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Comment Why do I care about instruments? (Score 0) 157

by EmagGeek (#66320774) Attached to: Instrument Clusters Are Now Paid Extras In Two Hyundai Models

As long as I know how fast I'm going and how much fuel I have left, what do I care about engine speed and oil pressure and coolant temperature, and so on? I don't need to monitor all of the minutiae of my engine's operating point while I am driving. That is handled by the FADEC. The FADEC will tell me when and if there is a problem. I do not need to monitor these things myself. This emotional attachment to the past is just that, an emotional attachment.

Submission + - NBA Suspends Steve Ballmer for 1 Year, Fines Clippers $30M for Salary-Cap Scheme

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire reports, "The NBA dropped the hammer on Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday, suspending the former Microsoft CEO from all league and team activities for one year and fining the franchise $30 million following a year-long investigation into illegal salary-cap circumvention involving star forward Kawhi Leonard. The sweeping sanctions mark one of the most severe punitive actions taken against an owner in modern sports history. Beyond Ballmer’s ban and the team fine, the Clippers were stripped of five consecutive first-round draft picks (2029 through 2033), several team executives were suspended, and Leonard was ordered to pay $700,000 in restitution. Leonard’s uncle and advisor, Dennis Robertson, was also banned from league activity for five years."

"Central to what the NBA identified as a salary-cap evasion scheme was Aspiration, a green-banking tech startup that filed for bankruptcy after its co-founder pleaded guilty to a $248 million fraud. Shortly after signing Leonard to a $176 million contract extension in 2021, Ballmer personally poured $50 million into Aspiration, while the team landed a $300 million sponsorship deal and Leonard secured a multimillion-dollar endorsement contract with the firm."

Given today's events, looking prescient in retrospect is a 2014 Deadspin item that quipped, Steve Ballmer Practiced Being Owner With His Son's High School Team, which took note of a Seattle Times investigation into "incoming Clippers owner Steve Ballmer's foray into the shady world of high school prep sports and the wealthy parents living vicariously through their kids." Summarizing Ballmer's aggressive find-a-way-to-win maneuvers, Deadspin wrote, "Ballmer's son's basketball team at Lakeside School in Seattle [which Bill Gates once attended] sucked, and he wanted to make it un-suck. So he created a non-profit as a way to pump money and talent into the school, got friendly faces coaching positions, and pushed for an administration-wide commitment to athletics at the expense of academics. He was basically the owner of Lakeside basketball."

Submission + - AI Banned in NYC Elementary and Middle Schools

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The NY Times and others are reporting on a moratorium on student-facing generative AI use in schools, alongside a new screen time policy, a decision that will impact nearly 600,000 public school students, or two-thirds of the system's total enrollment. An announcement from the NYC Mayor's Office — Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels Put Students First with Nation’s Broadest Generative AI Moratorium in Schools — characterizes the policy as the most expansive student-facing AI moratorium in the nation

The new policy eliminates AI use for students in grades 2-K through 8th grade. This includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI. Companion chatbots will be prohibited across all grades. At the high school level, no more than 50,000 students in five limited pilots will be introduced to AI in general education courses. All high school students will also have access to twice-yearly AI literacy classes (two 45-minute modules) designed to help them think critically about AI before they begin to rely on it. Students in 2nd grade and below will see restricted 1:1 screen time, with recommended caps of 30 minutes a day for students in 3rd grade through 5th grade and 45 minutes for students in 6th grade through 8th grade.

“Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow. They need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with educators and wrestle with tough problems on their own,” said Mayor Mamdani. “The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We do not see it that way. That’s why we’re implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in 2-K through 8th grade and spending the next year studying the impacts of this technology.”

Comment Re: The existence of the database endangers us (Score 0) 131

Tell me you've never used an AI coding tool, without telling me ...

I don't know about the rest of the peanut gallery, but I can say first hand that claude is excellent at commenting and documenting code and architecture, as well as keeping track of lessons learned.

Submission + - Amazon HR Chief Boasts of Creating 100K LOC With AI, Says 'Everyone Can Code'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "I'm an Amazon SVP who hadn't coded in 25 years," reads the headline. "Then I wrote 100,000 lines of code with AI." In an Amazon News post, Amazon HR leader Beth Galetti on Tuesday offered her own personal experience with Amazon AI development tools as evidence that 'everyone can build' now.

So, what compelling problems prompted Galetti to come out of coding retirement to develop solutions for using AI after a quarter century? "My first project was a family calendaring app so we could all stay coordinated," Galetti explains. "That confidence carried me forward. On a flight back to Seattle, I opened Kiro, our AI-powered development tool, and started building. By the time I landed, I had built the submission app for what would become our internal team competition 'Everyone Can Build.' The challenge was to build an app or tool that solves a real problem in your work or everyday life using AI. No technical background required."

Galetti continued, "A few years ago, if a non-technical employee wanted to build something at Amazon, they needed a tech team and a spot on a roadmap. That's changed. As non-technical employees build more internally, our tech teams are freed up to move even faster, think bigger, and deliver even more for our customers. [...] This is one of the most exciting times in my career. When you give people the tools to build, they will surprise you with what they create. I can’t wait to see what we all build next."

Last January, Galetti also took to Amazon News to announce the elimination of 16,000 corporate jobs that coincided with the company's push to invest heavily in AI. "I'm grateful for how our teams continue to deliver," Galetti said in her layoff announcement post, "for customers, for each other, and for the incredible things we're building together."

Submission + - How Big Tech Captured American Schools

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In How Big Tech Captured American Schools (alt source), an adapted excerpt of the forthcoming book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, the New York Times' Natasha Singer begins: "Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked. Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain."

"Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn."

"This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas."

"This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?"

In an accompanying LinkedIn post, Singer adds: "Every few years, Silicon Valley has urged American public schools to quickly adopt the latest technology or teach the latest tech subject: Big Data analytics; laptops for every child; algorithm-driven math and reading apps; computer programming; virtual reality. And each time the urgent arguments sounded remarkably similar: if schools just adopted the latest tech tool, or taught the latest tech subject, it would democratize learning for every child and equip students with valuable career skills. The campaign to expand student access to computer science and other efforts had good intentions. But today we know some of those classroom tech drives did not exactly pan out as advertised. Now some of the same companies that urged schools to provide laptops and coding lessons are employing similar arguments to urge schools to quickly adopt A.I. tools. I've spent years covering Chromebooks and student chatbot use. And I'm troubled by our collective amnesia around school tech."

Submission + - How Big Tech Captured American Schools

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In How Big Tech Captured American Schools (alt source), an adapted excerpt of the forthcoming book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, the New York Times' Natasha Singer begins: "Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked. Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain."

"Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn."

"This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas."

"This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?"

In an accompanying LinkedIn post, Singer adds: "Every few years, Silicon Valley has urged American public schools to quickly adopt the latest technology or teach the latest tech subject: Big Data analytics; laptops for every child; algorithm-driven math and reading apps; computer programming; virtual reality. And each time the urgent arguments sounded remarkably similar: if schools just adopted the latest tech tool, or taught the latest tech subject, it would democratize learning for every child and equip students with valuable career skills. The campaign to expand student access to computer science and other efforts had good intentions. But today we know some of those classroom tech drives did not exactly pan out as advertised. Now some of the same companies that urged schools to provide laptops and coding lessons are employing similar arguments to urge schools to quickly adopt A.I. tools. I've spent years covering Chromebooks and student chatbot use. And I'm troubled by our collective amnesia around school tech."

Submission + - OpenAI and Google Move Into K-12 Classrooms with New Kid-Friendly AI Offerings

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "OpenAI announced on Tuesday 'ChatGPT for Teens'", the NY Times reports, "a new mode in which the chatbot automatically limits some conversations to better protect young users, as scrutiny grows over the harmful effects of artificial intelligence." OpenAI added that it's also teaming with tech-backed nonprofit CodeAI to 'prepare the first AI generation', announcing a 'signature partnership' that it says will "give students and educators access to tools and resources that will help them learn how to use and benefit from AI [...] helping teens understand how AI works, direct it, question it, and create with it—with teachers playing a meaningful role in shaping how AI enters the classroom." Separately, CodeAI said it and OpenAI will be "helping students build foundational AI literacy" via the Hour of AI, through which it said "OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly."

OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens announcement came just days after the NY Times reported that Google turned on Gemini AI for K-12 students using its Google Classroom, a learning management system for posting assignments and turning in schoolwork that's used by 150+ million students and teachers worldwide. A new Gemini tab within Classroom will allow students of all ages to seek AI help on math problems and writing assignments. They can also generate course aids like study guides, quizzes and flashcards, as well as produce images. Last September, Google CEO Sundar Pichai briefed the White House on the tech giant's efforts to get Gemini for Education in 'every high school in America', which he noted "includes $3 million to Code.org [since rebranded as CodeAI] to transform its [K-12] curriculum and integrate new AI features." And in December, Google.org kicked off the inaugural 'Hour of AI' by announcing "over $5 million in new Google.org funding to bolster computer science teaching in the age of AI." The 5-day event during CS Education Week saw 13+ million schoolkids take AI tutorials, including Google's AI Quests offering.

The moves by Google and OpenAI in advance of children's return to classrooms for the 2026-27 school year further escalate the race among U.S. tech giants to train students on their AI tools. They also come just ahead of next month's release of NYT journalist Natasha Singer's Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America."

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