It said the overwhelming majority of graduates get a positive return on their education, which is still true. The studies I've read have concluded between 60-80% of college degree recipients earn more than they would have without a degree after compensating for the cost of college and lost earning years. That is an overwhelming majority.

The top Bachelors degrees with over 100k of annual degrees conferred that have more women graduates are Health Professions, Psychology, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and Social Sciences. So basically doctors, nurses, and psychologists. Not exactly low paying fields. Social sciences are obviously the ones you are referring to, but the medical field degrees outnumber those by 5 to 1.

As others have rightly pointed out, this is a very valuable export for the US. It not only earns us revenue, it improves the rest of the world which "rises all boats."

There are good universities outside of the US. If the US stops admitting as many foreign students, they will still get just as educated. They will just get educated in foreign universities. Those universities will grow and improve to meet demand, because that is how capitalism works.

We aren't making other countries more competitive. We are taking advantage of their drive to become more competitive. It is overwhelmingly a net benefit for the US.

I have had testing centers send me cameras in the mail to take a test. This was for an online college, and they sent two cameras. One was meant to be mounted to the monitor and the other was supposed to be behind me but offset to the side a bit. They combined to give a full field of view of my desk and the surrounding room. This is a pretty good solution, and these cameras are quite cheap now. Requiring the user to pay for them so they don't have to come into the testing center isn't asking a lot.

I want an accountant who knows how to game the tax code. Not one that knows how to game the testing process. Those are two very different things.

Capitalism is very wasteful, but so far the waste of capitalism has always outperformed more centrally controlled economies. That said, I agree it likely won't scale forever. The size and power of large consolidated global companies, the easy movement of wealth by extremely wealthy families, and how easy it is for the wealthy to wield populism as a weapon to maintain political power have arguably already pushed capitalism to its limits.

This LLM "spasm" is capitalism at its best. Massive funding into hundreds of new companies, 90%+ of which will fail in the next decade, is how capitalism has pushed economic growth forward for the past few centuries. That isn't the problem; the problem is our inability to spread out the wealth created by capitalism. It doesn't seam like our current combination of political and economic system in the US can handle this problem. When the status quo breaks, the result is almost always worst than the bad situation that caused the collapse, so if we are at the breaking point it's going to get a lot worst before it gets better. But perhaps our grandkids will appreciate us tearing the current system down.

That won't scale. Our world runs on plenty of systems that use statistical models to automate decision making. We prioritize how often we verify these systems. We already can't verify every single decision made by statistical models, but when it is something as benign as your Google search results we are fine with only verifying a small sample to do quality control. The same will be true of most code written by AI coding tools in the near future.

I said that I didn't need OpenGL or DirectX in the 90s because I was quite happy fine tuning my own graphics libraries with C and x86 assembly language. I also didn't want to learn early game engines for similar reasons. But I obviously couldn't keep up with progress by using the last generation's tools. I assume the same happened for early software developers when early compilers first started gaining popularity.

I don't think AI is going to replace software developers, but I doubt there will be many developers in 10 years that do almost any programming without heavy AI assistance. It's likely they'll be some niches where AI assistance isn't useful, but the other 98% of developers won't be able to match their colleagues capabilities and productivity without AI coding tools. Just like I couldn't keep up with modern game developers if I was still writing an entire game with my own C and x86 assembly language libraries (although in all honesty, I've moved to the healthcare industry now).

That would only be fair if Epic/Unreal had a large enough market share of the gaming industry, and significant ability to lock their gaming customers into only Epic/Unreal gaming platforms, to be considered as much of a competitive concern as Apple's App Store. Neither of those are true.

The clear guidance for what is unreasonable is any amount above what

There was plenty of information given during the case to show that 27% was not a reasonable fee for linked-out purchases based on Apple’s “actual costs” to “ensure user security and privacy." So they can charge something, but it can't be a profit center. Apple will be given an opportunity to show the cost of maintaining the Apple Store and keeping it secure, which of course will be scrutinized.

My guess is it will be less than 5%, unless Apple does a good enough job lobbying.

No, it was no different with the US. This is an irrelevant story for the whole world outside of the US, because they have been living in this reality for 75+ years. The only nation who is feeling a new pain is the US.

Correct, the problem is that China is acting more like the US now. Which is more of a problem for the US than for other nations, because we have been taking advantage of our unique status to increase our standard of living at other nations' expense, and that will now be harder. You have it backwards about who should be worried about it. My guess is out of some misplaced feeling of hypocrisy.

A CEO doesn't get paid for any of the work AI does. CEOs collect information from other executives, peers, consultants, and the media and make decisions. LLMs can disrupt the work of consultants, the media, and the employees feeding information to executives, but it's horrible at making good decisions that can be trusted.

In fairness, since some of the claims are that AI will replace all jobs, even massive disruption such as replacing 10% of the workforce is still a very big deal. I'll be surprised if we don't reduce our call center staff by at least 50% in the next 3 years, and AI chat/voice bots is a small portion of that projection. That is mostly from AI agents assisting call center agents and assisting product managers to find ways to improve human agent UX.

LLMs were capable of doing all of this in early 2024, and have only gotten better since then. We weren't having success with nano/flash models in 2024 but we have been moving to those models for most use cases in late 2025 (reducing LLM costs by 80%).

That is usually true, but we don't always use AI to replace employees (although it usually does).

I am working on something now that reads all of our transcripts and identifies what part of each call takes the most time to help product management prioritize call center improvements. Traditional NLP couldn't do as good of a job at this as early testing is showing LLMs can do. We would have to more than triple our call center staff to have a human listen to every single call and identify opportunities to improve call center agent UX, but a nano/flash LLM can do this for around 1 cent per call. For $250k we can do this for our 25M annual annual calls. That isn't replacing a human. It is doing something we would have never paid humans to do and giving us information we never would have had.

This information will still be used to either decrease call center staff or increase the caller experience, but that is true of every product enhancement we do for this business function. Not just AI.

There is a simple (and difficult) solution, but it destroys the illusion that having a college degree is a simple way to determine if someone will be a good employee.

If the degree is meant to show that someone has the knowledge to do the job, it isn't great because they don't teach enough on the job related skills in college.
If the degree is meant to show that someone has the critical thinking skills to do the job, it isn't great because those skills aren't focused on much in most colleges.
If the degree is meant to show they can work and think quickly under pressure, it isn't great because schools will often accommodate for students who struggle in those areas.
If the degree is meant to show they can work hard and follow through with a fairly challenging four year task, it is pretty good at that.
If the degree is meant to show they have enough foundational knowledge to learn to do the job, it is pretty good at that.
If the degree is meant to show they came from an upper middle class socioeconomic background (so they fit in with the corporate culture), or at least had middle class families that worked hard to give their children the benefits of an upper middle class upbringing, it is pretty good at that too.

If you want someone to do a job that is high stress and requires quick thinking, you better assess for that competency yourself instead of assuming a college degree is enough of a hiring filter. But most jobs don't (or shouldn't) require those skills.

I am in corporate strategy, and while I can think on my feet well enough to handle meetings with executives, I do my best thinking after a few hours (or weeks) of contemplation and research. No one should want someone to help advise on critical business decisions just because they are better at coming up with a decent answer in 5 minutes. Different jobs require different skills.