California saw these efforts in the pipeline and has some legislation working through the process to nip it in the bud: https://leginfo.legislature.ca...

It's only 4 steps away from becoming law (Senate Appropriations, Senate Floor, Concurrence, Governor). It will likely pass and go into effect January 1.

Gridlock is a function of people not obeying the law, not signal timing. The solution to gridlock is providing actual disincentives (traffic enforcement) as opposed to what is being done right now (no traffic enforcement).

I agree, but that's not the concern anywhere. No one is saying that using AI in a measured manner decreases work or education value. Instead, everyone's concerned that AI work will replace human thought.

In an educational environment, over-using AI is devastating to the production of competent experts. Remember, the goal of education is to make smarter people. Completing assignments and exams is part of that process, but not the end goal. Yes, you can have a generative AI write a paper for you, but you will have failed the educational assignment of learning and exhibiting what you have learned. You might be awarded a degree on the basis of submitted work, but your will have cheated yourself out of actual competence and when you're asked to demonstrate your knowledge, you will be no more valuable or useful than any other person asking chatGPT to do something.

That's the risk. That's where educational programs have the opportunity to completely fail-- by not regulating the use of AI to prevent incompetent people from gaining a degree.

First, a vocabulary check--

Fertility: The measure of the number of births per 1,000 females.
Fecundity: The measure of the ability to get pregnant/give birth.

While people associate "being fertile" with "being able to reproduce", these statistical analysis measure the rate of actual reproduction. No one is saying that we are less ABLE to reproduce, but that we are electing not to.

Teen Pregnancy
Healthy economies have done well to reduce teenage pregnancy. In the US, births to teenage mothers have gone from 62 per 1,000 females in the early 90s to 13 per 1,000 in 2023. That's a half million fewer babies born per year in the US and well over 50% of the fertility reduction.

If the various influential powers REALLY want move local fertility, they need to make sure that people ages 20-30 are sufficiently financially stable that they will CHOOSE to have children instead of relying on teen girls getting pregnant and getting STUCK WITH children.

I would donate an embarrassing amount of money to Slashdot for the ability to edit my posts.

Do to changes like this, I foresee universities more loudly advertising that their CS programs are accredited because I'm pretty damn sure that using GPT to create a program will not be worthy of a CS degree in most peoples' eyes.

Americans do not fund protections against (or warnings for) low-probability events. They don't care if the severity is high-- a significant part of the population can't imagine something RARE happening to them and thus don't want to pay for it. Moreover, the idea of funding something that benefits others but not yourself is labeled as "evil socialism" by said population.

* Hurricanes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, highly predictable, and deadly. They get very specific warnings and calls for evacuations.
* Tornadoes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, moderately predictable, and deadly. They get regional warnings and calls for taking shelter.
* Wild Fires: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, highly predictable once started, and deadly. They get very specific warnings and calls for evacuations.
* Earthquakes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, no seasonality, highly unpredictable, and rarely injurious. There are no earthquake risk warnings-- only alerts that earthquakes are happening or have recently occurred.
* Flash Floods: LOCAL risk (flood planes), LOW frequency everywhere, seasonal, and deadly. They get general risk warnings, but the primary protection is "Don't be in a flood plane".

They're complaining about stability.

Again, they're complaining about stability.

Remember-- these are people who make money from people buying and selling pieces of companies based on what changes they're able to foresee. If everything's stable, there's no money to be gained from sudden spikes in value or or shorting business failures. They will sometimes WANT mass layoffs because investors are taught that layoffs are simply reduction of expenses while maintaining output (resulting in greater profits).

These are vultures.

Most public universities aren't that expensive. UCLA, for example, is $15,700 per year. Is that worth it? Well, let's consider what you get-- UCLA runs on the quarter system (10-week terms plus a week for final exams) and your average student takes 4 classes per quarter at 3 hours per week. That's approx. 396 hours of direct education or examination per year, so if you want to break it down to the simplest cost-per-hour for education, it's $40/hour. Of course, there's much more expense that goes into the education that the instructor. There are the buildings and their maintenance, the utilities, the physical infrastructure of the campus (pipes, conduits, roads, walkways, etc.) and its maintenance, the landscaping, and all of the administrative work that goes into managing the extremely variable schedules, goals, and actions of 50,000 people on a single campus.

When you look at the whole picture, the cost of the university is pretty darn defensible.

Where I find the most egregious expense is in the cost of housing near major universities. All around these schools, you'll find a mass of investors (big and small, corporate and mom & pop) who buy up all the housing, turn it into rentals, and crank up the rent at every single opportunity. Food and housing is expected to be around $20,000 for a UCLA undergraduate this coming year-- and "housing" implies a shared bedroom among other shared bedrooms of an apartment or house.

This is why college campuses put so much work into building on-campus housing for their students and why some campuses (like UC Irvine) house the majority of their faculty on campus.

While there's a modicum of truth here, this the opinion of someone who knows nothing about universities. Honestly, a theater major will not have many job prospects after college by comparison to a civil engineering major. But, the arts are worthwhile and one's education at a major university is REQUIRED to be more than their major. History, math, writing, sciences, etc. -- those all take up ~1.5-2.0 years of a college education regardless of major as "breadth" courses or "general ed."

And then there's whole idea of "translatable experience". A person can go to school for a Computer Science degree, not actually like the exploitative patterns of the corporate world, and simply choose not to pursue the use of their degree in their career. Does that mean he's a useless human being? Of course not. There are MANY jobs out there that just require someone with an analytical mind to make/find solutions which those CS skills will directly benefit.

People with philosophy or English backgrounds tend to go into contracts, law, and policy because they're taught the importance of words, logic, meaning, and secondary effects. People with sociology degrees often move toward working with and for people in need. They use their education in more developed ways than simply being taught how to put a round thing in a round hole so that when they graduate they can put round things in round holes very quickly indeed.

I will say, thought, that too few students seek out on-campus jobs during their undergraduate careers. Yes, MANY do, but I think at least 80% of students should hold a campus job for at least 3 months prior to graduation. Mentorship, good wages, resume building, adjustable schedule, etc. It's hard to match that after graduation.

I don't know how many undergraduates you speak with daily, but I speak to at least 20. None of them have the expectation of getting a 6-digit salary right after graduation. Most of them are painfully cognizant of the financial future that's been created for them and most are just hoping to be able to make rent.

For those that DO hold out for higher pay, that's their choice and hopefully mom and dad support them in that choice.

We have had very different experiences. My 20 years of professional life have shown that people with a 4-year degree from a brick-and-mortar school tend to be those people that are able to learn on their own and will only ever ask for help when they're stuck. The ruggedness or grit of the person comes out in their work experience and interview as well.

Semi-colon use is rare. Appropriate semi-colon use is even more rare. It's so uncommon that when I see it in an email, presentation, or website it triggers the "Did ChatGPT write this?" question in my head and I begin looking for other tell-tale signs.

Mozilla is a 501(c)3 non-profit. It doesn't have a massive revenue source like Google, Microsoft, and Apple in the funding of their browsers. In fact, Mozilla has historically relied on Google for funds. Today, there's a lot less cash being thrown around. There's massive economic uncertainty due to the whims of some governmental executives, a long-slow war in Eastern Europe, and an expanding war in the Middle East. Interest rates are up. Very "up".

One of the few things people with too much money are willing to throw money at is "AI". 5 years ago it was "blockchain" and 5 years before that it was "VR", but today, it's AI. Mozilla NEEDS to look like they're going all in on AI to attract more funds because stupid people with money are told that AI will make everything more efficient, faster, and accessible.

In that time, while funds are being reduced, a non-profit needs to reduce its expenses. It's very likely that Pocket and Fakespot provide too little benefit to too little of a userbase for the expense to maintain the programs. About the two programs--

I used Fakespot to help shop on Amazon. I liked it and I'm sorry to see it go. I also know no one in the real world that knew about it. Amazon actively hated and submitted multiple complaints against Fakespot resulting it it being delisted from the Apple App store at least once. That said, there's a lot of computing power required to analyze and index ALL Amazon products. It seems like a very expensive product to maintain. It makes sense that it's getting cut.

Pocket is just a bookmark/article storage app. The principle is great "bookmark something to read later on any device", but that also means maintaining account infrastructure cloud storage, updating settings, etc. I think the most interesting thing about Pocket is to investigate just how many saved articles were visited later by their users. I'm willing to bet that fewer than 10% of articles saved for later reading were even clicked on ever again. That's not intended to be a dig at Pocket, Mozilla, or the users of Pocket, but more of a commentary of how we hoard things "just in case".

Lastly, let's talk about the sale of user data. Mozilla previously said, "Never" and now is saying, "Only safely". Before you call them traitors to life, consider asking "Why?". Might it be because they're desperately low on funds from prior contributors and need to find SOME sort of revenue to keep operations going? And if they have to sell user data to keep the doors open, isn't it best that they do so in such a way as to not be able to to personally identify any of their users?

It just seems that this article's author is quick to condemn Mozilla for being less righteous today than yesterday while it's trying to stay afloat in a sea of competitors who make no effort or illusion to righteousness. The article is akin to screaming at your child for getting a B+ after having missed 2 weeks of class while in the hospital.

Correct. What we had until our latest president was ethical precedence-- an honor code of integrity that was enforced by the social pressures of other politicos. That has gone by the wayside.

In the future, should we get out of this mess, you can expect significantly stronger restrictions of the office of the president.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 7

The strict reading suggests that the president shouldn't receive payments from the federal or state governments outside of his/her paycheck (see CREW v Trump and the self-dealing of Trump properties) and there is no strict prohibition of making money in business while serving as president. It just so happens that prior presidents have chosen (often under pressure) to relinquish control of their enterprises while president to avoid the accusation of partiality.

His actions go against long-standing historical norms and Congress can cite the actions as an undefined "high crime and misdemeanor", but there's no explicit prohibition against what he's doing. No one in the past realistically conceived the likely scenario where a president would do this and thus no law made it through Congress to create an enforceable crime.

Yep. Trump's big claim to fame is using the due process of the legal system as a delay tactic to allow him/his business to extract value before enforcement actions are applied. He knows that if he'd doing something illegal and someone calls him out, he says, "Sue me," knowing it will be weeks, months, or years before his actions are fully sanctioned.