The difference is that if you pay people to monkey around with things, you get a non-revocable perpetual license to the result. With license rental, you get a perpetual bill. It's the same rent trap as individuals get stuck in but with less excuses.

Yes, and the reason is that they stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about an exit strategy. Had they been thinking about the possibility that they might one day need to migrate from the beginning, it would be much cheaper to do so now.

That's the thing about painting yourself into a corner, a little better planning at the start can always avoid it with little to no additional effort.

As Big Cable ever... EVER... been for something good?

How bad it has to be the most hated companies are turning on their orange prophet of Satan.

I've had students legitimately using translation tools to get better english. With AI, they do much better but also it looks like AI and I can't possibly tell if they had AI do the work or if they merely translated or corrected their poor mixed english answers. So then everything has to be evaluated without the tools they come to depend upon. Tools that are legitimate if limited to translation. The subject isn't english and is not a requirement for competency in that subject; they could go back home with their degree and rarely speak english ever again - and that is totally fine! (good! improve the world with their new skills.)

Clever bot, you removed your em-dash from your reply!

They are so bent on faking intelligence we are not allowed specialized tools - or when we had them those are being replaced with these fake general intelligence chat bot.

Grammar checkers are old; they did get better and I read some so good they were re-writing too much and actually limited due to expert feedback which users may have liked. Today to get a good grammar checker is hard because even the ones you pay for are trying to replace them with general AI bots.

It wouldn't hallucinate, etc. if it wasn't trying to replace the whole human! It does so much better when limited in scope and built-for-purpose. Much of what is done today is just chat bots running commands for other tools which themselves have specialized intelligence (better term, A-pplied I-ntelligence; aka, real AI all this time.)

We need AI that processes all the API bloat and gives us nice glue code; does routine design patterns-- which we've spent decades trying to formalize in languages and paradigms (like OOP itself) and then we could develop programming languages around what the AI is good at melding together while leaving out all this new general intern stuff of adapting Stack Exchange answers. I waste so much time on API...and you think well designed systems with well designed APIs will exist in the future? why migrate to a good one when the old crap of multiple APIs of multiple frameworks can all be spaghetti coded together for you by an AI? the new one won't be directly used by a human anymore and the AI lacks training data for it. When it grows into a huge rats nest, no human will be able to troubleshoot it and the AI will eventually screw it up and not get out... complexity theory will always win because problems out scale solutions and intelligence. Our API rat nest solutions force new abstractions, refactoring, rewrites, etc. because we are unable to proceed with the complexity we trapped ourselves within - the AI will do the same but at levels beyond us. Maybe you can get it to refactor with bigger contexts (eventually outside of our comprehension but probably simplified... can you trust or know what is going on?? "good enough" is going to ensnare many.)

It takes one hell of a toll to try to do verbal exams 1:1 on students to evaluate them. In person exams in a monitored room are not so easy either... not that we have a huge problem now with undetectable ear plugs or smart glasses or anal beads or remote controls... but that tech progresses and demand will increase with more in person testing. A radio shielded test room would work well until local run AI fits in your underwear. Then you have an increasing number of IEPs so you can't even do a quiz without extra BS because more and more haven't adapted to testing.

Sure, I do not do well with testing but I managed to adapt and survive; it's not fair that I couldn't thrive in that environment but that is life. We're raising generations of artificially disabled adults because incompetent parents are over compensating by making demands on everybody but themselves.

Also keep in mind, evaluations take away TIME from learning. Sure it could be part of learning but it is not.

Frankly, I allow the cheating unofficially. If the society can't produce a minimum level of honesty (and it is made abundantly clear what is dishonest,) a corrupt population is going to be represented by a corrupt leadership and the incompetence comes with all that. The USA's decline has been preceded by increased corruption of the public and those of us in education must have been noticing a trend. I know I have for decades. The score is all that matters; understanding does not - for the majority - much more so for the parents (who only care about the child getting a job in the distant future. "Fake it until you make it" seems like mantra to Gen X parents.)

The attitude of firing officials who publish bad results; demanding the messengers deliver good results, is not far from the parents/students blaming the educator for poor results. As Mencken said:
"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

we have old billionaires and politicians in charge of everything today. They don't care about profits above extending their lives; far too selfish! They will pursue anything that grabs their attention.

There is a big effort to discourage, limit, or ban birth control. Usually religion based because that is how they boost their numbers; not conversion. They are not so confident they can honestly grow their numbers so they resort to conditioning and indoctrination. I like to point out to people: if they are really able to think for themselves, then why are they in their parents religion?

Luckily, our fascist government will work hard for "the corporations" (mega rich who own/run them, who still fear death) to discover why there is something to young blood and make some kind of drug... they've probably not found it already because they are fixated on the blood of youths (maybe some Epstein like appeal?) when it's actually something else creating the benefits which only slightly shows up from young blood transfusionsâ¦

I've said it before, but I'll say it again for those who arrived lete: If you give an AI agency of any kind, imagine everything you ask of it to be appended with "by any means necessary", because that' how it will interpret it. Slander, doxxing, and murder will definitely NOT be off the table even if you explicitly forbid them. That's the problem.

Honestly it should be called string toolbag. It contains some math that might (or might not) one day be useful in constructing a theory but it honestly has never actually been predictive enough to call it a theory.

A little of each. Banks in the U.S. actually maximized inconvenience by being closed any time most people actually had a decent opportunity to go to the bank, but it worked out somehow.

We already have string theory for that:-)

While the line of reasoning is sound, it's more or less a non-theory of exclusion.