I wouldn't call it a GOOD solution, more a default if nobody comes up with something better.

It would have reduced it to an extent that it would be as good as stopped.

The fact that surgeons today wouldn't think of operating without washing their hands. I never said it was a quick victory.

It was my example. It came from a photograph of the worksheet posted to Reddit by the child's father, who was wondering why the answer was 'wrong'.

Surely you don't expect the 2nd graders to start on Clifford algebras any time soon. They need to learn to walk before they run. Note that by the time you're multiplying vectors and matrices the process involved is sufficiently different from multiplying real numbers that not being commutative is not going to be an issue. I recall my high school math teacher demonstrating non-commutative multiplication. I was not confused in spite of having figured out the commutative nature of simple multiplication in elementary school.

Sure. I think the GP's example, if it was correctly described, is probably a sign of a teacher who doesn't understand what they're teaching.

I was pointing out, educationally I hope, that the GP also doesn't really understand what they're talking about, despite claiming it's "simple." Which, incidentally, makes me suspect the anecdote may not be entirely accurate.

Or maybe they want to prepare the kids so they're not shocked when they start Clifford algebras.

Sure, under the hood, but the end user is more concerned with the application than he is with how it got there.

The speech to text can be nice (even if my phone keeps writing "free cat" when I say FreeCAD), but it clearly has significant limitations. I still can't even guess why my phone can respond to "flashlight on" but fails at "flashlight off".

It's also amazing that it's possible to draw a metal wire thinner than a human hair and even more amazing that it's possible to drill a neat hold through it's width without breaking it, but I really don't have much use for that day to day.

As for image generation, quick, how many fingers am I holding up on my right hand? (hint: not 6).

The thing is, it wasn't lying. First there wasn't much evidence for the myocarditis, then it was confounded evidence. Did the kid get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, or was it from the beginning of a COVID infection aborted because the immune system was already actively reacting to spike protein at the time.

Of course, over-arching all of that, COVID causes myocarditis too, and often worse so it wasn't all that clear if mild myocarditis from the vaccine would even matter. Try explaining that to people ready to eat horse paste and unsure why people are laughing at Trump's suggestion to inject bleach.

Then there's a question of how much of the distortion came from scientists and how much from journalists (mis-)quoting them?

Now that the data is in, we can see that there is some possibility of mild myocarditis from the vaccine.

The thing about science is that as more data comes in, theories change and so actions suggested by those theories also change. In emergent situations such as the COVID pandemic, data and change can come fast.

Perhaps a sports analogy. After the first baseball game of the year, plenty of batters have an average of 1.000 for the year. Plenty have .000 for the year. That will change a LOT in the next day. By the end of the season, batting averages don't move that much in a single game.

Naturally vaccines increase your risk of shark attack. Sharks don't attack dead people. By keeping you alive through a disease outbreak, you are left vulnerable to shark attack later in life.

At this rate, I wonder if the only remaining solution is Darwinian (which they also don't believe in). Hopefully some of the unfortunate children of anti-vaxers will learn the truth and get their doctor to give them the shot anyway (but I'm guessing MAGA will move to make the punishment for that worse than for murder).

They were challenged by other doctors and scientists. The challengers won the day. The MAGA cultists would have been demanding a dose of horse paste before surgery and no Tylenol after.

Educational standards have been declining for a long time. It hasn't just recently gotten bad because of Corona. Both math and English instruction have declined to the point that people like you are making excuses for remedial instruction in college.

The sabotage is intentional even if those doing it don't think they are engaging in sabotage. This is painfully obvious if you interact with the K12 education system.

Parents these days have to more to repair the damage done by professionals.

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.

Vaccines certainly did cut down on transmission (stopping it cold was a media exaggeration). Some teens got mild myocarditis, but many unvaccinated teens got COVID and more severe myocarditis or just plain died.

True, but this is 2nd or 3rd grade. Real numbers are the only numbers they've been introduced to. They will be considerably older by the time they need to learn that multiplication of other things may not be commutative.