Victor Sohier

Introducing Kids Paint Studio, brought to you by Buffering Studios, Inc. 7 (and counting) massive, entirely offline coloring catalogs for kids. No in-app purchases, no ads, no accounts, and absolutely *zero* data ever captured or recorded (not even Sentry/Bugsnag/Posthog analytics). There is no backend API. You buy it once, download the entire catalog and own it forever. --- This started with my kid coming to me every 5 minutes to clear an in-app purchase screen after clicking an ad intentionally designed to look exactly like the coloring app he was using. So I decided to build him something that didn't suck or try to monetize his little creative brain for "one-more-sale" Turned out he liked it. A lot. Like a lot a lot. And I liked it a lot a lot because I could trust it. So we kept going. My wife and I experimented with collections built around his favorite stuff. We figured AI could help us generate images and learnable information for an app we could trust. An app that tried its hardest to keep him inside it, with no deceptive in-app purchases or external links. It was tough. AI is not good at consistent image gen. After plenty of trial and error, we dialed it in for about 90% of the content. For the other 10%, I built per-catalog debug controls so we could review everything between the daily bottles, activities, and meltdowns. Funny side story: most of my wife’s animal-catalog reviews asked AI to change several scenes where the animal's "private parts" were really in focus. Nature is fine... GOOD, even.. and those parts exist. But AI's choice to randomly put them on such display was kind of bizarre. The funniest part? AI refused to make her changes because her requests included words like (change the pose to hide the) "penis". Instead it just noped out and refused to make any edits But I digress… The next big hurdle was the app stores. The apps were ready in early June, but we're still fighting to get them all approved. The App Store and Google Play keep rejecting our catalog builds as "spam" because each app uses the same driver code. Meanwhile, the current garbage kids apps littered with ads and in-app purchases are totally fine. Okay, sure. I understand what they’re saying. The app engine is the same. But the engine isn’t the product! It’s also not where the time, blood, sweat, and tears went. That’s in the catalogs: their pictures, information, organization, and the work required to make everything informative, educational, appropriate and not obscene. Every time I've pushed back, we've received another rejection. The repeated recommendation is to consolidate everything into one app and sell the additional collections through in-app purchases. But we're not going to do that because that's exactly one of the issues we’re trying to solve for. Or maybe they do realize it and that model isn't nearly as profitable. Maybe that's the actual beast we’re fighting when trying to build child-friendly apps that aren't dopamine-sucking slot machines. Something something show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior. I don't know, draw your own conclusions So, while we originally planned to release every catalog at once, it looks like we’re starting with two: Bible and Heavy Equipment Bible will forever be free. It's a trust piece that lets parents try the experience. It shows you exactly what you'll get from every app we build. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Google Play or the App Store. They’ve made it very clear the engine is the same Since this whole ordeal started, we've had some really cool early-education ideas if we can get traction. Not the normal "replace me and teach my kid because I’m busy" tools, we want to build "we're actively teaching our kids and could maybe use software to help us" tools Hoping we can get approved and release the other catalogs soon! LIKES, RETWEETS AND TELLING YOUR PARENT FRIENDS IS GREATLY APPRECIATED! Godspeed, fellow parent soldiers

Windows task bar over the years.

The main difference between the Left and the Right nobody seems to understand is that Leftism has always been idealistic and the Right has always been pragmatic, that's why liberals argue about how things "should" be and conservatives argue about how things "are" in other words Leftists argue for things that will never work (infinity migrants but also free healthcare/education which is economically impossible) and why conservatives have to argue for hardline policies (remigrate all these incompatible migrants/illegals who should never have been here in the first place) The reality is liberalism is a failed experiment because its inherently idealistic, we've never actually had real Right Wingism (no the Nazis were not Right wing) and ironically the closest thing I can think of is Monarchy (at least they publicly executed criminals/shamed them) however my argument (The Libertarian-Authoritarian argument name pending) is that we need to combine the best aspects of absolute freedom with authority. No illegals should not be allowed to cross the border, the border should have a wall with armed guards (who will do whats necessary) no we can't let women just whore around (destroys both themselves and society) universal suffrage is likely a mistake (man or woman not everyone should vote) and tons of other things. Argue with a liberal and they will just cry about their feelings and muh "this is how things should be" (while I sympathize, not everything *can* be a certain way) but you know what the ultimate irony is? The truth is if everyone just embraced the Right Wing (the West is like 90% Leftist) they could actually get all those idealistic things (like universal healthcare) that they want so bad... eventually—because the only way to get these things is a prosperous powerful low crime society with a stable population free from criminals illegals and mass migration. That is the cold hard truth and nothing can change it.

I’m convinced that a large % of programmers don’t actually like computers. As a side effect, are also perfectly happy to throw away their reasoning to a model as soon as they can. I don’t get it, at ALL. Don’t you *LIKE* understanding the magic of the machine? You do realize hand-programming (I hate that I even have to specify hand now) is fun…right?

A kid will quit a math app in 6 minutes, but grind Factorio for 6 hours. The math app has more points, badges, and streaks. Factorio has none.