"For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent."

This a VERY thinly veiled parallel to a hotly divided political issue that teachers/unions [and chatbot trained bias] tend be on one side of and the majority of the public, parents, and truth on the opposite of. Given that adults of the highest levels of performance in our society, be it professional achievement, economic achievement, political achievement, IQ, and education disagree on the matter it sounds like what the teacher is likely testing is alignment with her own ideology and not evidence-based arguments.

I saw the same thing in many of my own courses, examples and material used in classes [especially logic classes like critical thinking] that taught and test concepts through distilled 'analogs' to popular political issues with an attempt to appear neutral and present both sides while actually presenting a weakened strawman of one side the argument and consistently that strawman was on the same side. Cleverly these were not the topics for essays where students spent effort on time and research and independent thought but the class examples that most would never look at additional material on... simply walk away believing they formed a valid independent judgement at the pinnacle of their own education.

Man, when this is over, I am going to pour some hot grits into my pants in tribute to a naked and petrified Natalie Portman. Closure! :p

We need more like this "Vader" and Count Binface over in the UK to talk some _sense_ into our overlords.

It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

... but I'm not hopeful. In a way I hope Google still turns the screws on installing apps, including the proposed 24-hr delay on 3rd-party apps. Linux smartphones are coming, and the more they squeeze us, the more incentive to finish truly open phone platforms.

I'm old enough to remember this.

Though it looks kinda funky, will keep an eye out for one on the surplus junk market after the bubble pops, could be a fun control surface for other things.

No no, Paypal will freeze the payment, citing it as 'suspicious'. They hold onto the cash, and the acquisition can't go through :)

Good.

.. and suddenly Altman has the chance to suck on the teat of the Military-Industrial Complex in order to secure never-ending funding for his unprofitable sham, so of course he's taking it.

For me it does -- I hope they can keep it going. The popup and background play features are killer.

.. Google Home has been nerfed in so many ways over the past few years, it's almost useless now save for turning my lights on and off.

- They killed the Apps SDK, and all games and custom stuff
- They killed Google Music, and 'play X from my Library", only Youtube Premium Music now or ads in between every damn track
- They killed all podcast feeds other than Youtube Music (many podcasts aren't on Youtube).
- They have borked most radio stations (used to be able to play almost any station via TuneIn)

The Enshittification has been wide, deep and purposeful. No way in hell will I *ever* pay for Youtube Premium.

Not much else needs to be said. A $1T company, yet a drain on the nation.

...source code for the version his local university had, their listings were often discarded in the back bins of the labs. Oh, and he wasn't enrolled in classes there so he stole computer lab time to work on his version.

No I don't have the references handy, but they're out there.

Bah, stupid title length limits...

Meant to say "..plenty of other pre-existing reasons why Bill Gates is a trash human being."