Guess how many people speak welsh in Wales, or Finnish in Finland? 10 million is a LOT of people. And lets be honest here, its still french. Sure its a dialect, but if you know Canadian french and put in a bit of effort, its not exactly hard to pick up Metropolitan french, belgian french, swiss french, etc, etc, etc.

French class is basically a 'a bit of exposure to even the idea of an another language (in this case french), a bit of canadian history (esp french canadian), oh... and its a bit of an art and drama class too'. For fucks sake its 30 minutes a few times a week in grade school.

Nobody is expecting you to learn conversant or fluent french from gradeschool french class.

If they dedicated the the time to arabic or hindi or mandarin, it would be just as ineffective at producing speakers of those languages. Meanwhile, french has some canadian significance in terms of heritage and culture, and its an official language... so what are you really on about here??

Heavy metal isn't mainstream. What part is confusing you?

It is exactly that. Its abused by many actors, and imperfect, and there's plenty of canadian crap as a result. There's also quite a bit of good stuff, and plenty of it is even made by white men (a tragically marginalized group, according to you apparently.)

Being worth consuming doesn't mean you'll hear about it. Wasn't that your very own argument about 3 inches of blood??

Lots of canadian content worth consuming wouldn't gain traction without the promotion. Your right, a lot of it isn't worth much, but frankly, a lot of is. So lets hear about it. What's the real problem here? You can't find enough quality american content to consume because canadian content is crowding it out of the marketplace? For realsies?

Meanwhile, take a look at all that top tier quality we're missing out on thanks to all that canadian content rules. American TV is full of promotion for low rent garbage reality TV, cake baking contests, hoarders, absurdist dating contests, and so on. American netflix is full of cheap comedy specials and low budget subtitled filler from their foreign studios, American spotify is full of AI slop music.

So yeah... if some of that is getting pushed below the surface some canadian crap is getting promoted instead. So be it.

I feel bad for entry-level folks -- though continually surprised how many of them outsource so much of their thinking to AI themselves. It seems like most college students cheat with AI, making them less useful as entry-level employees.

Again, if you think the artists don't use AI, it's because they didn't tell you.

A good example here is "I'm stuck, what rimes with x" that is a stereotypical writer block for song writers. Do you know what easily solves that problem?

LLM trained for it. I.e. Suno.ai.

Song writers writing a specific tune that just doesn't sound right that want to iterate on several close variants to determine what would sound better. Do you know what does this quickly? Suno.ai.

Again, the artists probably could, as we say it here, "climb up the tree ass first" and do this themselves. It will take them thousands to tens of thousands of times longer to solve the problem at hand than AI would solve it. But they could do it by hand.

But successful people are always starved for time. So they take every tool that will let them have a significant amount of extra time. AI is currently by far the most important tool in this category.

Another fun part: this has been studied. You're wrong on both accounts. People don't actually care (and often prefer) AI music, as long as they're not told it's AI music. I.e. telling them generates a nocebo effect.

And young generations are very much positive on AI music. They form a decent bulk of people who ask the likes of suno.ai make it for them. It's just that most of this music is something like "take this song that sounds cool, and make it more like this, because I like it more if it was like this". Sing with girlfriend's/boyfriends/crush's voice, etc.

Fun part: you can tell properly trained AI to give generated piece "a sense of the personality and mood of the specific performer". Today, 4/5 times it will be successful in doing so, provided it had enough of performer's works to learn from.

At this point, there are two kinds of successful artists.

Those that tell you that they use AI to assist with their craft, and those that lie about it.

Because the amount of extra work that needs to be done to without AI is ridiculous at this point. Add to this the part where AI provides several unique services that humans cannot deliver in time frames that aren't thousands to tens of thousands of times longer, allowing for rapid iteration on concepts that would be impossible otherwise, and today you no longer can be successful without it.

The only difference today is how much of it is used, for what parts, and what specific model.

And you think the fact that carbon dioxide has steadily increased over the past 150 years or as we pump a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a coincidence? You honestly believe that there is zero connection between pumping gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and there being gigatons more carbon dioxide in the air than pre-industrial times? Completely unrelated events?

He's got a valid point. For example, if you use wolfram alpha after you do a math problem to check the result you came up with you can actually learn MORE than just doing the problem yourself, and may even add to the time the work takes, as if your result is wrong, you'll spend extra time working out where you went wrong and fixing it. And ultimately learning more in the process.

OTOH - If you use wolfram alpha to DO the question for you, you will learn nothing at all.

But further to that, you can even use tools to save time and learn more.

The other day, my daughter and I chatted about docker build scripts while she was doing her homework (which used docker containers), and that conversation clarified a lot of details and subtleties. (I learned a few things in the course of that conversation myself.) Nothing we talked about wasn't in the documentation, strictly speaking, but the conversation was a more natural way to learn and address the specific details we were talking about, with examples, and use cases that we came up with on the flay to make sense of and highlight those specific nuances. She probably could have read and reread the docs and easily spent more time on it, while learning less.

Now, in this case, she was learning 'from me', but you could swap "Dad" out for an "LLM", and get the same benefit.

All that said, I don't think the AI systems we have right now are likely a good idea for homework. The temptation to use it self-destructively is just going to be too high for a large number of students. Probably the majority of them. But it definitely can be used to learn more, and even learn more faster in the hands of someone who uses it for that.

There's a lot wrong with your question.
Firstly, China's gun laws are among the strictest in the world. Private ownership of firearms is generally prohibited. You'll get better returns on matching China's homicide rates by matching their firearms laws than you will by catching up with them on surveillance.

Are you wiling to do that? I somehow doubt it. And to be a safe as china, you could do both -- give up your guns AND submit to a police surveillance state. What could go wrong?

China has done other things too - absolutely massive government investments in infrastructure and construction, creating jobs and reducing poverty in the process, uplifting people who would otherwise be more desperate and more likely to turn to crime etc.

And speaking of Crime, China is pretty busy with state executions too. And is quite adept at artificially making those numbers look smaller, frequently recording the execution of multiple people as a single execution. That may play a part in the lower homicide rate too.

Secondly, you imply the tradeoff is simple prudishness - we give up peoples lives for the ability to "go to a strip club secretly".
That's not that half of it, and you should know that. It's also the ability to go, for example, to a political party meeting secretly.

Do you really trust your government so much that you'd give them that power over you? That some fuckwit won't get into power and leverage this against the people? The best protection the civilian population has from government abuse is to resist giving them the tools to abuse you in the first place. The government doesn't need to know where every person is at all times, this will inevitably be used against you. The supposed 'safety' gains are not worth living in a police surveillance state.

I think the best term for AI luddites such as yourself is "AI Vegans".

Like vegans, you know a tiny sliver of reality, and make it your whole world. Like vegans, we don't need to know you're like this, because you'll tell us. Like vegans, you're wrong on almost everything. Like vegans, you believe your faith makes you a higher form of being, and those who disagree just "are lesser" i.e. "do not understand math".

Like vegans, you'll mostly go away in a decade or two.

It's actually the opposite. It was stagnant between 1960s and early 2000s. Where we thought we'd need to program it, because we were modelling it on ourselves even back then, and back then we thought brain was biologically fully pre-programmed.

Then fMRI brain imaging came, we understood how brain functions, that's it's not pre-programmed but learning from basic LLM-like template and then inferring based on what it learned (remember the "90% of the brain is not used" pre-fMRI myth?), and within a decade, basics of modern AI being "learn and infer" principle became mainstream.

And then they look at alternatives, and conclude "yes, this is in fact by far the best system we've ever had for this purpose".

"It's not perfect" is utopian thinking. What matters is "is this the best system we had so far".

Curious opinion considering that legal profession is mostly applied about logic. You learn the rules, and they you use logic to apply them to each situation.

Of course we do. We literally modeled current gen AI on it.

In fact, we even know that LLMs overwhelmingly struggle learning where humans struggle as well. Because it's the same process.

The only difference is that we are embodied and spend decades learning, while they have far more compute and memory and are able to learn in days. Each grants us slightly different advantages and disadvantages within the learning process.

Which is fundamentally the same process.

It is literally learning though. It's a neural network modeled on human brain, learning in the same way human brain does.

You going "lalalala, can't hear you" isn't changing reality. It's still learning.