I remember being absolutely burnt out on school by the time I reached grade 7 or 8. I started out enjoying learning. In fact, I was the kid who won the contest at our public library over the summer, twice in a row, for reading the most books on my own. I was also "that kid" who really got into doing those science fair projects and having one go on to some sort of regional finals.

I think what really started ruining things for me was the combination of way too much homework and too many classes (by high school, at least) where teachers felt it necessary to fill 4 chalkboards full of notes each day that we had to copy in our notebooks, as study material for their quizzes and exams. Oh, and of course, we still had to read a chapter or two of the provided hard-cover textbook.

I mean, there are SO many truly entertaining stories one can tell about history (YouTube is chock-full of them!), and yet - almost every History teacher I had in school insisted on dry/dull spewing of names, dates and places that had to be copied down, memorized, and spit back. And I'll admit math was always a struggle for me. I just never reached a point where I found any of it "enjoyable". But it never helped me that my math teachers always seemed to cover a steady "topic per day" without much care if we understood one of them or not. Everything built on everything else though, so as soon as I got lost with one or two items, it became a downward spiral. All they could suggest is, "Get tutoring!" ... and frankly? That's the LAST thing a school age kid/teen wants to hear when they've got so much of their waking life already occupied with the school day + hours of homework in the evening.I finally got a really good math teacher in college one year, who made a lot of it make sense for me. But it was one of those remedial classes that I think worked for me because she only taught us in a small group and made sure each of us understood each topic. I was always much better with reading and writing, but even a few of the English Lit. type courses I had were FAR more painful than they should have been. I mean, forcing us to read a specific novel to answer quiz questions on it and report on it later is counter to the way any sane person enjoys reading. (Who goes to a book store and has the clerk shove a book in their face - saying you must buy and read this one now?) Why couldn't they have a selection of books about different topics to choose from?

I dunno.... I guess I can see how AI could cause the same kind of "mental laziness" a calculator does vs learning to do a problem by hand? But calculator results are absolutes. AI makes mistakes and often requires creative re-wording of questions and playing with adding rules/restrictions to the output. If it's simply taught that it has to be used only as a tool, and one with limitations? It shouldn't stop the curious from wanting to learn. I wonder how much of that was already crushed by the system?

I, for one, doubt we'll see air traffic control replaced by AI any time soon. The big reason is accountability. If one air traffic controller completely screws things up and causes a plane crash -- that person can be singled out, terminated, and things return to normal. If the AI they replaced the human workers with screws up and causes a plane crash? Now you're talking about years of ongoing investigation, arguments/debates and pressure to bring the human workers back.

My own experience using Reddit is that it's really a mixed bag when it comes to forum moderation.
On some of the forums, moderators seem to do their due diligence and people receive warnings before outright bans, with explanations of why they were warned.

In others, you just get a sudden permanent ban, with nobody ever replying if you ask for an explanation.

For example, I work for a company that uses "Docuware", a fairly expensive (and somewhat obscure) document management software package. We paid to migrate our on-site server to their cloud-based solution a while back, but during that process, our support contract expired for the on-site version. We were assured we didn't need to spend the money renewing it just to get help finishing the migration. But we ran into some issues in the meantime (largely because we had to hold off on cutting over fully to the cloud, to retain compatibility with an outside vendor we shared some of the data with). I discovered Reddit had a Docuware subreddit (woo!), and asked a couple questions in there. I got a public reply from a guy in a foreign country who promised he could assist me. But then, he private messaged me, hitting me up for some large hourly fee. In other words, he was just looking for targets to sell his services but pretending he was just another helpful user in the public forum.

Shortly after I sent him a private reply thanking him but declining his services? I was permanently banned from the subreddit. No explanation... nothing. Looks like it was really just set up for Docuware consultants to make a few bucks.

but ours has the bonus of releasing radioactive waste!

https://www.waste360.com/nuisa...

It seems like the fight goes back and forth about "just cameras" vs "cameras + sensors", when all I can make of it is that the REAL answer lies in how good the hardware and software is processing the incoming data?

Tesla, for example, scrapped the cameras + lidar idea, largely out of frustration that both inputs often led to the computer interpreting the scene in conflicting ways. "Camera visual seems to indicate that's just a light pole on the side of the road but lidar image shows it may be a person starting to walk into the road." (Maybe that's a poor specific example, but I heard talks about it saying things along these lines were the struggle.)

If Waymo is arguing humans can only do so much with our eyes, so "superhuman levels of driving" require more? Again, it seems to me like more CPU power and better software is that "more"? Computers can do math FAR quicker than my brain can... and that's been true for decades. Superhuman levels of driving safely seem like they could happen with systems just using cameras OR systems collecting data from multiple sources?

You're right, but the problem is going to be location in many cases. Would a former data center make a great public library? Technically, it might. But when it was built out in the middle of some farm land, where they originally got a good deal on the land by buying some farmers out who were willing to sell? Now, it might not make so much sense.

Or as an example closer to home for me? Our own city is fielding requests to construct data centers right now. There are rumors about our now closed-down steel plant being a potential site. Great for the guy who owns the property and wants to unload it. But a data center there would mean tearing out and removing an existing environment that was good for manufacturing. If you said ok -- no more steel made here but we could do cement, or process glass? That would be an equivalent replacement that would bring back the lost jobs. A data center really won't ... and if it closes? I'm not sure people would want it as office space in that part of town.

Reality is? The places that allow new data centers where they interfere with the existing population are just going to wind up with regrets.

They remind me a bit of the battles over putting in new landfills/dumps. Everyone knows we need them, but it's always "not in my back yard"!

The thing is? The need for more data centers is questionable. If all this AI growth turns the corner and companies decide much of it was just overblown hype? Then those data centers will quickly wind back down again.

Even in "best case" scenarios, they don't employ many people once they're constructed, and they use large amounts of resources -- which tend to be sold at discounted rates as part of the deals struck when they move into an area. Everyone else gets stuck covering any losses by way of rate increases.

A landfill may smell bad, but it's not using up the lion's share of available electric power in my town or using a big portion of available clean water.

I don't understand how the entire concept isn't just outlawed and thrown out? The core reason we have a stock market is to allow business growth/prosperity. Company owners trade off their original ownership of a successful business for a chance to get investor income flowing in to make the business more successful than they could make it on their own.

Prediction markets are nothing more than gambling. There's no "investing" in a business happening at all with this.

To be fair, cellular data is really poor in quite a few places in America, when using ANY of the "second tier" reseller carriers. (Won't speak for other countries.)

EG. We have Spectrum Mobile right now (mostly due to a bundle deal with our broadband at home), and while voice calls work pretty much as expected, anywhere I go? The data is terrible! They say they're using Verizon's towers but it's obvious Verizon is throttling the heck out of them and/or only allowing them on SOME of the towers in a given area.

When I had T-Mobile for a few years previously? It had bad holes in coverage areas, but it worked quite well where it was built out (usually your bigger cities).

I don't care how much "cost savings" they claim it brings to eliminate retail stores. As one of only a few "major carriers", it's pathetic to offer only online interaction with customers. And honestly? I'm not even sure I would have a big issue with the FCC pulling some of the dedicated frequency spectrum they were allowed to purchase. I'm pretty sure there was an assumption made that as one of the "big 3" cellular providers in the USA, T-Mobile would ensure any potential customer had the ability to buy a phone with them and get the help needed to use it. I imagine there are quite a few elderly or handicapped people around who don't find it very functional to do all of that via an app.

I don't do a lot of traveling, but I remember when I last worked at a job that involved some travel? The ongoing "wisdom" was a realization that the cheaper hotels had the most usable/reliable wifi. The expensive ones tended to use Internet as a service to upsell, with annoying portals trying to bill you a daily rate and generally interfering with your applications. (They might, for example, lock down just about all ports except 80 and 443, meaning you couldn't get software updates to complete or connect a VPN, or ....)

The basic chains, by contrast, all seemed to used "canned" wifi setups sold to them by third party vendors, and as long as you got a decent signal in your room, you were good.

In any case, I never trusted a hotel wifi to be super-secure. Heck, I remember on a Vegas trip one time, they had it set up so wifi was capped at a slow rate unless you paid a premium. I was curious about a wired jack I found behind the bed and plugged into it. Turns out, it gave me a full gigabit network connection and bypassed their sign-in portal and everything. They seemed to just not realize or expect guests would still carry ethernet cables with them and try to use a wired connection.

But the first thing I thought of when reading this is how "sales" seems to constantly involve managers over teams who think all their employees have to be treated like kids, or at least assume simple-minded "motivators" actually work.

Have any real studies been done on ANY of this? Because whether it's negative reinforcement like this public shaming/pie assault, or it's insanity like ringing bells each time a sale is made and some bozo interrupting the whole place with loud announcements? It all feels primitive and pointless to me.

The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.

I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used and "wore out". It was always the optical drive failing. If you played only downloaded games, they'd run fine.

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.

I feel like it's not only possible, but likely America saw relatively major power outages at close to the same "one per month" rate in the past too? The electrical grid is basically designed with an assumption it only stays up with the help of a crew of linemen who get tasked with locating points of failure and fixing them ASAP.

I remember some years back, I lived in a small city right on the edge of the Potomac River in western Maryland. They were originally set up with "feeder" power lines coming from two directions in to town. At some point, Potomac Edison power company decided to just discontinue one of those feeder lines and let the city get by from the other one. Every time a car hit the right power pole coming in to town, after that? Power was out for the whole community.

Seemed insane to me that they'd purposely remove redundancy they already had in place? But I'm sure it was all about the economics -- with bean-counters realizing the lower grid reliability was still "adequate" per the total population there, and they'd save all the money maintaining the additional lines and poles.

I also remember living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where they had a power outage lasting over 2 weeks. A storm came through and knocked down a lot of trees. (The community took pride in having all the trees growing there, but I guess didn't consider how bad that was for above-ground power lines running right past all of them.) They had to get crews from other states out to replace blown transformers on poles and the whole bit, to get it back up and running.

If better uptime was a major issue, you'd think they'd bury those power lines. But again, it's about cost-savings instead.