ON battery life, I would love some kind of dumb phone/ ultra low power mode that we can set when we just want watch mode at certain times and nothing else. I imagine that would give us a week of battery.
They used to have this with "Power Reserve Mode" (PRM) which turned off everything except showing the time briefly when you pressed the side button.
If you got below 10% it would ask if you wanted to switch to this mode. You could also turn it on in the battery settings.
I've read that in this mode you could get a week or two on a full battery.
Sometime around watchOS 9 they replaced this with "Low Power Mode" (LPM). LPM reduced things like notifications, background processing, and update frequency enough to get about 50% more life out of a non-Ultra and 100% more on an Ultra 2.
LPM is gone from watchOS now but the underlying functionality still works and there is still a way to access it. You have to turn the watch off. While it is off if you press the crown it will briefly display the time.
If you wanted to frequently switch between normal operation and this low power time-only mode it would be somewhat of a pain since you'd have to turn the watch off and on to switch modes, and watchOS boots really really slow.
If you don't have to quickly switch between modes though it might be reasonable.
On the other hand, I just use my cheap Timex (with years of battery life) unless I need/want the more advanced features of the Apple Watch Ultra. I've been of two minds about the Ultra (and the Apple Watch generally). When I'm really using it like on a hike, I really like it. For more day to day stuff I mostly have notifications turned off and I rarely get legit phone calls when my phone isn't handy.
Mobile phones two decades ago lasted for weeks. I don't remember how many, but long enough, that we constantly lost our (expensive) charging cables. I believe battery time went down as fast as screens got bigger (and colorful).
Full Time and Part Time roles
Distark is hiring, an edutainment brand building learning videos for Education. Our small, passionate team creates animated shows and learning tools that help kids (ages 3-9) fall in love with curiosity and real-world learning. We use custom automation to speed up everything from story writing to animation. See what we’re making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c46VaM_VZGU
Open Roles (REMOTE, non US):
Animators (2D/3D or hybrid—experience with AI tools a plus)
Junior Software Developers (Python, Node, JS, or open to learning new tech)
Interns (all backgrounds, generalists, tech, or creative)
We are also looking for writers (different kind of hacking)
Important: You must be a parent (of any age child) We want people who care deeply about kids and learning. Lived experience as a parent is essential—our mission is to build things real families want.
Why join us?
Fully remote, async-friendly Ship real things that impact how kids learn Fast, creative, zero-corporate-BS environment
Direct access to founders; real ownership
Opportunity to shape our tools and shows from the ground up
To apply: Email jobs [at] studyturtle.com with your background, a few sentences about your kids, and why this mission excites you. Please include links to any relevant work.
We are the hiring company and will reply to all genuine applicants. No recruiters, no agencies, please.
Some feedback for you: the position seemed interesting to me, but this requirement is a huge turn off. I'm not emailing you information about my kids to apply for a job. If I felt this way, it's possible other people did too. You might want to rethink how you're communicating this.
Nice work on offline.kids and kudos for tackling screen-free play. I've been playing in a similar space. If you want something complementary for the inevitable “but why?” moments, you might like StudyTurtle Ask (https://studyturtle.com/ask). It’s a free, no-signup AI Q&A tuned for 3–9 year-olds with:
Strict age calibration (matching phrasing and examples to each developmental level)
Concrete analogies (“volcanoes are like shaken soda bottles”) and kitchen-table experiments you can actually do
Distark is hiring, an edutainment brand building learning videos for Education. Our small, passionate team creates animated shows and learning tools that help kids (ages 3-9) fall in love with curiosity and real-world learning. We use custom automation to speed up everything from story writing to animation. See what we’re making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c46VaM_VZGU
An example of some of our software, ChatGPT for families: https://www.studyturtle.com/ask
Open Roles (REMOTE):
Animators (2D/3D or hybrid—experience with AI tools a plus)
Junior Software Developers (Python, Node, JS, or open to learning new tech)
Interns (all backgrounds, generalists, tech, or creative)
Important: You must be a parent (of any age child)
We want people who care deeply about kids and learning. Lived experience as a parent is essential—our mission is to build things real families want.
Why join us?
Fully remote, async-friendly
Ship real things that impact how kids learn
Fast, creative, zero-corporate-BS environment
Direct access to founders; real ownership
Opportunity to shape our tools and shows from the ground up
To apply:
Email jobs [at] studyturtle.com with your background, a few sentences about your kids, and why this mission excites you. Please include links to any relevant work.
We are the hiring company and will reply to all genuine applicants. No recruiters, no agencies, please.
depends on how the law is written. the primary purpose is to protect parents, and in some jurisdictions favoring parents may actually be welcome exactly because of that.
either way, it should not be illegal to require parenting experience though. if you can demonstrate that experience without having children of your own (because of much younger siblings, fostering, or working as a caregiver or teacher maybe) then maybe you qualify.
It is a concern I have, but it's a concern with every new technology. The user, or in this case the family are the ones that need to decide how they will wield the technology.
The way I think about this tool is that it is way to spark and test our curiosity. Is the child really interested in space or just randomly asking questions. Tools like this can help you as parent determine this faster.
For family tools like these I would want parents to know everything the child is asking about.
from our experience, we tried using stackflow on the frontend but encountered problems with responsive keyboard layouts. thought it was stackflow's problem but soon realized that it just wasn't implemented in tauri yet.
I truly believe AI will change all of education for the better, but of course it can also hinder learning if used improperly. Those who want to genuinely learn will learn while those looking for shortcuts will cause more harm to themselves.
I just did a show HN today about something semi related.
I made A deep research assistant for families. Children can ask questions to explain difficult concepts and for parents to ask how to deal with any parenting situation. For example a 4 year old may ask “why does the plate break when it falls?”
I think research and the ability to summarize are important skills and automating these skills away will have bad downstream effects. I see people on Twitter asking grok to summarize a paragraph so I don't think further cementing this idea that a tool will summarize for you is a good idea.
I'm conflicted about this. Custom tutoring available at all times and at mass sounds like a great thing, if done right. On the other hand, the research skill you mentioned is something that I worry about atrophying as well. Where before, we used to read through 3 or 4 slightly related articles or stackoverflow questions and do the transfer of related topics onto our specific problem ourselves, with a tutor it's all pre-chewed.
Then again, human 1:1 tutoring is the most effective way to learn, isn't it? In the end it'll probably end up being a balance of reading through texts yourself and still researching broadly so you get an idea about the context around whatever it is you're trying to do, and having a tutor available to walk you through if you don't get it?
Do you genuinely have any non-anecdotal reason to believe that AI will improve education, or is it just hope?
I ask because every serious study on using modern generative AI tools tends to conclude fairly immediate and measurable deleterious effects on cognitive ability.
> I ask because every serious study on using modern generative AI tools
There are a lot of studies, and I can't say I've read all of them, but the ones I have read, there hasn't been much focus on how the participants used the LLM to learn. My guess is that it has a lot of effect on the end results. Someone just asking for the answer and then thinking "Lets remember this" will have very different results than someone who does the Socratic method of learning together with a LLM, as just one example.
You know, that's a good point too. The studies I've read all focused on cognition after using an LLM to complete tasks for work or hobbies. I do wonder if there might be a different outcome with learning specifically.
Every technology can be good or bad to an individual depending on how they use it. It is up to the user to decide how they will use the tool. For people who are really looking to learn a topic and understand in detail, then I think it can really help them to grasp the concepts.
