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Comment Re:Second-generation homeschooling (Score 1) 69

I'm not in the homeschooling universe, but I have yet to meet a second-generation homeschooler. Like, anyone I know who was homeschooled sends -their- kids to school (public, private, parochial, boarding, single-sex, co-ed) - anything but homeschool. Thoughts?

I know a few. I don't know what it may or may not mean. It may be relevant that the ones I know used a community-based approach, where groups of homeschooling families worked together to create something akin to a school, with different parents teaching different subjects. This meant that while the kids socialization groups were small, they did hang out with and learn with other kids, not just their siblings.

Comment Re:Well, if we're going to consider that... (Score 1) 271

That there is no evidence to support it does not mean it cannot be true. But it should inform your assessment of probabilities.

It's more than that. Research into the possibility of a link between vaccination and autism has been done, and no correlation found. This is evidence that there is no connection and it's entirely different from a case where no research has been done. One is evidence of absence, the other is absence of evidence. The GP is equating them, but they're not remotely the same thing.

Comment Re:Well, if we're going to consider that... (Score 1) 271

...I want a statement that autism is created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. For reasons only He understands, He sometimes reaches out with his noodley appendage and gives kids autism.

Is that true? We don't know, we haven't rigorously investigated it, have we now? Since there's exactly as much evidence to support the FSM as vaccines causing autism, the CDC has a duty to mention both possibilities.

Show me all of the studies that have evaluated the correlation between FSM action and autism. There has been a lot of research on the possibility of a correlation between vaccination and autism, and no evidence of correlation has been found. There is an enormous difference between "We've looked hard and found no connection" (evidence of a negative) and "We haven't looked at all" (lack of evidence).

In addition, there's no need for the CDC to debunk a claims that are not being made, or non-harmful claims. To pick a less-ludicrous example, there's no significant population claiming that eating grapes causes autism, so there's no need for the CDC to address it. Further, if there were an anti-grape lobby touting a connection with autism, the CDC probably still wouldn't need to address it because some people avoiding grapes doesn't create significant health risks to others.

But there is a significant population claiming -- against strong scientific evidence -- that vaccines cause autism, and that claim is causing them to reject vaccines, which does create significant health risks for others. So, the CDC absolutely does need to address it, since public health is their job.

Your analogy is terrible, in every way.

Comment Re: Other Non-Evidence-Based claims (Score 1) 271

1) "give me liberty or give me death" was always a minority position.
2) Things that work well when people live in rural areas with slow communication don't necessarily work well when people live in dense clusters (i.e. cities) and conversely.
3) It is always the job of the individual to assign weights to his Bayesian priors. The state may control the costs of your actions, but should not be allowed to control your beliefs.

I hope I've covered what you were asking, but it was a bit unclear.

Comment Re:How did they lose a slam dunk? (Score 1) 18

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

Comment Re:Current LLM's (Score 1) 200

Yes, exactly.

If you want to automate something the automation has to not only be faster per unit task or output, but it also has to make up for the extra time of checking or re-doing something when the automated way failed. To do that, you usually need to constrain the parts of a problem where the automated approach will succeed nearly always and where failures can be identified and mitigated quickly. That requires building a bunch of process oversight stuff, which in turn requires a big investment in instrumenting the current and future process to identify the exceptions and handle them correctly before failures move downstream and become much hard to address.
Additionally, work outputs that have a lot of unpredictability, or require persuasion or consensus (such as defining what problem to solve), or situations where there's no pre-defined correct future state, only a series of choices and murky outcomes, are just hard to automate period.

LLMs not only have regular failures, they have highly unpredictable failures. Yet they're being sold as though than can automate anything.

The reason the "agentic OS" stuff is will fail is the same reason that we didn't automate away our daily work using VBScript - the automation will be clunkier and more annoying than just doing the steps on our own.

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