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Comment Re:This is a fundamental problem with education (Score 4, Insightful) 9

I worked in K-12 education for a long time. And one of the things that genuinely shocked me is how much curriculum is in fact just sponsored by giant corporations.

The especially concerning/scary thing this time is that what the giant corporations want is to make computing seem like "magic." Make a wish into the wishing well that is AI, and what you will receive will be what you wished for ... provided, of course, you keep paying the corporation for the privilege of having your wishes granted.

Never mind having the actual skill, talent, understanding, etc. to make your wishes come true yourself. Just pay, wish, and it will be yours ... and never mind anyone who tells you it used to be possible to get what you want to achieve without paying a giant corporation. Just keep wishing, lean how to wish big, and your wishes will come true.

This seems like the antithesis of how anyone who considers themselves an educator should think.

And the really sad part is they're not just saying this to CS students. They're saying it to writers and journalists, artists, musicians ... basically anyone whose job doesn't involve a hammer, a shovel, or a stove.

Comment Re:Enterprise software is bought with blowjobs any (Score 2) 52

Happens all the time. A friend spent a full year flying back and forth from Southern California, staying in hotels, to meet with a cross-company team to figure out how to use the new software they'd licensed from a Perot company. After the full year (or more), they decided the software just wasn't going to work out, so they scrapped the project and the whole effort was for nothing.

Comment Re:A difference of kind or of degree (Score 1) 52

The interesting model, though, is driving. Most of us think that this has been a complete failure. Musk set out to do it and failed, like many of his other enterprises. What we missed is that in fact there is a company that has delivered "full self driving" [youtube.com] by limiting the problem so it doesn't need intelligence.

There are at least two fully autonomous robotaxi companies operating in San Francisco. Waymo, in particular, has been wildly successful and is winning business away from the likes of Lyft and Uber. It will even give you a ride to the airport now.

Comment So ... RSA, huh? (Score 2) 93

Is RSA even a serious security conference, other than to market the latest tools and gee-gaws to willing suckers? Despite the obvious tone of skepticism/sarcasm, this is a serious question from me, not a troll. I just didn't think RSA was much of a magnet for serious-minded security researchers, policy wonks, activists, and the like. I thought folks went to Black Hat and DefCon for that sort of thing, while RSA was pretty much just the security-focused version of Dreamforce or Oracle OpenWorld.

Comment It ain't a published paper, folks (Score 3, Insightful) 31

"It's pretty long on accusations and thin on any sort of evidence," Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, said over Signal.

Yeah, buddy, you might be good at reading scientific papers and research, but you're not so good at reading lawsuits. The suit itself is just a bunch of claims. Evidence is the stuff you present in court. So if you're thinking, "But I'm not a party to this suit, so I don't have access to all the evidence attorneys are planning to present" ... now yer thinkin'.

Comment Re:Has Apple software ever been good? (Score 1) 9

It's a fair point. I use a Mac, but I pretty much automatically replace the functionality of any of the apps it comes with. It bugs me when Apple announces a major OS release and all the "new features" relate to the bundled apps, all of which, for me, rank no higher than "it'll get you there until you get something better." I even use iTerm instead of the built-in Terminal.

Still, the day-to-day use of macOS is still more pleasurable to me than Windows has been for years, and even though there aren't likely to be any showstoppers for me with Linux, I still don't want to deal with it.

As for Final Cut, years ago Apple did something to screw it up and piss off a lot of the professional video editors who were using it. Maybe they reversed themselves or came up with a fix, but the pro editors I know had no patience to wait for that and moved on to Adobe Premiere, which by then had improved by leaps and bounds.

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