There are no 'personalities'. There are no 'feelings'. There is software looking at patterns and regurgitating text that fits that pattern, because that is what it was programmed to do.

These idiots using those words would still be fooled by Eliza.

Class rank exists and can be used to determine relative capability though.

I have no complaint with the idea that most students simply won't be able to achieve an A-grade if the material is both challenging and taught to proper standards, but I have a major problem with the notion that teachers are required to deny students that have mastered well above 90% of the material an A-grade because other students managed to yet outperform them. I hate the idea of grading on a curve. One should be judged against the mastery of the material, not comparatively against other students during that particular semester.

That said, I have also had college classes where I really should have failed the class but because of the curve, I got an A because I had the highest scores. While some of that reflects upon me, a good chunk of that reflects upon the instructor, the department and its head, and the curricula for that particular course. If students are to be held to high standards then instructors should likewise be held to high standards, and so should their institutions. If they cannot produce results then that should reflect both upon them and upon the revenue they receive in tuition.

I would love it if I could ask the AI a question about the RPC I'm playing and have it give me an answer in a small pop-up. Today, I need to switch to the Xbox Edge browser, which sucks on console.

but DO they have their audience?

or maybe this is gaming the system on two sides: the company puts out AI slop on the channels, and then creates hundreds of fake accounts and downloaders and streamers to make it seem like the thing is the bees knees, none of which have ad-blocking on , so it just rakes in the ad-view count?

This is far beyond just spotify and podcasts. The AI Slop of music has invaded YouTube on a massive scale, where common searches of semi-rare material (say, Disney Parks Background Loops) are now flooded with "Ambient" and "Jazz" and "Orchestra" loops that have nothing to do with Disney, their songs (however they are arranged) nor the parks music at all. It is just generic AI-generated junk but picking up on those keywords and including fake Disney video animation content to get the click.

Pretty sure this is going to hit other genre things, too, like if you were to search for "Star Wars Music". Maybe the "Christmas Music" AI slop might actually be recognizable Christmas/Seasonal tunes this coming season...but something tells me probably not.

I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

seriously, he's going to lose these in the long run (he already has on several other firings), but he continues because 1) SCOTUS has never made a blanket statement he can't yet, and 2) it isn't his money, win or lose.

...doesn't this open up the ultimate in bait and switch excuses? Oh sorry, that car doesn't actually exist. The AI just made it up. We'll see if we can get our provider to fix that but for now can we show you THIS car that's only $4000 more expensive?

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

at the very least, doing code reviews of jr developers gives one (of age/experience) the satisfaction that the mentoring is going to produce a better developer who can take on bigger tasks, eventually start reviewing others, and the company experience continues to grow until the obligatory pointless layoffs to boost the stock price.

you can't trust an AI to truly remember anything you tried to "teach" it if it even got a look at your fixes of their crappy code, because even if it did, the next version of the bot's engine may need to be retrained from scratch as it "forgot" almost everything. Plus, it is REALLY hard to get AI to understand general code design philosophies like "3 strikes and you refactor" - it is designed to regurgitate first, not solve problems by increasing the use of shared code. I look at some AI results and all I see is tech debt that will eventually kill the product but never get fixed because nobody quite understands the original task it was trying to do when it just did 'copy and mod'.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.