scrion

Okay, if this is going to be a whole project you probably want a commercial supplier. Based on your geo-preference, one recommendation would be Formulor:

https://www.formulor.de/material/mylar

You can upload your own SVGs for laser cutting and engraving, the whole process is rather automated. They offer templates for Inkscape or whatever the matching, closed-source Adobe product is (Illustrator maybe?)

I linked the mylar material since that would be my recommendation for stencils used for e. g. painting, spraying etc. Mylar hits an excellent balance between cost, handling and durability.

Formulor is probably not the cheapest supplier, but it's reliable and instant with no customer support agents involved and requires no quotes and approvals being sent back and forth.

How many do you need?

Sure, but you just said the same thing as I did. Do you think you can trust brands? Or that any company actually cares for their customers, as long as they can get away with it? Or at all, if the fines are smaller than the profits they gain from exploitation?

The solution is what you mentioned: independent testing (and systematic changes, but that is a whole other topic)

Sunscreen works, just not if you buy it from shady manufacturers that try to maximize their profits and care about nothing else.

If only. My wife's phone is affected by a Google battery recall. You basically get $50 of shut-up money and get to live with a software update that nerfs your phone to an almost unusable state, or you can try and have a local, approved repair shop replace the faulty battery.

We're living in a large city, there is exactly one approved store available. You can't contact them by email, no one has picked up the phone in weeks. She is close taking the $50.

Even having a funny and weird relationship with my mother, this would be suuuuper cringe. And inappropriate.

What? We're not talking about death here, what kind of a reply is that? We're talking about making a decision at a very young age that might have irreversible consequences, a decision many 20yos are simply ill equipped to make, in particular, when alternatives exist.

No, they're not always reversible. You can opt for one that isn't, and even if you decide to go for it, it might simply not work.

I've had a vasectomy. Give it a few years, 22 might be a bit young.

Yes, but many things can be mapped to "language", let's say a grammar describing state machines, so it can be used to generate control actions.

Transformer models etc. are not only useful for conversational AI and translations.

I'd be fine with the approach as part of research advancing the field, but unfortunately, that's not what we're seeing.

Sorry, but that's simply not good advice. Nobody is born with perfect parenting skills and is granted all the answers. In fact, many parents are not fit to raise kids at all, others are simply overwhelmed and need help.

It's very easy to have a kid, not particularly easy to raise one. The idea that all your decisions are magically correct and sound just because it's your own kid and that every parent knows best is simply wrong. It's healthy to doubt yourself and to ask for advice.

Also, parenting science is not quackery. This is an actively researched area and there are real scientific efforts to better understand child development with respect to biology, psychology and neuroscience. These efforts do lead to a better understanding of how kids can be raised and how certain parental decisions might affect a child.

Personally, I'm happy each time parents try to inform themselves and seek the advice of others. That doesn't necessarily mean relying on the answers a bunch of strangers give on social media, but I hope the Fediverse as a whole can do better.

Right now, I can't make the claims you did in your post initially.

You're not causing permanent damage to a child by letting them sleep in your bed.

I wouldn't know that. Intuitively, I do believe that co-sleeping would have a lot of benefits up to a certain age, after the infant stage and dangers of SIDS have passed. However, I could easily imagine that there might be adverse effects after a certain age. Would it be likely to occur after a handful of times? Probably not. Are there any indications on the threshold maybe? Anything to look out for, given the kid might have anything else going on? Maybe. All information I would have on that subject would indeed be anecdotal though, and so in turn pretty useless. Why the dismissal of an honest attempt at getting educated?

I would indeed argue for getting an overview of what science has to say on the matter and then making an individual, informedndecision based on all the additional context I'd have as a parent that I could never cram into a couple of posts on the internet.

Having access to scientific publications, I'll see if I can provide some material later.