Least important material? You weren't a STEM major, were you? I wanna see how physics/chemistry/math 101 is going to be the least important material.

Key difference: You're paying a lot of money for that useless first semester.

I would be supremely pissed to fork over $40k just to get a "pass" in Freshman-101.

If U-M is doing the now-common waste of a first semester packed with "Freshman 101" bullshit, I would agree with you.

If students are taking real classes, then no, I'd call that the second most important semester (with only the very last one mattering more). Why? Because that's when half the incoming class realizes they are wildly unprepared for college and either pursues an exciting career in fast food, or for those only slightly overwhelmed, switches to a 2-year structured a lot more like an advanced version of highschool.

Not everyone should be going to college, that is the real problem here. There's nothing new under the sun, dumb kids exist and they become dumb adults.

I expect they are indicating there's no depth / distance data, but I'd still call it a 3D map because it is the inner surface of a sphere. You can't really compare even the relative 2D positions of things on this map correctly without considering an additional spatial dimension.

You're right that wasn't an exhaustive list - I'm personally a counterexample to my own comment in that I'm a mere peon of a coder... Who is often tapped to assist with M&A, major vendor changes, and onboarding new customers (in the B2B sense). I do have privileged information that would be illegal to trade on.

But this is Slashdot, not Investopedia. The "tl;dr" is, if you have actionable insider information, you're not merely guessing, you damned well know it and almost certainly signed an NDA specifically covering what you can and can't do with that information.

The problem is that AI has made it very obvious that teachers have not been doing their jobs.

For instance: one history test, one report. Two different responses: "Contrast the political sentiments at the time of the American Revolution with modern day American sentiments and political events." 1 page report.

You could just paste that into chat and get a useable if not undetectable result. The result is obvious. Instead, a curious student could use the tool to pose a more complete question to chat: take into mind more emotional similarities between different political factions, as well as the contrast amongst social classes. It'll help them stand out a bit and it'll be different, and they might learn something.

But, I do note: this would require a curious student. Teachers have all but punished curiosity and a love for education for decades, catering to the dumb ones to keep them engaged instead of punishing them for wanting to be dumb.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

AI has only accelerated my desire for learning. I can learn so much more (though perhaps not as thoroughly or as deeply, because you don't have to go below the architectural surface as much anymore) now than I could before: much less switching between tabs, copy/pasta'ing, digging for documentation (and reading a lot of things that I don't remember 3 seconds later because I'm looking for something specific).

The same goes for reading about history, or anything else. Curiosity is rewarded rapidly with AI.

No, the biggest problem with education in the schools is the schools and how they teach. They've made it un-interesting and curiosity is generally punished. They have completely destroyed education long before AI was even a question - I'd argue shortly after the Internet became available and approachable for your typical 100-IQ public school teacher, in the late 90s.

One problem with the smartphones in USA is that the Chinese were chased out, so there is significantly less competition now. Huawei devices were as good as Nexus/Pixel but left a decade ago. So we have been stuck with just Apple/Samsung/Pixel.

Another problem with the US market is that most customers don't pay for their smartphones upfront. Instead, they are used to hook up with expensive cellular plan contracts and end up getting their phones for "free" or half price. So nobody is actually shopping for phones with a good price and value.

Congress "did not intend" to legalize straight-up gambling nationwide through what amounts to a semantic loophole. There is absolutely no doubt about that, on any side of this discussion (including the CFTC).

It's funny - Online discussions among (real) investors often worry about, and frequently caution each other about insider trading. The reality is, insider trading isn't applicable to the vast majority of us. Unless you're a C-level employee, specifically working in M&A, or maybe as the lead on a truly revolutionary new product (no, your company's Facebook wannabe or thinly disguised open source ripoff ain't it) - You have no insider information to trade on. Sincere belief that your employer's cool new toys are going to change the world ain't it - every company has cool new toys in the pipeline, and most of them are going to flop or at best be just another branded widget.

Thanks to Kalshi and Polymarket, congrats, every single one of us can now have truly actionable insider information. And that's not good, because as the past year has shown repeatedly, the average Joe is more than willing to use that information and has zero comprehension of securities regulations.

And to be clear, I have no substantial objection to gambling. This sham is something else entirely, however, and that something is a naked power grab.

"3 dimensional thinking and problem solving is something you can learn to be good at"

It really isn't, not to a meaningful degree. You can sharpen cast iron, too, but that doesn't mean you'll have a sharp knife.

Spatial thinking (which is heavily linked to problem solving) is fairly tightly coupled to inborn intellect and early education capability attainment.

In order: no, no, no, no, yes, no.

The lone "yes" is for illegally obtained. Otherwise you're effectively banning the default situation for every smartphone on the market today.

More to the point, Meta's glasses are in no way unique - And make no mistake, I loathe all things Meta as much as the rest of you. Unmodified, they're no different than using any other camera in public (including dozens of competing smart / camera glasses). Even modified - I hate to break it to you all, but go to Amazon and search for hidden / spy / nanny cams. I get nearly a thousand results and that's from a major, primarily law-abiding (if we don't count labor and competition) online store. If you go to a site actively specializing in spy cams, you can find even more, smaller, and creepier form factors beyond your wildest imagination.

There is, bluntly, zero technical difference between the nannycam in my kitchen smoke detector, and a spycam in your bedroom or a public bathroom. Any meaningful legal solutions here therefore must focus on intent (primarily in production and, secondarily, consumption). Or, as in this FP, we can pretend spanking Meta changes any of what I've just described.

To be clear, I'm not at all defending the creeps or Meta in general. Fuck 'em, and fuck 'em hard. But let's not lump the 99.9% of well-meaning and law-abiding users of recording technology in with the actual criminals.

That trick works even on accounts with a private profile.

Not to mention third-party search engines couldn't care less about how a profile is set. Though admittedly, Reddit is doing its best to commit suicide - in yet another way - by trying to block search engines except their AI "partners".

This is smart but harder than it needs to be.

Do we have a wrapper available that can let native Zoom launch and only have access to ~/.config/zoom and some USB input devices but not the rest of the machine?

Somehow building a custom MAC profile is expert-level stuff two decades on and not an end user's job.

An on-demand screen sharing permission popup should be achievable.

It's silly that a browser sandbox is better than any native sandbox available.

Perhaps such a tool readily exists and just needs to be mainstreamed into existing distros.

I know there was a Debian project a while back that aimed for all services to pass systemd strict security by default but nobody wanted to do the work.

That's the right mindset but separate from user apps.

There's some interesting stuff going on trying to understand more of the atomic structure beyond the current models.

The math on gluons has worked quite well but for some reason questions like, "OK, but what are gluons?" has been derided as "crank science" in Pergamon Press-gated Academia.

Such a diversion from Science from the beginning of Human history through the 1960's.

Structures like DeLay-Bendebury Fibers and other models of what's going on behind the math are happening outside of Academia where Physics PhD's are discarded and PhysEd BA's are celebrated.

Whichever model comes next will likely happen adjacent to the podcaster sphere and be reduced to useful engineering before Academics take a look at it.

There are plenty of good researchers working in institutions but for fundamental revisions at this point they all seem to need to leave Academia and go out on their own seeking private investment.

Which is fine except that we're all paying for the uninterested remainder. The great advancements that make our lives better always begin in fundamental science generating new models that better describe this reality. We don't get much from a jobs program for Mathematicians playing Physicists and it's very expensive.

It's quite strange that most people find the status quo completely acceptable and are willing to throw another $100B at a higher energy collider but are unwilling to grant base-layer investigations that are nearly free in comparison.

If we believe the former head of Skunkworks they've recruited the best and brightest since the 1970's and had made breakthroughs by the early 90's in at least topological physics. So we get to pay for that but aren't allowed to use it which is intolerable. But it's also understanble in a pre-Internet era where the only feasible choices were String Theory or black projects.

I favorite was getting perm-banned from a reddit group because I quoted, along with reference, from the CDC material on COVID shots , countering the popular democrats message, that all people who received COVID-19 vaccinations would not get sick, hospitalized, or die.
Before you laugh I also got my karma here at slashdot push down to terrible, still has not recovered, for posting the same information.
Far to many anti-science people around when the covid shot was first released.