My home internet from Spectrum is out and looking at https://istheservicedown.com/p... it seems Spectrum is having massive outages too. Coordinated attack on cable companies?

The part that weirds me out the most, they read the script out loud?
I mean, they didn't think the webcam was on, and they were asked to read a script which supposedly no one could hear. But they read it out loud? And not even in a mumbling, under-their-breath voice, but a clear enough voice with convicing emotion that could be used in a marketing video? When they thought no one could hear them?

We are talking about high school here, is there anything you would have to actually study? If you were even half-awake during class it is usually trivially easy to ace any high school test.

Failing a class in high school is caused by not spending hours and hours per day grinding out boring, repetitive homework assigments (which often count for 50% of your grade), not failing to learn the trivially easy material.

# is hatch, but I'll take hash as close enough.

I never understood where # equals "pound" and it confused me greatly when computer driven phone menus first came out.

  I read once that sugar supposedly used # to display a per pound price, but I've never seen sugar sold by anything but per box.

This really doesn't jive with my experience. You have a 3600 square foot house? Holy fucking shit! I can't afford a fully detached house of any size. Dispite having a STEM degree and earning about double the national average income, I struggle to stay in a 1000 square foot condo*.

I've compared it to the house I lived in as a teenager. Not vaugely the same based on averagages. The actual same structure. It is way out of my league, not even close to something I could afford. This dispite the fact that the struture is now 30 years older than when I lived there.

Somehow my parents, neither of whom had a college degree, bought a 1500 square foot fully detached house in a nice neighborhood. Far beyond anything I could realistically dream of.

*No I do not live in Silicon Valley. I live in a crappy, somewhat iffy, part of Orange County California. You can't pin this on lack growth/development.

I don't know, the Coast Guard?

Ah, fair point. I forgot about community colleges. But those are generally modeled as the first half of university (at least for university type subjects like engineering). You still can't take engineering courses at a trade school, unless you are calling CCs "trade schools". They do kind of have one foot in both camps.

You should not be at university if your interest is simply engineering, but rather a trade school.

I don't agree with the original poster's opinion on learning about Shakespeare, but that statement is flat out stupid. They don't teach engineering in trade schools, they teach trades there. Engineering is based mostly on differential equations, which are generally only taught at Universities.

I assume all the scary Orwellian stuff is already in use at airports everywhere. The novel part is that they thought of a way to use the terrorist/criminal/scary person facial recognition tracker infrastructure to possibly help people.

Ok, tell me what visa category a house painter applies for. I did research on visas when I was getting ready to marry my fiancee from oversees and I did not see any category that would apply to a would-be painter. Assuming they are not diplomatic staff, not marrying anyone here, have no family here, aren't rich or some kind of model/actor/singer/celebrity, and not coming here as a student, the remaing work-allowing visas are H1B (must require at least a bachelor's degree) or agricultural work.

Did I miss any? That would apply to a house painter?

Ha you think nose picking is safe? You're not looking at the big picture. Robots aren't constrained by the size and shape of human noses, they can be designed with whatever kind of nose is convenient.

In the future, robots will have large noses with perfectly rectangular nostrils that match there robo-fingers exactly. And then robots WILL replace toddlers completely.

Do they need an engraved invitation or something? Homeless people are free to go take those jobs if they want them.

Because the government won't issue entry visas. Though this is a bad example, since strawberry picking (agriculture) is one of the few things the government does issue a tiny number of visas for. A Mexican trying to enter to do house painting, furniture hauling, or construction labor, for example, cannot legally enter the USA.

I don't think SIRI needs AI to be more useful. Once it does the 'hard part' of converting speech to text, it just needs to use existing (non-AI) technology to make it more useful.
The two examples I gave were already on the market technology (the second one for over 30 years) that Apple could have trivially copied, but didn't.

All my life, we've been expecting voice recognition "real soon now". And it always flopped. You had to shout really slowly and carefully to get the system to recognize maybe half the words you said.

Then along came Siri, and finally there was a commercially available system that was good enough with normal speaking tone and pace (mostly) and... it dropped the ball miserably at doing simple stuff with the recognized speech.
I haven't tried Siri in ages, so maybe they've improved it recently, but I already gave up on using it because of how dumb it was. For example:

I could ask Siri for directions, say to my hotel, and she would understand fine. But if I asked for gas stations along my route, or restaurants near my destination she wouldn't do it. My old Tom-Tom could do that fine, you had to push the touchscreen as it had no voice capabilities, but it did it great. Siri could understand my voice, but could not do what my Tom-Tom could. To add insult to injury, Siri's canned response indicated that she understood what I was asking for (to use my route or destination as a search location instead of my current position), she just wouldn't do it.

Another time, I wanted to call my wife from a rental car (my regular car has its own voice recognition that works better for this). So I asked Siri to call [wife's name]. She didn't understand, fine, my wife has a weird foreign name. So asked Siri to call [our last name]. She found 2 people with that last name in my contacts (myself and my wife ) and asked me which one I wanted to call. Great! I responded "[wife's name]" Siri then asked "what do you want to do with [wife's name]?" Siri you just asked me which of 2 people I wanted to call! Oh well, I responded "Call her". Siri didn't understand what "Call her" meant and looked up websites related to "Call her". Now even back in the '80s when playing Infocom text adventures like Zork, you could type commands like "hit troll" have the game respond "what do you want to hit the troll with?" and answer "axe". The game remembered just fine that it asked you to fill in some info, and was ready to plug in the new info into what you were doing a few commands ago. But Siri couldn'do that, 30 years later.

If you don't like it being dark at 4:30 then just wake up one hour early, go to work one hour early, and go home one hour early.

You do realize almost nobody has a job that allows this, right? On many of my job assignments, going to work an hour early would mean waiting at a locked gate for a while. And at many (most?) jobs, the work day starts with the 7:00am safety meeting. If you are there at 6:00, you can't pick up your tools and do any work before the safety meeting. And if you work at any kind of operator (or monitoring, security, customer service) type job, it doesn't matter when you started, you leave when your replacement arrives to take over. Most people don't come to work at a computer and shuffle bytes all day.