What nonsense. First, the most important part in teaching is to select the materials and structure them in a way that makes sense. Second is the actual teaching and anybody halfway competent does far more than just reading the slides. It is about demonstrating you know your stuff, the materials are worthwhile working through, you respect the time of the participants and any good lecture will also need a real entertainment factor.

I think you have never designed and then held a lecture. And if you ever have heard lectures, apparently they were not any good.

Indeed. As an example, I currently have a student looking at all the major AIs (including coding ones with paid subscriptions) for code security review. With small, well known samples they are good. With larger samples, they are >50% fail. With CVEs (the things that matter) they are so far almost 100% fail.

Add that using AI coding assistants makes you about 20% slower, and the only thing AI could be called for this application is "completely unsuitable".

Indeed. I mean they have been subjected to slow for a full semester now. Anybody that does not see the limitations after that has a problem.

Hahaha, in 4 years the collapse of the hallucination that LLMs are actually very useful will have concluded. Things are already mightily crumbling. Those that apply themselves and learn stuff will find something worthwhile in 4 years. Obviously, with this mockery of teaching, that will be impossible, but real teaching is still being done. You just need to insist on it.

Tell that to those that place profits over everything else in life. Failures like Elon Musk that, despite all his money, obviously suffers from a deep (and justified) feeling of inadequacy.

The primary job of a lecturer is design of the lecture, select the material and structure it. That requires insight, experience and understanding of the target audience. The second most important thing is teaching the material and that requires a lot more than just standing there and reading the slides. In fact, just reading the slides is a complete fail. What you need to di is talk about what is ion the slides, signal what is important, how this relates to the rest of the world, what is the future perspective and, most important, do a bit of storytelling with real-world examples not on the slides, etc. The students must have the impression you know your stuff, and that you, as the lecturer, respect their time and provide something of value. That is what keeps them engaged and is critical for the learning effect. Things must be _interesting_ for them.

Hence this "course" is a complete fail and waste of time and essentially a scam. The students would have been much better served by being told to buy a specific book and to work through it.

I think they're a bit more than that, but assume you're right... have you considered that they're less than three years old? ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. And the reasoning models that have made them massively more effective in many areas (especially software development) are barely a year old?

If you reason about what will happen in the next decade or two based on where the technology is right now, a technology that didn't even exist five years ago and is still obviously in its infancy, you're clearly missing the most important point, which is that the pace of improvement has been and continues to be incredibly rapid. You need to base your reasoning on what the models will be capable of five years from now, ten years from now. Unless we suddenly hit a wall, they'll be vastly better. How much better? No one knows, but it seems safe to expect that they'll be orders of magnitude better.

I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.

If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved them so far, but they've responded by going the wrong direction.

No, they can't. They're already seeing searches decline as people move to asking LLMs instead. The LLMs actually end up using Google, but that doesn't generate any ad revenue for Google (that's something Google may have to figure out how to put a stop to). The solution so far is the addition of "AI results" to search output... but those AI results are produced by a far inferior model because Google search gets hundreds of thousands of queries per second, and it's currently infeasible to service those queries with a full-powered model. But the output of the inferior model doesn't satisfy users, so many of them are shifting to ChatGPT or Claude (I am!). If users opt for paid subscriptions to LLMs instead of free, ad-supported search, fine, but Google needs to be in that game and to get them to use Gemini rather than the competitors. For users who won't pay for a subscription, I assume that ad-supported LLM usage will become a thing, and Google clearly wants to get there first, or at least early enough. But right now they don't actually have the capacity and LLM usage is too expensive for an ad-supported model.

So... they need 1000X capacity, and they need it at something not too far above current OPEX costs. If it requires massive CAPEX, that's less problematic as long as it can be funded from revenues (including future revenues), and in fact it's actually good for Google if massive CAPEX is required, because it helps to build their moat, protecting them from competition by other companies that don't have the same resources. But OPEX can't be 1000X, it probably can't even be 10X.

What you describe is the only solution, but it almost certainly can't happen fast enough to prevent massive climate-caused death tolls, including lots of wars produced by the need to relocate billions of people and restructure global agriculture. The enormous refugee crises and wars are, of course, going to disrupt the technology transition that your solution necessarily and correctly relies on, which will slow it down, resulting in even more emissions and more warming.

I think we very well might have to employ geoengineering to mitigate the temperature increase and keep the equatorial areas livable while we decarbonize. Maybe not. I hope not. But we should absolutely be investing in geoengineering research now so that we have the capability if we need it. I understand the concern many people have that if we know how to mitigate warming without reducing CO2, we may choose to do that as the easier course. But I think we're going to find the inevitable and unavoidable (barring geoengineering to reduce insolation) CO2-driven temperature increases to be simply unmanageable.

The only other option is to somehow create a world government capable of:

1. Forcing implementation of decarbonization much faster than is economically-preferable,
2 Funding carbon sequestration at incredible rates, probably consuming a significant portion of global GDP
3. Forcing temperate regions to peacefully accept massive influxes of refugees from equatorial regions, and
4. Coordinating global production and distribution of food, accommodating for changing productivity of farmland.

Oh, and we'd better create this powerful, far-sighted and non-corrupt world government within the next decade or so. If we can't do that, self-interested squabbling between countries is going to prevent rapid implementation of the solution even in the absence of the refugee crisis and resulting wars.

Or, we can use geoengineering to slow the temperature rise down and gain some time and breathing room to implement decarbonization and then sequestration.

Global birth rates are already crashing. Most of the developed world is already well below replacement and is increasingly dependent on immigration. On current trends the global population is already slated to start declining within 15-20 years. The decline is likely to cause serious problems within 50 years, and if at some point we don't reverse or slow the decline, within 100 years we may struggle to maintain our knowledge base (ignoring AI, which probably shouldn't be ignored).

The clarity and thoroughness of your reasoning and explanation are impressive.

The AI business is also the search business.

Yes.

But, as usual, the enemies of privacy cannot stop pushing.