Seems like this all boils down down definitions. What does a grade mean?

If a grade means understanding the material, there's no reason every student couldn't get an A. Sure, many won't, but when we're talking about Harvard students, especially at lower-level courses, the barriers to get into the school are so high that it makes sense most students would be able to master the material.

If grades are relative to other students, even if every student understands the material perfectly there's still going to be the curve, some A's, B's, C's, and some must fail.

Turning the link purple to go to the report, then following that link to the actual study, you can look at those concerns.

Oddly enough, the post-doc researchers at University College London doing research in behavioral science and psychiatry, published through Oxford University, do indeed answer the questions.

The paper shows is something they noticed and want to investigate further, presented as "the first evidence" not a final conclusion. They started from the UK Household Longitudinal Study data, data going back to 1991 and publicly available to any registered researcher, and cross checked against a few others with related sampling information. They looked at ages from 16 to 90, marital status, children, education level, employment status, household income, area deprivation index (living in poor areas to rich areas) and reported disabilities.

Based on my analysis of their needs and what AI can deliver. I agree that it's management's job to increase efficiency and output, but change for change's sake is never good. For instance, in the examples above I *knew* what AI would deliver. I told them, in no uncertain terms, what product they'd receive. They still made the decision to push ahead ( and I'm more than willing to cash that check ). I can see, objectively and by any metric, that what was delivered is a worse customer experience than what they had before.

However, because it's "AI", that makes it acceptable. The buzzword has effectively disabled the rational and critical thinking parts of this management's teams brains. Of course I have seen this before ( First rule of IT: Vendors lie, Second rule of IT: Managers believe them ), but to this extent? Especially in smaller businesses, where margins are tighter. For what they're paying for this AI solution ( ha, "solution" ), they could afford to hire another staff member; another person on the phones, and far more capable than AI in delivering the ultimate product ( caring for the patient ).

Mind you; I pointed all this out to them. They know the math, but they are so...enamored with AI that it doesn't mean anything to them. Meanwhile, patients and staff hate it.

I'm sure there's AI use cases out there which deliver a decent ROI. What I'm seeing in the field, however, is management hysteria for the latest thing at a scale I've never before experienced.

I shouldn't complain, it's paying extremely well, but I know this will all come crashing down at some point.

I've been through more than a few technology cycles, so while I don't necessary disagree with you, the scale of the disconnect between the worker bees and management is more significant than I ever remember.

It's becoming exceedingly difficult to dissuade management from AI courses of action, even when they make no sense or will end up delivering a substandard product for significantly higher cost.

For instance, I just had a client implement an AI auto-attendant for a medical office. Were they having difficulties answer the phone in a timely manner? No. Do they anticipate a staffing shortage that would cause such an issue? No. Will the auto-attendant be able to accomplish what a regular worker can? No. In fact, it can pretty much only answer the phone and find someone for the caller to talk to.

But by god, management had to have it. So, for an extra 2000 a month they get a middle man that delays delivering service to patients. Management loves it. Folks answering the calls hate it because the patients hate it.

Different office asked about AI curated music. Another client asked about replacing our network monitoring software with AI so their IT staff can stop working after hours. They both will end up getting their wish, and at least in the case of the network monitoring solution it's going to cause so many issues I'm having them sign a waiver before I implement; I won't be held responsible when the AI agent is rebooting servers randomly because it thinks they're offline.

More than any other IT fad over the past 2 decades, I've noticed AI has really divided "decision makers" and "makers/workers". Those of us in the trenches making things work are highly skeptical of AI and treat it much as we have any other "flash in the pan" technology; weary, willing to test/play with it, but disbelieving of the hype.

The decision makers though...whoooboy, they've bought into the tech hook, line and sinker. They want AI everything, even in places it makes no sense. They can't define what they want AI to do, or how it's supposed to do it, but by god they will sign away millions of dollars in pursuit of their golden cow.

The only time I really saw anything like this was with "Teh Cloudz!", but even then it was tempered by practicality. AI? It's magic beans, all the way down.

"Shot themselves in the foot" is relative; it was never about sustainability. It's about extracting the most they can as fast as they can, then selling the dregs at a discount.

That includes pursuing legal action against other vendors once their cash cow starts drying up.

One might be left with the impression that this is the goal.

Unfortunately that industry lobbiests got their hands on the politicians.

It has a *TON* of loopholes. The biggest loophole is all they need to do is start including these words in their disclosures: "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM OR BY USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." Just make sure it is included in the webpage along with all the other terms and conditions, and they can do all they want.

Yup, collusion, price fixing, and antitrust violations are a few of the ways it is an issue. Indirectly by third parties doing the collusion, as was done with apartments, is still collusion.

The special interest groups clearly got their hands into the politicians for this version. Here's the text, pick the version of the full text in the dropdown. Even though it has loopholes you could drive a delivery truck through, it's a start.

Kinda. Yes, the US-based judge could issue a judgment that affects the .org domain, as that's managed by a US-based company. But the rest? The judge has no authority for Liechtenstein (.li), Sweden (.se), India (.in), Saint Pierre and Miquelon (.pm), Greenland (.gl), Switzerland (.ch), Pakistan (.pk), Grenada (.gd), and the British Virgin Islands (.vg).

The rant about threats, harassment, coercion, not so much.

Yup, that caught my eye too.

Security isn't "my blueprints are secret."

Security comes with: "Here are the blueprints, here is the research behind the blueprints, here are copies of the safe to practice on, here are conference papers discussing the known exploits of the safe, here are the reviews done by experts in the field, and here is the list of implementations used by governments around the world, if you discover exploits you'll make global news and companies everywhere will want your brains."

Intermissions are still a thing in concerts, plays, theater, musicals, and in many types of Indian cinema.

The break lets the audience stretch, visit a toilet, talk about what they've seen, and buy the high-priced concessions. Run for about an hour, have a break, finish it up. Or a 3-act, with two breaks.

It makes a change for the writers, with a one-act movie there is a continuous momentum from beginning to end, with breaks the writing can be more episodic. Neither is really going to be right or wrong, just different for storytelling. Many take advantage of the break with time passing or off-screen events as part of telling the story effectively.

There are two issues I have with Ceph:

1) management complexity. Proxmox is pretty easy to manage, very little to surprised a seasoned admin. Ceph, while easy to implement, can be deceptively difficult to administrate if something goes sideways. I usually recommend small businesses avoid it if at all possible.

2) SANs are often faster. Ceph has enough overhead to be noticable.

That said, it is a very nice feature and well worth learning how to administrate if you're already a linux admin. If you are going to use ceph, I highly stress at least a dedicated 10g network JUST for ceph.

Seems you're missing the point. The article says anyone over 133K was classified as upper middle class, and ignored the location. We agree on that bit.

They counted millions of people who are low income for their region and even potentially on welfare as being upper middle class. They said 10% of the population was upper middle class in 1979 by one metric, but then using a different metric that 31% were upper middle class in 2024. They wrongly and quite openly counted millions of households with welfare level incomes, lower class incomes, and middle class incomes and claimed they were in the upper middle class. Everything that follows from the conclusion that upper middle class has grown so much is fundamentally flawed.

A huge amount of the population are millionaires if we define a millionaire as someone with thousands of dollars. That's effectively what they did here. Count millions of household that middle, lower, and welfare-level as though they're upper middle class, and suddenly the upper middle class triples in size. The claims that follow that the lower rungs of the middle class are garbage because they just reclassified them as upper middle class, even though by the author's own admission they are not.

This. The lower end of those "upper middle class" numbers may qualify for welfare in some tech hub cities.

They do point out that it varies by location, but really their number range is terrible. "classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class." From the HUD Section 8 income limits, expensive places the lower end of that is considered low income, like San Jose 143,600 qualifies for Section 8, versus cities like Akron where 72,250 is low enough to qualify. Location, location, location.

As this is /. lots of us live in tech hubs that even though we don't like the costs, they're very expensive places to live. In my current city despite being a full hour commute from the city center 130K is still solidly middle class. Not poverty, but not upper crust either. That income wouldn't require a trailer park, but would have a hard time affording a 3 bedroom / 2 bath home (they'd add another 45+ minutes to the commute distance), one or possibly two small vacations per year.

In tech hubs especially, those household incomes can be very middle class, not upper-middle, and in some places, lower class lifestyles.