My school, despite getting a Gates grant, had a class in Claris works. That was a worthwhile use of my learning time...

I remember being in school in the early 2000s, and the teachers were all regularly given macs that they absolutely did not need, given the most complicated thing most of them were doing was spreadsheets. Then, after the teachers had gotten used to using macs, Apple stopped donating the units to schools. This stuff has been going on forever, and it's just one of many, many ways corporations screw around with schools.

I expect to see a bunch of foreign power companies staying at Trump properties, playing golf at Trump resorts, and buying a ton of Trump coin followed shortly by their equipment being said to be "safe" and allowed to be imported. We NEED this equipment because we don't make most of it here and definitely not enough of it, so it will have to be allowed in. This is just a way for Trump to get paid by them to be allowed in.

"could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner."

What you are doing is exactly violating that. You set the goals based on where you want to be, not what you think the technology can do. That is what "technologically neutral" means. You are taking into account the technology when setting goals, which means you are not neutral at all. But what else would I expect from this band of asshats?

I'm not gambling, I am just trying to predict whether this slot machine will give me three cherries when I spin the wheel.

Except tuition is basically free for Mexican citizens while the travel and accommodation certainly will not be. This isn't the US where all schools are outrageously expensive.

I don't have much more to say about it, except that if I was a billion-dollar AI company I wouldn't try and pass off my flaws as brilliance.

Which part of "people are afraid they might get fired if they don't go along with it" do you not get? You seem to think there is no problem with this, but if this is OK, where does it stop? Is it OK to have the highest sales punch the person with the lowest sales? Can they sexually assault them after they are tied to the chair (and why did they have to be tied to a chair if everyone was on board with this)? Where does this assault you think is OK turn into assault you think is not OK?

Except you are ignoring the fact this is your boss telling you this. Sure, maybe you can say you aren't comfortable with it and nothing happens. Or maybe you say you are uncomfortable with it and the boss looks for a reason to fire you because you "aren't a good fit with the culture". If a group of friends do this, it is good fun. When your boss does it, it is assault and workplace coercion.

A late reply to your comment:

Yes, overall structure is a problem. I generally give it hints as to how I would like the architecture to be, and for larger projects I mention that future ability to expand/extend is important, which then makes it construct more robust "frameworks".

But generally you need to know what the bones of your solution should look like and push it in that direction otherwise you end up with nicely commented spaghetti code.

"He's not under any compulsion to give a password is he? They had the phone, nothing forced the authorities to trust anything he said....they could have tried forensics like they'd do if they had a safe and tried a safecracker to get in if the suspect didn't want to give the combination."

This is the interesting part to me. He definitely could not be compelled to give them his password (legally). So the fact he offered them a password could be covered under freedom of speech. Depending on what was said, lying to the police can be a crime, especially when it could be considered obstruction of justice. Did they just ask for a PIN and he provided a PIN? Did he say the PIN would unlock the device when it would actually wipe it? It could also show he intended to destroy anything on the device, and while they can't prove there was anything incriminating on the device, it could still be considered evidence as it was data for an investigation. There are a lot of different paths I can see this going down.

The barrier to AI cheating is ridiculously low, though.

RIDICULOUSLY LOW.

It tool me about 20 seconds to paste your comment into Claude and get this back out:

Quick take, then the rebuttal itself:
 
The comment's "cheaters gonna cheat" logic dodges the actual point. A few counters:
 
Ease changes behavior, not just outcomes. If AI cheating is dramatically easier and lower-risk than pre-AI alternatives (crib notes, bribing a proctor, memorizing leaked exams), it doesn't just help existing cheaters - it recruits new ones who wouldn't have bothered with the harder, riskier methods. Frictionless cheating scales.
 
"Someone would've cheated anyway" doesn't mean the tool is blameless. That's true of almost any enabling technology (fake IDs, counterfeit currency, doping). We don't shrug at those because determined bad actors exist regardless - we still try to close the specific hole.
 
The "other tests exist" point is the real concession. If proctored, in-person, or oral exams resist AI cheating better, that's an argument for changing how we test, not for waving away AI's role in why the change is suddenly urgent. The heart surgeon example works against the poster here - we'd absolutely want to know an AI-era certification exam let someone through who couldn't do the job, because the failure mode (unqualified surgeon) is real regardless of how they cheated.
 
So the response isn't "AI is uniquely evil," it's "AI meaningfully lowered the cost of cheating, which is exactly why testing methods need to adapt" which is compatible with, not contradicted by, the original comment's own second paragraph

There were a few different questions in the feedback popup before I finally answered.

One of them was "How delightful do you find the new home page layout?"

Oh yeah, DELIGHTFUL.

Look Mozilla, I don't get any delight out of opening a browser tab. Maybe, about 1994 or so, I had some delight in just getting NCSA Mosaic to open, so that I could connect via Trumpet Winsock to this crazy new thing called the World Wide Web, and look at some page that some guy at CERN built, and check out how full a coffee pot was with Netscape Navigator 0.9. Nowadays, it's a very small step in my task of "get out on the internet and find something", or "Open browser so I can click on a bookmark in the bookmark bar". Get out of my way and stop wasting CPU and bandwidth on stuff that I don't look at,

Over the last few weeks started getting increasing numbers of shortcut icons underneath my search bar on my default page - Amazon, Temu, etc,(with tiny "sponsored" text) and a couple of my most visited sites.

Then I started to get the mini-apps exhorting me to play this or look at that.

And then I went to FireFox's settings and set my new tab option to "blank".

There was a feedback popup when the tab loaded and I spent a little time telling them not to repeat the mistakes of other browsers cluttering up their landing pages. One of the few times I recommended taking a cue for Google, home page is clean, you hit it and jump off somewhere else, job done.

Other reports on this say that it had access to a proxy for a package manager for installing tools, which it then hacked to become a general proxy, and then off it went on it's cybercrime spree.

All of which is completely inexcusable for its owners, because all that shit doesn't happen in a blink of an eye.

OpenAI's PR approach to their security debacle seems to be "Oooo our models are so powerful and scary, that's awesome! We didn't notice that it did this over the course a few days, didn't notice suspicious network activity doing a whole lot of connections to a package manager proxy, didn't notice it churning though a bajillion tokens in it's little sandbox, it just got out and did all of this itself!"

If I have a car and I park it on a hill, and I don't set the handbrake and turn the wheels towards the curb, and then it rolls down the hill causing mayhem and destruction, I am held responsible.

Is there any good reason why OpenAI shouldn't be held responsible for the mayhem caused by it's unattended machine?