"Maybe everyone's just practicing their language skills with ChatGPT?"

Or: Maybe no one's practicing any skills whatsoever anymore, because they expect answers will always be available on-demand via ChatGPT (et. al.)

My limited sample: I have 3 long-time engineering friends currently looking for jobs, and they've all been asked to use AI tools of some sort in all of their recent interviews.

Weirdly, most of those cases have sprung the requirement on the person by surprise midway into the interview.

You sound like one of the misinformation spigots that are cheesed you can't get traction on Bluesky.

I access Bluesky on the Firefox browser on my Android-based phone.

Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.

If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!

I was a senior software engineer (now a CS professor), and I never touch-typed, and it never held me back.

The work of the programmer/engineer is what, 95% mental work, 5% typing? (to be generous to the latter) That's without even getting into rapidly-changing input techniques, autocomplete in the IDE, etc.

Anecdote: When I got my first engineering job in the 90's, I vented my frustration to my father, "The guy in the next cubicle is like 100 times more productive than me" (comparing a day-1 out of college programmer to a senior codebase expert who was indeed one those x100 engineers). My father's response was, "Well, he must be a much faster typist than you are", and it was all I could do to not laugh or choke on such a ridiculous misunderstanding of the job. Consider the degree to which that's a relevant assessment.

A few weeks SO staff posted a "we're rebranding" post on the site in the Q&A format. They've been throwing out all kinds of supposed strategic expansions lately, which look scattered and less than coherent.This particular post generated comments and the CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar started responding.

Observation: The CEO (unfiltered by editors, legal, or PR) can barely write a coherent English sentence. They're not making any sense at all with their current plans, as far as I can tell. Their goose is probably cooked. Remember when Slashdot came off its peak and was sold and shuffled around a couple times by corporations grasping for some way to leverage its former popularity? Like that.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/408825/341383

I personally have a lot of white and Asian community-college students who can't do basic algebra.

Since 1866, New York State has had a standardized testing regime at the end of high school to qualify for a statewide Regents Diploma. Since at least 2015, they likewise goose the scores in a broadly similar way. You can see a scoring conversion chart from last year here. For example, out of 82 possible points on the Algebra I test, scoring 29 (that is, 35%) gets scaled up to a reported score of 65, qualifying for performance level 3 (out of 5, like a 'C'), and so qualifies for the Regents Diploma (more).

In the time since that's been done, the proficiency of basic math skills for incoming college students has become so poor, the colleges (like CUNY) have had to abandon the requirement to know any algebra even as an expectation to graduate college.

I've said for quite some time that an essential problem with SO is that, since people are incited to score points, they want that to come easy, and so they get irritable when there's a fundamentally hard question that gets asked. Hence the downgrading and looking for reasons to close or delete a question. Which especially sucks for high-knowledge question-askers who have already thought through, researched, and ruled out any easy solutions.

The Iron Law of Stack Exchange

He's "seen the future" here as much as he did with the $100B+ pile of cash he lit on fire in pursuit of VR.

I'm really surprised that the default reception to this story is to actually believe what the company reps are saying after the fact. It seems like a very weird coincidence:

(1) Help bot gives very specific one-device policy.
(2) Separate login system simultaneously shuts people out of multiple devices.

To me it seems like a high, possibly more-likely possibility, is that the company did change the policy behind the scenes, and then when backlash and cancelled subscriptions started happening, backtracked -- reversed the policy and claimed AI communication was to blame. I mean, it's not like the AI bot can defend itself in this regard. And the company already seems on the sleazy side, e.g., not labeling help chat as AI-based.

If you're wealthy, you are by definition not suffering from economic inequality. I don't know why analysts keep trying to point to that. This study disproves that on its face.

Health care in the USA is just inherently rotten at is core, that's the simple truth. I'm as privileged as you could hope for in many ways, and of the couple-dozen doctors I've seen in the last few years, they're all basically incompetent. Perpetually slacked-jawed and tell me to my face they don't believe what I'm telling them is happening. After several cycles of testing, they finally become convinced of what I was telling them, and then they say to go away because they can't help me.

I was literally being killed by prescribed medications, I only started recovering once I dumped them all cold-turkey. I really wish it wasn't the case, I wouldn't have believed it until it happened to me. I will say that my parents in the country seem to get better health care responses than I do in the big city.

As a college instructor, the only way I've ever touched base with the DOE is in its capacity to administer and account that Pell Grant funds, currently about $1.6 trillion in outstanding loans and growing, are used for purpose under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965. (Here's a slice of the regulations I've dealt with.) So part of the current administration's "states and local communities" language is code to enable a Russian-style kleptocracy with the places that want to work with them.

It bears noting that as of two years ago, even GOP senators were introducing bills to expand eligibility, and increase award amounts, of Pell Grants.

I don't think there's a school anywhere that has a (academic integrity) policy that would permit removing students based on that state of affairs.

They don't work. Look it up. It's practically a halting problem.