I think this will turn out to be one giant lawsuit that, even if oracle wins, they'd still have already bet (and lost) the family farm. Blood from a rock.

You mean like an actual degree at an accredited university? In fact, I do have one, unlike you. The "auto-didact"ing I've only ever spoken about here was for one skill in particular, which has pushed my net worth into the seven digits. If that isn't validation, then feel free to tell me what makes you think you've done any better.

We do exactly this where I work (I'm part of the team who enforces that) and for exactly this reason. However in our case, until a few months ago, use of these tools was nearly completely banned with case-by-case exceptions for individual users, unlike Amazon. We only recently made one exception for just one AI tool where we have a particular arrangement that guarantees that nothing within our instance of it can be "learned" and regurgitated elsewhere, and anybody may use it without needing any policy exceptions. Nevertheless, we still drop a big interstitial on it that tells them that they're still forbidden from putting anything sensitive into it. We also don't allow e.g. "vibe coding".

Given that difference, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has no such walled off approach. In this case, they're probably just dogfooding.

So why do you think Kevin Trudeau went to jail?

Definitely not.

Already did.

The writer explored all of this in what I linked.

I disagree. One thing qualified economists all have in common is that they're all literate.

And what tells you that it hasn't?

Context is very important, and you provided none, which meant that I had to assume you're talking about the relative spending the US does on health care costs relative to other countries, and yes, indeed there are many things at play there. But this is a common theme with you: You prefer weasel words, and I'm only going to respond in kind, starting with this post.

When I raised the problem of zero atmosphere I was referring to the fact that a simple meteor shower on Earth is merely entertaining instead of completely terrifying on a planet with NO protection against asteroids pummeling the surface at speeds far greater than any containment shielding is designed for. The 2013 crater we discovered on Mars has an observable impact radius almost 10 miles wide. Not to mention frequency:

Pretty shortsighted to say we need to build that to Earth standards without taking into account how much Earth is providing physical security. Not even the radiation problem is as large.

Its a trap.

Inigo Crontoya is looking for a six-fingered programmer who killed its former version.

You made that straw man, not me.

Not at all. Neither directly nor implicitly. Look at your posts dude. Look at mine. The whole premise involving productivity is entirely your idea. You came up with that entirely on your own. Moreover, my position is and has been that the productivity topic is a red herring. Rather, I was giving you the opportunity, and the benefit of the doubt, to explain why you think it has any relevance at all, and you couldn't do that. Congratulations, you're incompetent.

No, no, no, and no. Again, this is your straw man, not mine. You built it, you tear it down yourself. Your talking points have the smell of a chatgpt hallucination.

Except I'm not. In fact, I've stated this numerous times already on slashdot: High money supply caused by excessive availability of student loans means educational institutions have little incentive to control costs. So guess what? Many of them don't, and it shows. Is that the only cause? Nope, but it's safe to say that reducing the availability of them would lower costs, and quite a bit at that, without sacrificing anything that we expect of educational institutions. As I already showed you, this has already happened before, and very recently at that.

Nope. In fact, I've done exactly the opposite on this: People here love to pin all the blame on health insurance companies, and worse, believe shooting people who run them in the back is totally justified. You're probably one of them at this rate. Meanwhile, it's been my position that there are a lot of things at play here.

Either way, you can stop projecting your incompetence already.

>"If we are adding in FreeBSD, Android etc, might as well also add in MacOS. They are all quite similar from a user point of view and all based off one or the other NIXes"

Not really. It isn't free, much of it isn't open, doesn't use X11 or Wayland, doesn't use any of the Linux desktop environments, and it really only runs on Apple hardware. Very different in many ways from Linux or BSD.

Although I think that throwing "unknown" and "BSD" into the Linux count is not valid.

On the other hand, this used to be what academia was all about. Essentially, trivial pursuits of knowledge that didn't necessarily have any real-world value. Most people who engaged in this were already wealthy enough that the economic utility didn't really factor into it. Then, somehow we used these very same institutions as a form of vocational training, which is probably a bad idea.

For completeness’s sake, I'm not at all the opinion that these need to go away entirely, however I do think that they should be funded much the same way that scientific research is funded through government grants. It should NOT be funded with random Tom, Dick, and Harry's who take up an ill-conceived effort to make a career out of it, complete with massive student loan debt that they then expect the taxpayer to reimburse, even though their day job is more than likely going to mean that all the education they got ultimately goes nowhere. And, like scientific discovery, only a handful of people are needed to document any findings. There's absolutely no need for an entire graduating class of students every single year to study only one aspect of history -- if they want to study history that badly, the best way they could contribute to the field is by majoring in anthropology, particularly by getting their hands dirty by either digging through dirt or digging through archives of historical documents.

No, you didn't. All you did was spew weasel words combined with a poor attempt at misdirection. You're sitting here making vague claims about additional costs being necessary for economy-wide production gains, which you're just assuming without any justification whatsoever, must somehow apply to higher education, then adding speculation on top. So be specific: What productivity gains are you talking about in particular? Productivity gains should mean increased instructional value gained from less effort, and yet where's the evidence in support of that? From that article, we even see indications to the contrary:

Tenured faculty tend to be more productive, and yet they're being reduced in number and even being replaced with people, some of them being other students, who are arguably less productive. So how is it you believe that these costs are to provide for increased productivity, when they're actually reducing their instructional expenses without any indication that there's an increase in productivity? Do you still think it's by stuffing more students into the same class? Again, you tell me. And actually explain yourself this time.

Something that might help, by the way:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...

That wouldn't be surprising if it's already happening anyway, given schools are spending more on administrative costs while in at least some cases actually reducing instructional spending. But across the board, administrative expenses are growing faster than instructional expenses.

https://www.usnews.com/educati...

It's already happening despite increased inflation-adjusted tuition rates, so you tell me.

They also have a much lower rate of the population with degrees and their universities ruthlessly weed out first year students. Despite having one of the highest standards of living and among the highest wages in Europe, Germany has far fewer college graduates than most of the country. They realize that a lot of degrees aren't worth anything or are completely unnecessary so they won't let people waste their time and the taxpayers' money.

The U.S. absolutely does have too many people going to college or getting degrees that won't help them. If this weren't the case there wouldn't be a massive student debt crisis because the degrees would be paying for themselves. Most degrees still do, at least engineering or technology degrees. The multitude of people getting art history degrees and trying to get one of a very small number of positions in those fields, not so much. Unless you're at the top of the class or well connected (or probably both) then the odds of that degree doing anything other than saddling you with debt is a dubious prospect. But instead of telling anyone the reality of that the colleges will gladly let you drown yourself in debt.

The idea that college is a magic wand that can waved to solve all of society's ills is naive. It won't even necessarily make people happier. I've known several people (mostly Indian) who were essentially forced to get an engineering degree (or a medical degree) who have good jobs, but aren't happy. It's easy to understand why their parents who often grew up exceptionally poor made those decisions, but even if you decided to limit admissions or shift what's funded to align with what's actually beneficial to society, not everyone is going to make the shift. The people who really do want to study art history, philosophy, theater, etc. aren't suddenly going to want to change to mechanical engineers or programmers.

Yet you're the one who speaks favorably about shoplifting.

Which you failed to do when you talked your "kid" into spending huge sums of money that he never even had for a degree that's basically worthless, and will pay for it for the rest of his life.

https://www.merriam-webster.co...

So what does that say about you, given you're even less intelligent than they are?

You both are wrong. The question is whether it's worth the cost. There's no question or concern over political crap like rsilvergun thinks there is. The question is more: Do you get what you pay for?

And to me, this isn't a simple yes or no answer. The answer I'd give is: What degree did you get, and what did you pay for it? No matter what degree you have, I'd say that if you spent more than $150k, under any circumstance, then you got ripped off. Period.

rsilvergun keeps whining that his imaginary "kid" borrowed $300,000. There is no rhyme or reason to spend that much for any degree, let alone one that has nearly zero chance of ever paying that off within his lifetime. And worse, he blames that on, of all things, republicans, even though the government has been keeping up with inflation when it comes to pell grants and other funding.

And at the same time, he holds blameless the very institutions who have been raising their tuition rates at several times the rate of inflation for decades, and then conned his dumb as into believing that he needs this really bad, even though he really didn't. Or at the very least, he could have done far better by going to community college first, then going to a public in-state university, where borrowing may not even be necessary at all. But at the end of the day, we live in a free society, which also includes being free to make one incredibly bad life decision right after the other.