s “pure”. I’m also putting me-vetted YouTube content like Kurzgesagt on it.

You might want to vet your video collection more closely. Kurzgesagt got into hot water a few years ago after it came out that they were being sponsored by large corporations to push messaging that used those sponsors' publications as primary sources. They're not as unpartial and objective as they lead people to believe

They're not as partial and biased as people like to believe.

When you read kurzgesagt's reasoned response, and you consider the motivations of the primary accuser, it's a lot less dramatic than you make it sound. Nobody's perfect; and sometimes organisations' messaging align without it being bought. They are not primarily funded by billionaires, they have editorial independence enforced by contract, and have a lot to lose if that's not the case. Of course, make up your own mind (as kurzgesagt would like you to do); but I'll still be watching their work. If in doubt, check with other sources afterwards! (Like you should anyway).

Re: Kagi for Kids

#98

Post by stankot »

Roritharr wrote: post #9

What Kagi or anyone could work on, is an actually working version of YouTube Kids. I literally Pi-Hole Blocked all of YouTube after my son started reading the Bible after a Minecraft Influencer started preaching throughout most of his videos to the point my son became a bit too much interested in the topic. Not that I'm a rabid atheist or would deny my child such a thing, but if THAT can enter my 8yr olds brain via h…

I stumbled on this some time ago and saved it for when my kid grows up enough. It is a collection of a few thousands kid friendly videos. I think their curation is pretty good, but check it out for yourself.

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/

Re: Kagi for Kids

#99

Post by falcor84 »

Minor49er wrote: post #59
kridsdale1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this. I set up a plex server in my home that connects to a NAS which has the full runs of every PBS style kids show that I could find and found good reviews of. Along with classic movies. Just trying to recreate the media conditions of my youth, with modern content as well as long as it’s “pure”. I’m also putting me-vetted YouTube content like Kurzgesagt on it.

You might want to vet your video collection more closely. Kurzgesagt got into hot water a few years ago after it came out that they were being sponsored by large corporations to push messaging that used those sponsors' publications as primary sources. They're not as unpartial and objective as they lead people to believe

Trying to look into this now, and can't seem to find the issue. Is the complaint that they used Our World in Data [0] while they got money from the Gates Foundation? If so, I don't understand what the problem is; it seems to me as objective a source as can be. Or is there something more shady there that I haven't found?

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/

Re: Kagi for Kids

#100

Post by skydhash »

Barrin92 wrote: post #92
mvieira38 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm weird, but hobbies just feel like work anyways, except maybe reading. Learning Japanese just doesn't have the same feedback loop as grinding Dota or something... Alas, how would I tackle this issue with a kid? Maybe just throw a bunch of activities at him and see what sticks as a hobby?

> Alas, how would I tackle this issue with a kid? by teaching them that work is good and necessary. There's a book by Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death , the central idea of which is that "form excludes content". The problem with Youtube, or in his time TV, isn't just the content, it's that all content by the nature of the medium must be entertaining. If it isn't entertaining, it isn't content. Hobbies feel lik…

Also there's a period when you're going to feel terrible if you're focusing too much on the result, when you know enough to judge the quality, but not practiced enough to do it well. That's when positive feedback is important, either by reducing expectations (just doing it for fun), focusing on relative progress instead of absolute qualifications, and mental care. A social element works wonder for these.
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