The sad thing is there are now far more resources for learning than ever before. I used to have to go to the library and look through microfilm.

Now we have Wikipedia, which is better than any encyclopedia. If you want to know how to reroof a house, there are hundreds of videos available about that.

A more important problem is that often the teachers don't find the material interesting.

If the teacher actually enjoys the book 1984, they can teach their students to enjoy it. That kind of teacher is a good teacher.

Your boos mean nothing!!

Stanford grads aren't idiots, though. They have at least a minimal level of intelligence.

You're talking about what AI might be in the future, not what it is now.

It is extremely important to make that distinction.

Whether Anthropic was trying to hype about Mythos / Fable or not (and FYI, it is a pretty big leap forward), they absolutely did not want to get public access shut down. The US government very much seems to want to have exclusive access to it for now.

Also, to clarify the "jailbreak": They took open source projects that had known vulnerabilities, as well as deliberately introducing vulnerabilities into some other projects, then asked Fable to fix them, and then asked for test scripts to demonstrate that the exploits could no longer be exploited - the implication being that they could then use those exploits against unpatched systems. But what's the logic here? The challenge isn't "how to write exploits against known bugs", any model can do that. The challenge is finding the bugs - something Mythos / Fable has proven better than previous models at. Even if Fable refused to write said test scripts, it would automatically downgrade to Opus 4.8, and then *Opus* would have written those test scripts. Or any other model out there could do it, including free open source ones that can be safety-abliterated at will.

More than one study suggests we're past the tipping point for Kessler syndrome: https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

Nah I just typed the wrong word and meant Starlink.

In some LEO altitudes, objects can take 50,000 years on average to clear out due to orbital decay. At the Earthlink altitude it takes 10-20 years on average for an object to de-orbit.

Because the number of objects increase dramatically every time there is an explosion/collision, we have likely already hit Kesler syndrome. That is, even if we don't launch anything else, the amount of space junk will just keep increasing. (You would know that if you'd bothered to read the Wikipedia article).

Scientists used to think that space junk would clear because of the atmosphere, but that hasn't been thought true for thirty years or more. There is probably no way to avoid Kessler syndrome now.

Oh come on, green is a very beautiful color. It's probably Biden's fault.

Someone needs to let Trump know that the best way to clean algae from a fountain is to add laundry detergent. Lots of it.

That's a little extreme, some are better than others. Last time I went to Los Gatos DMV, even though it was a bit farther away. Much more pleasant than Santa Clara DMV. Next time I'll probably go to Capitola DMV, even though it's rather far. I'll visit some nice restaurants while I'm there.

Ships have been floating through the Straight of Hormuz for a month or so now, and Iran hasn't been able to do anything about it. They tried.

https://www.politico.com/news/...

A colleague of mine working for Motorola patented encrypted memory sometime in the 2006-2010 timeframe. Maybe Motorola figured out that AMD was violating their patent and negotiated royalties privately with AMD. I don't know; I don't work at Motorola, but if AMD had to suddenly start paying royalties, it makes sense that they'd remove the feature from lower end, lower margin processors.

Surely it's Ahmad Vahidi, head of the IRGC.

I like your concept that the negotiations are aimed at driving wedges between the factions in Iran. Certainly, agreeing to a deal this week requires the IRGC to show their hand at least.

Is only half of women being able to read at all really the counterargument you were trying to make here?

And we're just talking the most basic aspect of an educational system. Kids today learn to read early in grade school.

ED: EEG, not fMRI.

And again, that's not to imply that they have any particular "mastery" in this specific case. Obviously, if they just typed "write the essay for me" into ChatGPT and submitted it without reading it, then they're not going to have learned much of anything from that. The question is, however, what did they do with their time instead? Because their brain was learning that instead.

The correllary to "use it or lose it" is that the brain isn't just going idle, it's refocusing its efforts on other things that you are "using" instead.

The average person today could hardly identify all the wild edible plants in their area, change a horseshoe, or build a proper barn, like their ancestors hundreds of years ago could.

By contrast, their ancestors hundreds of years ago probably couldn't read.

Brains don't just go idle; they just refocus on different things. A wealthy Victorian often pursued a life of a polymath, seeking varied intellectual pursuits and sometimes making great discoveries, but they could probably scarcely tell you how to mend a shoe or even change a nappy - that was their servants job.

Also, it's quite the spin to present low MRI activity as "reduced function". It's commonly literally the opposite. If you present a novice with a task they're not used to, and an expert with the same task, the expert will tend to show much less activity than the novice, as the novice has to think harder to accomplish it, whereas it's become rote for the expert. Low activation on a task is commonly a sign of cognitive efficiency.