Comment Re:The death of homework (Score 1) 14
Homework is also for reading topics that can be discussed in the next class.
Comment Re:As it should be - but there needs to be more... (Score 1) 17
'Free' should have no strings attached.
They should not be permitted to say something is 'Free' if they require you to pay for shipping.
Comment Re:Didn't The FTC Do This Two years ago? (Score 1) 17
Besides this, the NYC rule seems to cover rental agreements, which the FTC rule did not cover, to my knowledge.
Comment Re: We have been doing this all along... (Score 1) 79
Indeed, but I was answering the question: "It seems like there is an obvious business opportunity for a domestic tractor manufacturer here. Anyone care to explain why nobody has moved into this market?"
European tractors would not be a domestic manufacturer. A domestic company moving into the market would be a "new manufacturer" and would have to invest quite a bit into development - design, manufacturing, etc...
It's easier for other companies, whether Chinese, Japanese, or European to move in instead with their own superior offerings.
Submission + - Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat (insidehighered.com)
schwit1 writes: For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.
But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.
“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”
Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.
“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”
Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
Comment Re:Microsoft might be right about this one (Score 1) 29
My banks site won't work in Firefox. Oddly it says it does, I have not tried on Windows. Maybe it would on Windows but I don't know why that should make a difference.
Comment Re:So what are they going to do? (Score 2) 28
Yeah,
I kinda like Disney+, my family and I do watch quite a bit of content on it. It has gone down hill some though. I don't really pay for the ad tier it is bundled with my wife's mobile plan (so yes I do pay for it) but that bundle includes other features/services/tethering rules we want and is still the most economic to get them, at least without completely switching carriers.
I don't think I'd be a subscriber if we had to pay 'full rate'
Comment So what are they going to do? (Score 1) 28
$20 for ad free
$15 for w/ads
Would free be
$0 w/MOAR Ads!
Or would it be a limited selection of content, stuff comes out first on the paid subs levels?
Something even more aggravating and dickish like the first 8 episodes of whatever free, but oh look you have to subscribe to get episodes 9 and 10?
Regardless of what youtube and Tubi etc might be doing there is psychology in play here that I expect is going to leave either subscribers or would-be subscribers feeling resentful about the model.
Submission + - Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That's finally changing. (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 writes:
A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.
Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.
This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.
“I actually thought I would basically disprove that [claim], and on my first try, I got to $67 per kilogram after nine use cycles,” Jones told Ars. “It’s based upon some significant assumptions in the paper, but it’s not something that’s completely crazy. It certainly wouldn’t be something they’d reach on the first few times, on their first model; but over time, and with a learning curve, why not? I think it’s possible.
“These [Wall Street] analyst dweebs just have no clue what daily orbital access at under $100/kg means.”
— veteran aerospace engineer Will Collier
Comment Re:American Open Weight Models (Score 3, Interesting) 94
They are counting some combination of legitimate risk, FUD, and protectionism to ultimately protect them from the Chinese models.
The reality is at some point in the not to distant future it will be cheaper to put enough AI accelerator hardware in workstations to give most folks using Claude/Claude code and similar a perfectly acceptable degree of performance. It always goes this way - it is never cheaper put hardware behind the glass when it can go under the desk long term. The only reasons to do it usual boil down to management and wanting to do something more bleeding edge that hasnt filtered to commodity hardware yet.
Of course for online applications that need to scale, and for complex engineering or very large data volume tasks, sure "Cloud AI" and certainly for anyone who needs to train a model. However the idea these guys are going to get individuals and business to keep paying $200 for tokens to use some desktop AI assistant is unrealistic, and down goes the datacenter volume requirements along with that.
Again I am not saying there isnt a new industry / space here or that it is all a bubble but the current Anthropic/OpenAI/Grok business model persisting for a whole lot longer does not appear to me anyway to that it fits the patter of the last 25 years of White-Collar-targeted IT systems.
Let me caveat that I also think the sorts of people making big investments in Data Centers are not stupid and at least see this as a likely outcome as well, presumably they believe they can sell the space/capacity to other users for other applications. If so why not charge the Anthropics of the world with the VC money huge premiums to rush build outs while you can get them? As long the assets are still marketable after that business drops off, it is a win!
Comment Microsoft might be right about this one (Score 2) 29
As much as I want to say, it might be useful to have Web Based E-mail interface that will work in a basic / legacy browser, I don't know this is really true.
Not much of the web works at all if you try to use it with anything not Chromium or Apple-Webkit from less than five years ago. YMMV with recent Mozilla engines.
The few places where I can see someone maybe wanting to use this are the very places that people definitely should be isolating from all things Internet, especially not exposing it to e-mail content, which even if restricted to being from the local domain could still contain something malicious accidentally forwarded.
I can certainly understand why people would want / maybe just like or prefer a range of other legacy mail client. I mean if you handle a lot of mail and have been using Pegasus or something for the last 30 years and its all muscle memory, sure I get it. Moving from OWA-lite to OWA though probably isnt much bother for most people. At some point it makes sense to drop software likely very few folks are using.
Submission + - Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search (adweek.com)
schwit1 writes: For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.
Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.
The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators
Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.
In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.
Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.
The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators
Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.
In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.
Submission + - Morgan Stanley Agrees SpaceX Can Deploy 8 Gigawatts of AI Data Center by 2028 (substack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Adam Jonas projects about 8 Gigawatts of SpaceX AI data center in 2028 and 16 Gigawatts by 2030. Very little of that AI data center comes from AI data centers in space.
Morgan Stanley has this in a 142 page report on SpaceX that has several material inconsistencies between its high-level assumptions about orbital compute scale, mass/payload, capex, and monetization and the known technical specifications for Starship launches, satellite power density, and real-world AI compute deals.
I agree that 8 gigawatts of AI data center is very doable for SpaceX in 2028-2030. They already have the natural gas turbines on order from Doosan in South Korea, all of the APR Energy production and 60-70% of the Solaris mobile turbines. Twelve 380 MW doosan turbines are on order and those are 4.5 GW. 1 GW per year from APR Energy and the Caterpillar joint venture is 6.5 GW plus the 2 Gigawatts that are already installed.
They have shown that they can build faster than anyone else and they have the power supply issues solved with suppliers and contracts for natural gas turbines that are already being installed.
Morgan Stanley has this in a 142 page report on SpaceX that has several material inconsistencies between its high-level assumptions about orbital compute scale, mass/payload, capex, and monetization and the known technical specifications for Starship launches, satellite power density, and real-world AI compute deals.
I agree that 8 gigawatts of AI data center is very doable for SpaceX in 2028-2030. They already have the natural gas turbines on order from Doosan in South Korea, all of the APR Energy production and 60-70% of the Solaris mobile turbines. Twelve 380 MW doosan turbines are on order and those are 4.5 GW. 1 GW per year from APR Energy and the Caterpillar joint venture is 6.5 GW plus the 2 Gigawatts that are already installed.
They have shown that they can build faster than anyone else and they have the power supply issues solved with suppliers and contracts for natural gas turbines that are already being installed.
Comment Re:We have been doing this all along... (Score 1) 79
That would be that labor costs are too high, they wouldn't be able to compete with the established players as a new manufacturer that would have a bunch of development costs for what would, at least at the start, be more primitive offerings.
Of course, primitive is what some people are after.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have taken over on much of the innovation, or at least development. The USA and Europe have too much invested in the status quo these days.
Submission + - In 503 New York City schools, majority of students failed both math and reading (freebeacon.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "These are not schools teetering at the edge of success. They are schools that have been massively failing — persistently, systemically, and at staggering public expense — for years, and in many cases for decades," says the report, titled "By Any Honest Measure: New York City's Long Record of School Failure — and the Price We Keep Paying."
"The cost is enormous. New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024 — $36,293 per pupil, double the national average of $17,619," the report says. "The city is now committed to billions more to fund a class-size mandate that the evidence does not support, while propping up hundreds of vacant schools that drain resources at a premium rate with no return."
Particularly haunting is the appendix listing the 503 "double fail" schools, which are failing to get majority pass rates on standardized tests in math and in English. The schools are named after some distinguished Americans—abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Zionist Henrietta Szold, baseball player Roberto Clemente, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, poets Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and physicist Albert Einstein. Or they carry names full of ambition and ideals—"Leaders of Tomorrow," "School of Leadership Development," "Renaissance School of the Arts," and "Brooklyn Democracy Academy."
"Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties," the report says. "No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way."
"The cost is enormous. New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024 — $36,293 per pupil, double the national average of $17,619," the report says. "The city is now committed to billions more to fund a class-size mandate that the evidence does not support, while propping up hundreds of vacant schools that drain resources at a premium rate with no return."
Particularly haunting is the appendix listing the 503 "double fail" schools, which are failing to get majority pass rates on standardized tests in math and in English. The schools are named after some distinguished Americans—abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Zionist Henrietta Szold, baseball player Roberto Clemente, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, poets Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and physicist Albert Einstein. Or they carry names full of ambition and ideals—"Leaders of Tomorrow," "School of Leadership Development," "Renaissance School of the Arts," and "Brooklyn Democracy Academy."
"Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties," the report says. "No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way."
