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Comment Re:poorly trained instructors (Score 1) 129

That's rarely the case in most universities. The instructor may have a very good understanding of the subject material but no idea as to how to convey it. Many of my instructors could barely speak english. You learn from the textbooks or you fail.

This is VERY different between institutions and levels of institution and majors. I went to a top 20 national university. I had one adjunct professor in 4 years (an English PhD student who taught a small 10-person freshman seminar).

I never had a teacher who was hard to understand. My Calc 3 teacher was German, but that was it. Every single computer science professor I had was native American or 100% fluent and clear in English.

My freshman 101 comp sci class had maybe 60 people, and that was the largest class I ever took. Multiple undergrad professors held parties at their homes at the end of the semester for their students. 20+ years later I am still in regular contact with 3 or 4 professors.

My experience in graduate school was identical. My wife went to a small private liberals arts school and her experience was perhaps even more extreme than mine. She never even had a 60 person class!

This all came with a price tag that has gotten worse since then, of course..

My sister, on the other hand, went to a non-flagship public and her experience was wildly different. I'm not sure she really ever had personal interaction with a professor. It was very much what you said--learn from the textbooks, pass the exam, that's it.

Comment Re:College education is still worth it (Score 1) 129

If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history.

Yeah, go ahead and put "Didn't attend college, but I spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, Reddit, and getting tutored by ChatGPT." on your resume and see how far that gets you. /s

There are already first-level companies that no longer require a degree for entry-level positions... Google among them. This is only going to accelerate. There will be more things like 3rd party certification programs that to some extent replace traditional degrees. Colleges can either adapt to this change, or be wiped out by it.

Comment Re:College education is still worth it (Score 1) 129

A whole bunch of very rich assholes want you to think that you don't have any use for an education because they are tired of paying for it and because they don't want you to learn critical thinking skills. That's why you get at least two stories a week attacking education in your feed.

You get two stories a week because the current model of education we have is broken beyond repair, and to some extent, obsolete, and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. You don't need to go away to a campus at a debt of six figures (or a cost of six figures to taxpayers) to get an education anymore. If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history. From the freely available works of the greatest minds in history to real time or recorded remote instruction, people now have everything they need for a first class education at their fingertips. It's all about personal motivation at this point. The resources are there, often at little or no cost. How hard is one willing to work to get the education? That's what it comes down to now.

The old model is going to have to either adapt to this reality, or die out and be replaced. I think some of both will happen. You already have 100+ colleges a year closing in the United States. That will only accelerate with AI now in the mix.

Comment Re:China is acting like the US now? (Score -1) 49

I'm sorry but this article is ridiculous. If I didn't live in the US I'd feel like maybe there would be something to call out, but this is how our companies roll all the time and our current administration is even worse. Nothing to see here.

Correct, the problem is that China is acting more like the US now. Which is more of a problem for the US than for other nations, because we have been taking advantage of our unique status to increase our standard of living at other nations' expense, and that will now be harder. You have it backwards about who should be worried about it. My guess is out of some misplaced feeling of hypocrisy.

Comment Re:So pay the government their cut and it is (Score 4, Informative) 105

Nope they are getting fined because there are regulations.

Lack of enforcement - Nope they got audited thousands of times and fined!

Now you could argue they were not fined enough, I guess but clearly there is a regulation and clearly the regulators are checking up!

Their fines amount to a quarterly rounding error. https://www.businesswire.com/n...

Comment Re:Replace CEOs with AI! (Score 2) 32

We need to push for CEOs to be replaced with AI. They'd do a better job and would cost a LOT less.

Start repeating this everywhere and get the meme-makers on it. It will be wonderful to watch them squirm as they suddenly find reasons why AI shouldn't replace a company's most valuable assets: its most highly-paid executives.

A CEO doesn't get paid for any of the work AI does. CEOs collect information from other executives, peers, consultants, and the media and make decisions. LLMs can disrupt the work of consultants, the media, and the employees feeding information to executives, but it's horrible at making good decisions that can be trusted.

Comment Re:And the stupid doubles down (Score 1) 32

I find it totally fascinating how determinedly these "decision makers" try to ignore that LLMs cannot deliver anything but a tiny fraction of the claims made about them.

In fairness, since some of the claims are that AI will replace all jobs, even massive disruption such as replacing 10% of the workforce is still a very big deal. I'll be surprised if we don't reduce our call center staff by at least 50% in the next 3 years, and AI chat/voice bots is a small portion of that projection. That is mostly from AI agents assisting call center agents and assisting product managers to find ways to improve human agent UX.

LLMs were capable of doing all of this in early 2024, and have only gotten better since then. We weren't having success with nano/flash models in 2024 but we have been moving to those models for most use cases in late 2025 (reducing LLM costs by 80%).

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