Long answer: Homework has spiraled out of control. We need to have a critical debate of what the actual point of homework is. Should it be a daily slog because that's what the curriculum demands, or is it because kids need repetition to learn a difficult subject.
A US middle school student will have 6-8 classes per day. If they all demand 1hr of homework... how does that not lead to burnout?
Someone funny in a dark way that this story is posted right above the FEC's attempt to control mass surveillance via hardware. This kind of thing makes it absolute clear that one of the core goals of these self-described "AI" systems it to finalize the capture of all PII on everyone and transmit it to centralized storehouses controlled by... who exactly?
People who say "I really never really got the hate" are morons.
Apple Maps at release was a disaster. It was cartoonishly bad. I still don't use it because of that one time on a road trip it sent me into a rural hellhole to find a Chinese restaurant that never existed and could never exist in the hick shithole it sent me to.
I was literally afraid for my life just because some billion-dollar companies didn't want to play nice.
"Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."
Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.
Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has them all. And all the commercial services give bad directions from time to time; my spouse had to flag down a Forest Service ranger and send them after a couple that was blindly following Google Maps down a road they weren't going to make even in their big honkin pickup truck.
I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.
Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.
Interestingly, I was in a lab yesterday and met a PhD student whose thesis was largely about using LLMs to fake fingerprints and retinal scans.
Wow - that page reads like a step-by-step guide on how to violate the Robinson-Patman Act. Too bad we haven't had any real consumer protection enforcement in the US since the 1970s.
"Why did they make him CEO if they know so clearly that he can't be trusted?"
'I never expected the leopard to eat my face! [just the faces of those marks and chumps]'
100% this.
My personal take after reading The Idea Factory (really good book btw) was that it was actually a combo of a monopoly with close government accountability that produced some remarkable results.
Basically, Bell had a monopoly, and in anti-trust hearings ~early 1900's it was argued that it was necessarily a monopoly from a technical perspective in order to have standardization of communication across the country. Congress reluctantly agreed, and granted Bell the ability to maintain the monopoly under the constraint that they must continually show that continuing it served the public interest.
Bell Labs was a big part of that - funneling profit into Bell Labs, and providing research and development that helped create the entire information age absolutely served the public interest (development of the transistor and cellular networks being two of the largest innovations coming out of that institution).
My personal take is that what we really saw was an unusually effective success story of checks and balances. Bell had strict accountability and a burden to prove that their existence served the public interest, and the courts and congress served as a check on business practices that would have really abused that monopoly. At the same time, you didn't have the situation we have with NASA, where congress is actually trying to impose rocket designs on NASA - that's very different, where instead of congress serving as accountability, congress is trying to drive pork into their districts. We should be striving for the Bell Labs model in more places IMO - business is allowed to do what business does best and works to maximize profit, and then government acts as accountability to make sure the profit motive isn't driving abusive behavior and the organization still serves the public interest. Big, powerful institutions in business and government should be set up to provide accountability to each other.
I just switched to Windows 10 LTS, much better. Less crap, less stupid updates, and still get security updates. LTS should be offered to all users with an easy switch..
Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance -- Jim Horning
