WSJ had an article a few weeks ago about AI solving math problems. It was able to solve Navier-Stokes problem because 26 (or was it 21, my memory of the figure is fuzzy) poked in a lot of proofs of smaller problems into something called MathLib. It took them about 2 years (if my memory on that is accurate). Only then was the AI thingy able to solve Navier-Stokes.

My take is essentially that the AI thingy is not really solving anything in any fundamentally novel way. It still required a lot of human input. Would the AI thingy figured out it needed to solve the little problems first. I doubt it (at least with this iteration) because they tried that an it failed. And it was not clear from the article how much coaching the AI thingy got from its pets, i.e., its owners.

Especially in america. The most obvious thing is that the bells were there to train people to work in factories.

But it's pretty well known that the education system was built to make useful workers for the Epstein class. The reason it's sometimes doesn't feel that way is that it's modeled after the education system the Epstein class maintains for themselves which is very much not designed for that purpose. The Epstein class has a completely different education system for their kids designed to teach them critical thinking and a variety of skills associated with stealing money from the lower classes. The critical thinking is especially important to prevent their kids from being taken advantage of and having their money stolen since every member of the ruling elite are crooks and psychopaths.

This is how and why guys like Kim jong-un went to school overseas at fancy schools and it's the same reason mitt Romney went to fancy schools. They're being taught to function in a aristocracy where everyone is going to stab everyone in the back because they are all complete total psychopaths. The ones who aren't get weeded out pretty quick at that level.

Getting back on point the school system has some elements where it's designed to make smarter people with critical thinking skills but those elements are blunted because of a combination of religious parents who don't want their kids coming home with an actual understanding of the holy books and as well as the ruling class wanting pliable useful tools instead of people who can think.

Information is out there if you care to look it up but I warned you it's very very boring. If you think world history is dull try reading the history of the American education system.

This is been extremely well researched. Homework is essentially worthless. There's a very very small amount of homework you can give out each week, not each night each week, that has been shown to be moderately useful.

The real problem here is we have too many people who could be doing useful things but not profitable things.

The homework system and our school system is a sorting system. It's designed to pick out who is going to be useful to the Epstein class. But when you have too many people and the Epstein class just doesn't need that many for their purposes you start introducing shit like homework to decide who gets to be useful in society and who gets to spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid homelessness.

On the other hand it could just be all that avocado toast to those kids are eating. I mean screw experts in education whether they know anyway?

America in 2026 is best summed up with that old Isaac Asimov quote, the one about your ignorance being just as good as my knowledge...

What you actually cannot afford is have email clients that are easily hacked via email. Like Outlook.

If AI works and it probably eventually will you can basically get rid of every white collar worker in the country except the epstein-class CEOs.

That is trillions of dollars in value. But even ignoring the raw economic value the control and power it gives you is worth any expense.

People keep asking if you don't have jobs who's going to buy their products?

What in Christ's name makes you think that they want to sell you a product? Think about that.

These are borderline gods who are completely dependent on your fickle whims as a consumer. Imagine a king or an emperor living like that. They couldn't it's why they lost to the merchant class.

This level of automation is the first step to putting us back to feudalism and the divine right of kings. It eliminates the connection between the Epstein class and you as a consumer and employee.

This is why Facebook is planning on more data center energy use then every single house in this country. They are sick and tired of you having civilization and having any say in Civilization. It belongs to them. They are Gods.

All of this is so far beyond your daily life that you can't even understand the words I'm saying. Almost nobody can. I do but that's because I'm neurotic. I can see all the bad stuff coming and because I'm already broken I can face it head on. Normal human beings can't get out of bed knowing the state of the world.

This doesn't make me tough by the way. It's the exact opposite it makes me a nervous wreck. Ignorance is bliss.

But even Trillion dollar companies like Meta essentially freeload off the likes of Php where a contribution in the low millions or tens of millions works help bend development to their liking,

Even less: clearly most of these companies don't particularly want to influence the directions (they could hire the devs if they really wanted to). They're jut content to use them. If they chucked, say, 10 grand a year at a handful of projects, the problem would be solved.

But I guess companies are now meeting their doing good quota

It's not even doing good, it ought to be pure, bloody minded self interest. The cost of things like the PHP exploit, heartbleed and so on are absolutely immense. Investing a small amount in the future i jut good business. Trouble it it needs everyone to do it to make it so cheap they don't notice.

I suppose the main thing I'd have said very differently is the terminology, in that I wouldn't regard the kind of incompetent senior as a senior in the first place

The best phrase I heard (I think here) was "10 years experience or 1 year experience repeated 10 times".

But then I'm pretty old school about this: to me, a junior developer needs quite close supervision to produce useful results, a regular/mid developer can perform routine tasks with minimal supervision but might need more help with larger or more complex tasks, while a senior is someone you can give more or less any task on your project to and they'll figure it out, and senior is also the level of someone who would be capable of supervising and training a junior.

Ostensibly yes. The juniors I'm thinking of certainly do need close supervision, though I don't think Claude replaces them because the good one use claude.

What I've noticed is there are a lot of jut plain crap mid level and senior people (for some value of senior). They can do more or less what you say, except they're still crap. The results will be overengineered piles of crap where they've decided to use the latest "technologies" which are really due to curiosity not some actual need. And the whole thing comes with an attitude problem too.

We've had a wave of people, particularly since the tech boom during COVID, who have obviously been over-promoted due to the employee's market and title inflation.

This is true, but my big corporate job spanned COVID, and I can assure you that the problem existed before COVID. Some of the refugees (haha they were in for a shock) from other big corporate shitshows had much the same to say.

Billionaires in the Epstein class already control the media. They own 90% of it. There is no reason for them to bother attacking their own infrastructure.

The tactics used in America for maintaining control are really simple. Control the media. Undermine education so that people do not learn critical thinking, used generic moral panics to keep people from voting in their economic interests, disrupt left wing and progressive get out the vote campaigns and actual effective political organization, and finally lots of lots of voter suppression done at the county level. New Hampshire just made it so that you can't use a student ID to vote and naturally the supreme Court said that's a-ok. And of course our entire drug policy was set up by Richard Nixon in order to attack progressives and the left wing.

So with all that already in place there's absolutely no need to do fancy shit disrupting the left wing like that. It's like the old comic about the guy with the 1024-bit encryption getting hit with a $2 wrench until he gives them the password.

When I ask the models that my company makes available to me to write something it will kind of sort of do it. But about half the time it will generate something that is completely wrong. I then have to debug it and then well I could have just written it myself.

It also takes a tremendous amount of effort to learn how to correctly prompt and again well, at that point why don't I just write it myself?

The programming isn't what takes forever it's getting all the business logic in place and explaining it to people. I spent hours explaining to management why something they wanted to do wouldn't work, implemented it, it didn't work, and I will have to reimplement a bunch of stuff now.

One thing AI will do it will let everyone be a code monkey. But those jobs were already in India so as an American I'm not that concerned.

On the other hand AI has convinced leadership that a shitload of things that can be automated that they for some reason didn't believe could be automated can now in fact be automated. So AI is devouring jobs indirectly. A bunch of jobs that could be automated or now in the process of automation and are just disappearing. It's why America is pushing 25% functional unemployment. We are basically in a 2008 style recession and just not talking about it

Admittedly I wasn't using a paid frontier model, but I've tried it a few times with very mixed results.

One attempt was to write some code for a microcontroller to do some tricky stuff with DMA and timers to generate a complex waveform. It failed miserably and couldn't seem to understand my implementation that did work, or debug it when I introduced a subtle bug.

Another attempt involved having to develop a system to automatically crop and rotate images to be upright and remove the border. It managed to remove the border reliably, but never got about about 30% of them upright. I provided it with sample, hand crafted output to compare against, and told it to keep iterating until it got it right, but it just couldn't figure out how to do it.

Ironically if I just uploaded the images to bog standard consumer AIs like Gemini and ChatGPT, they could reliably crop and rotate the images 100% of the time. I even suggested that it use the same image recognition systems as those were using, but it couldn't make that work either.

I used to hate long form writing because it hurt my hands, due to arthritis. When I learned to type I was suddenly freed from the pain and I started to enjoy it.

So while hand-written notes are a nice idea, they won't work for everyone. I think recording the screen is going to be the only option for some kids.

It seems to disproportionately affect people on the Autism spectrum. I've been accused of it more than once, and seen people accused when to me their text reads perfectly normally.

These detectors seem to be a load of crap.

From what I understand they're not exactly a nice company. Apparently they have a habit of stealing images and using their size to bully the photographers into silence.

But either way it sucks because it means more AI slop. We're already seeing these absolutely ridiculous and hideous restaurant menus all over the place. One thing I learned years ago good enough is always good enough.

Sounds like job for the Blonde Crusader, able to flash her teeth and illiminate an entire stadium, prose that could knock a dead buzzard off a shit-wagon at 20 paces, construct sentences that will make Maggots orgasm where they stand. She'll be fighting for Truth, Justice, and not insignificant bribes to the Chief Bunko "artiste".

Yes, but 30-40 years ago the computing landscape in companies was much different. It hadn't extended to damn near everything the company did. This is different now so a change 30-40 years ago was minor in terms of cost to the company, now it can elicit major whining from accounting.