People always point out that almost nobody needs to know all the pointless facts you learn in school in your daily life, but the reality is that school offers a lot of different chances to do all kinds of boring, tedious, pointless, and esoteric things- many of which you'll mirror in your adult lives. Sure, you might not need to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but being able to remember all the different types of purchasing orders that your company uses and the specific esoteric tagging system they have in the back end, being able to remember all that esoteric stuff is helpful. But AI really does change things, and I worry about human cognition, as all this stuff is ultimately trained. You get smarter by thinking about things and figuring stuff out, and if AI is doing that for you, you're robbed of that opportunity.

Kids lost two years of learning from the lockdowns. Don't blame laptops for a horrible pandemic that, for some reason, everyone forgets about.

I sold a subreddit to a sex toy manufacturer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Deadlines exist, and workplace accommodations exist. It's why the ADA and section 504 exist. And honestly, if a boss isn't able to support his employee on having the time to complete the work, that's the boss's fault for failing to be flexible and understanding how to help their employee succeed. Accommodations exist to help employees be the best they can be, and the disability world is honestly flush with neurodivergent people talking about how they had an asshole boss who never accommodated them, and they went through a living hell, then quitting and finding a job with a boss who actually worked with them, and they're a top performer. I've been through that process a number of times. The realities of the job are absolutely the realities of the job, but more often than not, the issues people with disabilities have in the workplace are the fault of shitty ablest managers who can't or won't think outside the box, not with the constraints of the work.

So this is all a bunch of moral panic, and ablest bs for a number of reasons. A: Extra time on tests really isn't the end of the world that people make it out to be. If someone needs a bit longer to do their work, what is the issue? The point of schooling is that people understand the subject matter, so if someone needs a bit more time to get it right, what's the issue? I'd rather my doctor take a day extra with my test results to really think about them than give me a knee jerk reaction. B: I see a lot of people here who are really, really ill informed on disability which isn't surprising given that it's Slashdot, but right now we're in a time where autism and ADHD diagnoses are skyrocketing due to increased diagnostic clarity. The number of severely high needs individuals has stayed relatively static, but we're getting a lot better at screening for ADHD (there's literally an app that has an 80% success rate that can be used as a preliminary screener by any school nurse) especially in underrepresented populations. And given that a lot of the stigma around neurodivergence is going down (although it's starting to rise again) people are getting more comfortable disclosing that they have a learning disability, even if they've been able to be successful academically. It's kind of like identifying that you have asthma and need an inhaler and some accommodations to participate in PE- you can still participate and likely pass, but you will need some extra accommodation. But at the end of the day, providing accommodations like extra time on tests and other relatively benign things isn't the end of the world. The point of schooling is to show subject matter expertise, and someone can still show that if they have an extra hour to finish the test. and C: ADHD absolutely does exist. My wife's working on her chem degree with ADHD, and it's brutal- she needs about three times as much time to study as her peers because her mind literally won't focus, and the only pill that actually does any good is damn near impossible to get. I get so tired of people who act as armchair psychologists because they read some article.

...I'm very sensitive to this issue, but fix the chatbots. We need to stop requiring ID for services, it's too much of a risk.

This is to control you, adults, and make you hand over your identity and other information to these providers. It's a scam, don't let the government do this to people.

AI doesn't generate well detailed images to be used this way, what's the angle here or is this just another ad for "AI"?

There's a burgeoning therapeutic and social skills D&D market currently, and a load of research that shows all kinds of significant mental health, social, and personal wellbeing to having a regular gaming group. What's a bit frustrating is she didn't actually do any serious research with geriatric populations, who would likely benefit from a regular RPG group. There's a lady in Germany who ran a little house on the prairie RPG at a nursing home, and did some great work there, but outside that little has been done.

It may be a trite saying, but it's as true in education as it is in a gym. If you don't exercise your brain, it's not going to improve.

There's a reason weightlifters don't use a forklift or crane to pick up the barbells and do a dozen reps. The problem is not that the weights are in need of lifting. And that's the same problem with homework. The teacher doesn't need a stack of 5 page reports; what they need is for their students to practice using their brains.

Unfortunately the education system is designed to evaluate output instead of process. It's easier to grade a paper or a test, not evaluate a demonstration of knowledge. It's always been ripe for cheating, but now the cheat tools are everywhere and made legitimate by techbros demanding AI productivity. So either teaching will change, or we'll head straight for idiocracy and nobody will be left with the skills to wonder why it all went to hell.

I also bought nice charging bricks. I don't need any more.

This post was indeed brought to you by ChatGPT.

Far from a MAGA voter, but there were exploding pagers not long ago...

I'm seeing a lot of people with kneejerk reactions, so I want to highlight a points: ADHD is very easy to diagnose. Unlike autism, which requires a whole day of screening and thousands of dollars, ADHD can be diagnosed in an hour. However, when this happens, parents are usually very receptive to medication because it's both an easy fix and they're probably struggling at home for any number of reasons. If you're slammed, working two jobs, stressed out, barely able to pay the bills, and a pill that promises to make your kid be able to get through their math homework without crying comes along, you'll take it. The alternatives like therapy and parent coaching and stuff are difficult to get, unfortunately, and while schools are technically supposed to provide support, that's an issue. The other issue is that a lot of kids that may be autistic are getting ADHD labels- you've got a kid that gets distracted in class? It's entirely possible that they are autistic and struggling with sensory overwhelm so it's hard for them to think clearly, but ADHD is a convenient dx. Finally, there's long been a real push for pharmaceuticals to be prescribed at a young age, with drug reps targeting both teachers and pediatricians. While providing meds to help, unfortunately for them to work out in the long term it's critical that kids get therapy to help them manage their ADHD, and more and more, that's just not available, so it just becomes a band aid the kids become dependent on, then as their bodies and brains acclimate to it, they have less and less ability to function, so you end up with serious issues in young adulthood. So, unfortunately, a lot of kids get screwed because they aren't getting the essential therapies they need to be able to balance meds with an ADHD toolkit.