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Comment Re:We're in the group (Score 5, Informative) 198

There are a couple of things going on there. First of all, schools are really designed to teach kids en masse. If you had to teach ONE kid, you'd never set that kid up as we do, where a kid sits down and a teacher talks to them from the front of a room and, after that, gives the student a few minutes of individual attention. The classroom format is designed to maximize the amount of the teacher's time spent teaching while trying to maximize the aggregate learning of the class. But, that means that, for any particular kid, there's a fair bit of the class time when they're not learning at all or learning slower than they are capable of.

You can offset that, some, with differentiated instruction where you put the "smart" kids together -- there, the teacher can go at a faster pace, can provide more challenging work, and so on. But, it still has the same fundamental flaw -- you're optimizing for use of the teacher's time, not the student's.

The other thing is that schools, especially public schools, are bureaucracies that tend to be driven by centralized policy, not by individual decision making at that staff level. Part of that is necessity, but part of it is because administrators don't trust student-facing staff to make good decisions and are also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.

Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 0) 209

Windows isn't enshittifying. It’s been shit for 30 years. The new AI shit is just a replacement for the Cortana shit. People are attributing new Windows bugs to shitty AI generated code but Microsoft has always had bugs due to shitty human generated code. AI isn’t going to make Windows shittier, because it's just the latest generation of shit.

Comment Because the output is crap. (Score 1) 209

Sure I can have a conversation with an AI. And it will start telling me that incorrect things I mention are actually facts. And it will run with that until I either notice that is has gone off the rails or I end up with full blown delusions and my life goes off the rails. If I am depressed to begin with the AI will even happily guide me to suicide. What a great conversation. And if I ask it a question it might come back with a wrong answer and back it up by citing sources that do not exist. Why wouldn't I want this in my life?

As for image generators, that technology sucks, too. Two days ago I was goofing around and generated an image based on the face of a famous actress. It gave her pronounced freckles, which said actress does not have. There were playing cards in the picture and it rendered them with garbled letters and mixed symbols in the cards. I was nonplussed.

This stuff is mostly junk. The AI companies can come up with amazing examples of the capabilities of AI because they coded the damned things. But in the real world it's just slop, over and over.

Comment Re:Nuclear would have prevented this! (Score 2) 73

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

Comment Itâ(TM)s too late. (Score 1) 98

Getting dozens of vendors to start sourcing thousands of parts from the USA is going to take years. Because nobody in the USA makes most of these parts. Supply chains will have to be built to source the materials and factories will have to be built to do the manufacturing. And the whole thing will be an inefficient mess because the losers running GM don't understand that they need to vertically integrate to compete with the Chinese car companies that will inevitably open their awesome dark factories in the USA. What a bunch of clowns.

Comment Re:And WHEN it breaks... (Score 1) 65

Probably not the bankers, the big banks aren't dumb enough to have lent huge amounts of money to companies in the tech bubble. And they're much better capitalized than last time. The investment firms with large holdings in the magnificent seven have lots of other holdings and can afford to take the hit when things go to shit. But the government will bail out all the stupid VCs who kept pouring money into tech bubble 2.0 companies. “We have to save them so they can invest again or we'll lose the AI war to China!”

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