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Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 64

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 2) 64

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:A modest proposal (Score 4, Informative) 205

If Trump thinks AI is so "super intelligent", why doesn't he ask his favorite LLM for a plan to lower gas prices?

He would only ask it for things that result in an improved situation for him, personally. There is nothing at all for him to gain by seeing lower gas prices. He hasn't bought gas himself in many years - and will never have a reason to buy gas again for the rest of his life - so the price is completely irrelevant to him. If the price fell and the MAGA party lost part of congress he would still blame it on other people. If the price stays the same and the MAGA party loses part of congress he'll blame that on other people as well.

Comment Re:Performance or nostalgia? (Score 1) 121

I saw it with a group of four people.

Three of us enjoyed it quite a bit.

I didn't mind it but nothing was surprising to me.

I saw several scenes that could have been more cleverly written but I was glad to support the group that saved a creative work from the burn pile. The idea of killing a movie for accounting losses seems sinful.

The motion-control photography, practical effects, and integration of animation were at least as good as Roger Rabbit.

If you enjoy the craft of filmmaking it's at least worth seeing.

I didn't see any marxist social commentary. Perhaps folks in the "Flock does nothing wrong" camp might feel otherwise.

Comment Crashes (Score 1) 80

Would be lovely if they could take a breath and spend a release fixing Dr. Konqui or Akonadi or whatever crashes that show up a few times a month for me (regardless of hardware).

This has been going on for half of its 30-yr release cycle.

I must admit ignorance of how this can persist for so long. FLOSS developers typically obsess over stability but seemingly not in the KDE culture.

I used to install symbols and submit bug reports but they're not interested if you're not running the latest tip.

Not that there is an obvious better DE right now. XFCE could stop corrupting its preferences files too. I used to have a script to restore a config from a previous ZFS snapshot when it self destructed but that gets old too.

If I'm building a device for production I'll use something simple like openbox/devilspie2 to get stability.

Lots of folks seem to get fed up and start a new project but momentum is a real thing. I hear Omarchy is stable and not withering but tiles just aren't my thing. More power to those who love them.

Comment Re:What is public? (Score 1) 64

That's easy to fix around here: if the employee was working at the time, they represent the bank, so ask the bank about their GDPR policy and information about the recordings the employee made and how they're being handled.

I'd think the bank would want to stamp that practice out anyway because they don't control the recordings, which could lead to a security issue for them.

Submission + - No Warrant, No Suspicion, No Problem (reason.com)

fjo3 writes: Part of the bedrock of American civil liberties is the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches. There is no right to privacy, and no due process in the justice system, without that. But immigration authorities, cops, and courts keep deciding that, for some reason, the Fourth Amendment just doesn't apply where new technology is concerned.

Submission + - Students are suddenly losing interest in computer science as AI coding takes off (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: For years, students were told that learning to code was one of the safest paths into a lucrative technology career. New data suggests that message may be losing some of its pull. Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, while Software and Data Science saw a steep drop.

The survey is not nationally representative, but broader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like.

Comment Re:I watched multiple journalists dog walked (Score 1) 86

The government told social media companies to silence people who were critical of Biden.

When did this happen? Citation, please.

You are aware that Joe Biden, while seemingly a nice enough guy, was wildly unpopular as a leader, including among the left? It was the Democrats, after all, who convinced him not to run for a second term.

Comment Re:Standing? (Score 1) 110

Nothing what is being accused of here covers the act of monopolising. Following a common standard approach is not anti-trust, in fact whole bodies exist to standardise how things are done, and whole industry bodies self regulate the way industries operate.

What's being alleged here is closer to price fixing, which is also an antitrust violation. Hypothetically, let's say four major automakers got together and said, "We all know we have access to the latest in brake technology, but we collectively agree not to deploy it until two years from now," presumably for business reasons. That kind of collusion is illegal.

Comment Re:Why just there? (Score 5, Insightful) 64

As a Meta customer or user, the person with the glasses has had to agree to Meta's terms and conditions, including their data processing. For me though, an innocent bystander in the street, I haven't agreed to have information processed about me by Meta. Meta has a long suspected problem with shadow profiles, and I don't want their massive processing capabilities to be able to reference me wherever I am, even if it's in a public place. They have no system for me to make a GDPR request about the data they're holding on me. Based on Meta's behaviour over many years and statements from Zuck about privacy, they simply cannot be trusted with people's personal data.

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