I'm happy to pay taxes for a public education system that works. Unfortunately, what we have today is a system encumbered by too many administrators, hampered by unfunded mandates, exploited by public unions, and micromanaged from every level from (superfluous) department heads to district administration to state legislators to the federal government.

From 2010-2019, the number of administrators in public schools nearly doubled, while the number of students and teachers only went up by ~8%. Those administrators generally cost a whole lot more than classroom teachers. To justify their salaries (and their staff), they are always chasing the latest fads in public education, whether it's "social emotional learning," Chromebooks, "student support time," AVID, teaching kids to "analyze texts", abandoning math facts and phonics, or "diversity/equity/inclusion" programs, each at tremendous expense both in dollars and disruption. The amount of inefficiency and waste is staggering.

And that's just on the local level. State and federal mandates, or "money with strings attached," adds tremendously to the cost, while burdening the actual teaching. What have we got in return for these enormous costs? Just about nothing. Part of the problem is that, since it's a government program, all the political incentives are front-loaded, and there's little incentive to review what has been done, and to weed out what isn't working. NCLB didn't move the needle. Neither did ESSA. Common Core was a disaster, and Race to the Top didn't help, either. More standardized tests, and linking funds to test scores, only provided perverse incentives. But we are still operating under the burdens they imposed.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in your post that public school is the only way for kids to develop a sense of civic engagement, social skills, new friendships, independence, meeting people from all social strata.

Certainly, a public school *can* be such an environment. However, over the past few decades, I've watched public schools (at least in the US) devolve into an environment where independence is quashed, left-leaning (or outright far-left) values are taught as doctrine, and students are given little time to actually socialize in meaningful ways, all while teachers' administrative burden (and our taxes to support it) continues to rise and core academic rigor is neglected.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint. The whole "socialization" argument is one of those urban myths that has long outlived any relationship with reality. In our local elementary school, the kids get a single recess per day. When they arrive for school in the morning, they are expected to sit silently in the hallway outside their classroom until the teacher lets them in. Their lunch period is so short that there's barely enough time to down their lunch, let alone talk with their peers.

My kids are homeschooled, but have one foot in the public school world for electives. As a result, we get to observe both sides, and what we see is a dramatic difference in social skills. For example, two weeks ago, at a birthday party, about half the attendees were homeschooled, and the other half were public schooled. The homeschooled kids were generally engaged, respectful, and having a great time. The public school kids? They could hardly utter a full sentence without someone blurting out "6-7!" and were actively trying to disrupt and ruin the party for everyone else, including the birthday kid. Individually, kids from either side can be great. In a group setting, however? I'll take the homeschoolers every time. They've escaped the herd mentality that a public school system engenders.

Because of the time efficiency of homeschooling, my kids have plenty of time for extracurriculars, free time, and part-time work. When it comes to "socialization," (however you define it), that part-time job, working around adults, provides tremendously greater value than being surrounded by 2,500 other hormonal, brains-not-yet-fully-developed teenagers who are trying to define themselves and understand how they fit in the world.

You're confusing the task with the mechanism. Classic autoconplete uses statistical methods, often using some variant of a Bayesian algorithm. The task is to predict the next word, the method is statistics.

But if I asked *you* to predict the next word in a sentence, you would not be using a simple statistical method. Neither is the AI. It doesn't have the breadth of multi domain training data that your neutral network has, so it doesn't really think like a human does, but the way it functions is much closer to your brain than it is to a classical autoconplete.

It's hard to stress enough how profound that difference is.

If I may offer a modification to your statement, it would be that car infotainment systems age poorly. Not the cars themselves. I currently own three examples that have aged quite well. All are near or over 20 years old. New enough to have OBD-2 and great reliability and repairability, old enough to be focused on real utility and avoid the invasion of useless (or worse) tech and complication. No $700 LED tail lights or $1500 mirrors with cameras, or everything-is-a-module-connected-to-the-canbus. Now get off my lawn! :)

Why not deploy more, cheaper, less efficient AI processors, but run it only during the daytime when the solar farms are pumping out excess energy? It won't be the highest performance and have more heat output but you don't have to worry about energy availability or build grid storage infrastructure to support it. You could then offer it at a discount for customers that are willing to wait a little longer for training tasks to complete.

This is obviously not good for on-demand inference tasks (e.g. talking to AI customer support agent), but inference is orders of magnitude less demanding on the hardware.

Why would you fly from LA to DC to see a shuttle when there is already a space shuttle (Endeavor) in LA? There were six built (counting Enterprise) and minus the destroyed Challenger and Columbia, there are four left at three corners of the country for you to see.

Dude there are *four* surviving space shuttles. One in DC, one in NY (those are close together, fair enough -- the one in NY was only for atmo testing and while mostly capable of flying in space, but never received the refit to be able to do it) but the other two flown shuttles are at KSC in Florida and in Los Angeles. If your argument was that people have to travel too far, then we'd move the NY one to Nebraska or something to minimize distance traveled from any point in the country. That would also be a lot cheaper to stay at a hotel there than in Houston.

But, conveniently, Florida, New York, DC and California are some of the most visited places in the US. 64% of Americans have visited Florida (far more than any other state), 56% have visited New York, 54% DC, and 50% California. Texas just barely beats California at 51%, so you could probably improve accessibility a tiny tiny tiny bit by moving the LA one to Houston, but that would leave the entire western US with worse access (distance from LA to Houston is 1500 miles, vs distance from Houston to KSC is 1000 miles, and that's not even taking into account places like the Pacific Northwest.)

If you want to see a shuttle for less money, you have a couple of options. Go to Florida and drive to KSC, or stay at a cheap place somewhere along the Northeast Corridor or Metro North train lines and take a day trip into NYC -- you can stay late as the last Northeast Corridor trains run late into the evening and the Metro North trains leave as late as 1AM. (And you can take an uber to Penn/Grand Central to get the short distance to the train stations if you want to avoid the subway at night -- it's not as dangerous as the news makes it seem but you do see some tweakers on the subway, but the regional trains out of the city are clean and comfy)

On average, I've actually been very happy with the use of AI chatbots for phone support.

The reason for this is that, for lower tier support (as well as a fair chunk of things I need done that can be handled by lower support), the support agents are largely working off of scripts that they are not allowed to deviate from, nor do they have the expertise to understand what they are doing.

While the AI is not necessarily as intelligent or capable as a human *CAN* be, in practice it is often more capable than the first-tier support agent that it has replaced, due to the breadth of its training data. If I need something that requires cognitive tasks that exceed the AI's context window, I can request escalation.

This is in stark contrast to the bad old days where I waste time talking to the bottom tier support where I usually need to spend a long time explaining what I want done, wind up requesting to be escalated anyway, or try to battle with a dumb non-AI menu-based agent bot to even get to speak to a human (and usually that human is still bottom-tier support who I have the same problems with).

Preach.

This headline, two years ago: Apple Faces Calls to Reboot Blockchain Strategy

Because, if there's anyone who knows how to run tech companies, it's Robinhood day traders.

I think they're an... AI company now? ;-)

We used to call this "Nobody gets fired for picking IBM".

"Shrill TDS rants about anti-abortion boogymen aren't helpful."

Now that the GOP controls all branches of government, I suppose we shall fuck around and find out, eh?

You can backup your iOS device to any PC or Mac, which can then utilize Backblaze, Google Drive or whatever cloud thingy you want to use.

https://support.apple.com/en-u...

Sounds like the people bringing this suit are wanna be software architects with little imagination.

"I don't see how this is economically feasible"

We're in pre-enshitification of AI. Once one or two dominate the technology, they will start "monetizing" it. Also, the more AI shit you can spout on earnings calls, the more horny wall street gets for your sweet sweet stock.