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Comment Re:Bitcoin - victim of its own success (Score 1) 96

To be clear I'm not pretending they are the same. I believe in gold as a store of wealth. Bitcoin mystifies me.i don't understand what the fuck any of it rests on.

Everything has a supply curve and a demand curve, including gold and bitcoin. Where the curves cross, that is the price. This is economics 101, which you never took.

Air is more "innately valuable" than gold, but you don't pay money to breathe.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 78

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 78

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment Re:This just in - Trump Grifts some more (Score 2) 96

Well, I know about that, so I guess I should have been more specific. What I don't get is the perpetual falling for it again. They get nothing they were promised, or they get a little bit of it temporarily (like Trump(1)'s tax cuts for lower income people which expired after two years) and then it gets yoinked away and they just come back for another round.

It really has to be the cultism that I don't get? Because I think we've all been where we thought we could do things we couldn't, some of us just extrapolated from lessons learned from failure...

Comment Re:This just in - Trump Grifts some more (Score 3, Interesting) 96

Most people didn't choose that part of this consciously, because they didn't understand it, and if they did, they didn't believe it.

What I don't get is how those people can think they're smart when the counterevidence is so persistent.

Comment correct incentives (Score 1) 136

Well, there have to be correct incentives for someone to be in software, I got into it because I liked the idea of being able to control a machine, to be able to tell a computer what to do and it would do it.

Would I have the same interest in it 40 years ago if controlling the computer meant writing in human language that is imprecise and nuanced and receiving back code that I couldn't start to comprehend? Maybe, maybe not, I am not sure actually. If there was still a way for me to do this without the AI I probably would have gone that route but how many people today would do it? I mean people are telling Agents to write their letters for them, not code, just letters. People are telling agents to do all sorts of things, all of which probably saves some time, make some errors, creates some problems while solving others, it is just that none of it is actually understood by the user.

How many AI users understand how any of it works? But that was the point, to understand how the thing works to be able to control it.

It is similar to car mechanics, people who like to tinker with cars, how interesting is it to tinker with a car where you are not allowed to understand half of it and you cannot fix most of it, if something breaks you have to order an entire replacement part because it has a built in computer interface.

Comment Re: "Eat the rich!" (Score 1) 123

I"m getting so tired of this perineal complaint.....

No need to tell us you don't care about anyone but yourself, because you've told us in so many words many times before. What a waste of everyone's time.

Everyone needs to have skin in the game.

Since you don't care about anyone but yourself, caring about what you think or have to say is inherently destructive to anyone who wants to have a working sockety.

pay flat tax or fair tax or whatever you want to call it.

I call it a stupid fucking idea that can't work proposed only by idiots, assholes, or assholes who are idiots.

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