You're profoundly stupid.

I think what you're essentially saying is that the teacher is being interesting or innovative enough to overcome the students' desire to use an internet service to shortcut their entire learning process. That's nice in theory, but pretty damn hard in reality.

Sure, plenty of teachers in secondary and post-secondary education could stand to broader their suite of teaching techniques. But actually doing that is very hard, and that's before all the students who do the least work come and do the most complaining about not getting the grade they wanted.

If you want to take this tack, perhaps you can talk about your own experiences motivating people to learn things they want to get a shortcut to?

Otherwise, it sure sounds a lot like Monday morning quarterbacking to me.

I guess I'm just an unreconstructed intellectual, because I can't understand how anyone could fail to see that teachers/professors give assignments so that you go through a process of learning.

The learning happens inside of your own brain, and if you don't do the learning your brain won't have either the knowledge in the assignment or the experience of having figured out how to gain and use that knowledge. When you know how to learn things that makes you useful for learning things as needed.

I guess people really either don't understand or believe that. It's one thing to not do everything a teacher assigns out of lack of motivation or time conflict, but with some understanding that as a student one is missing something.

The irony is that the ability to learn and think through many kinds of things is more needed than ever. LLMs are able to retrieve and compile information, but they cannot think through what makes sense. They especially cannot figure out what makes sense within an organization or take responsibility for the accuracy and utility of the information for the uses of LLM results.

Now more than ever it's the learning that makes people really valuable. Pretty depressing that so many people can't see that.

I left academia in 2003 with a "terminal masters" and I've never once regretted it. It was clear to me even 20 years ago that:

a) There was a simple capacity issue - there are far more candidates being generated than there are available slots in academia. The math of post-doctoral jobs and careers is pretty simple: 15% academia, a small percentage to government (getting really small these days), and the rest to industry. That's how the jobs shake out.

b) The established academics - mostly tenured - simply could not understand this and thought that a career as a scientist was academia or bust.

I saw clearly that this was a buzzsaw and my odds of getting a job in academia with a good salary, health benefits, and stability (much less tenure) were low. Instead there's a Hunger Games setup where people linger hungrily in postdocs and associate professor roles waiting for a shot at job-sustaining.

What is dismaying but not surprising is that this view is the exact framing of that nature article. This says to me that academia has done nearly nothing to take a more proactive approach to getting PhD students jobs. This says to me they continue to have no realistic idea about what jobs the students they have in their programs will actually do later in life, much less help them get set up on that path.

Pure bollocks, as the Brits say. The basic idea, as best I could decipher after peeling away many layers of nonsense, is that instead of businesses just having Facebook pages somehow Facebook will make these into "agentic AI" that makes these business somehow more awesomer.

And I guess the business owners or workers will also somehow use WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook to do ask AI to surf the web for them. "Hey WhatsApp, can you post content to my Instagram account that is not exactly the like content you made for all the other businesses that are like mine except in some other neighborhood and run by other people?" That definitely will not lead to an explosion of AI slop. Or maybe these business will finally truly see the future and use this agentic AI to run their business in the Metaverse.

My local coffee shop's or restaurant's Facebook page can all of a sudden can chat with me about varieties of coffee or post even more pictures on its Instagram feed and this interests me as a customer why?
The place still can only take order online if there is some sort of integration with their order system, which they either do or don't have regardless of Agentic AI. The data on the page will remain just as stale as it usually is with respect to hours, offerings, people, etc., unless the business spends more time updating the Facebook page than it does now - Agentic AI can only beg for more attention from the business owner.

This is a great example of a company solving its own problems rather than any customer's problems. A large business would almost certainly not want to entrust its external communications to some AI chatbot on its Facebook page, while an AI agent can't actually change that much about the business model or fundamentals for smaller businesses.

These are very interesting comments, sounds like you've thought about it a lot. As an American, we have some different incentive problems.

To your point, we have far more regional power, in the form of state and local governments. We also have the kind of incentive structure for development that the authors suggest is necessary. Our problem is that we have so many incentives for decentralized development that we are creating a vast amount of infrastructure that will cost a huge amount to maintain. Our exurban developments require enormous highways, as well as power, water and sewer, trash collection, and many other municipal services. This means that we are creating an enormous amount of infrastructure that will need to be maintained alter

Because our school districts are local, this means that these cities form many small school districts. This isn't entirely bad - as smaller bureaucracies they're easier to traverse and can be more responsive, but it does make it hard for these school districts to achieve scale in purchasing, or pay for the kinds of deeper expertise that can exist in larger school systems.

So it's not always great to have financial incentives toward decentralization. Not really debating your points, just adding to them.

If the attacks were unreported, how do you know about them?

Also what does "woke" have to do with that?

Alas, if a 16-year-old is doing the buying over the net, Bob's out of luck. Bob can't even tell if the customer is a dog (:-))
The parent who buys their kid a phone is a really good source of the kid's age. It's not leak-proof, but most other approaches leak like sieves.

My favorite thing about the word "woke" is that when someone is mad about it I can instantly dismiss them as an idiot without having to read all of their rambling stupidity.

Do you have children?

This might one of the most useful comments about AI in coding I've ever read.
My programming is mostly in R, so it's much less common for me to need master an extensive framework or API.
That's why I've yet to find a case where I can even formulate a prompt for LLM code generation.
One thing I sure wish someone would build an AI-ish thing to do is extract the cardinality of a dataset I find, plus report on the nature of missingness. That's a time-consuming pain that I'd be happy to have automated.

Yeah ask Wisconsin how that went with Foxconn

Once upon a time, lint would critique your work, at the expense of often being wrong. I tried using LLMs for that, and they work only a little less well than lint.
I was insulted, though, when It misquoted my sentence and then said I had a grammar error in the misquoted part (:-))

The fuck is wrong with Americans that they see everything as a tax.

Situation: The government wants to stop producing a currency that costs almost three its face value times to make and distribute.
Americans: THIS IS ANOTHER TAX FUCK THE GUBBERMINT AMERICA FUCK YEA RA RA

You people deserve the absolute shitfest that your country is about to become. Your broken politics and collective idiocy have paved the way for the coming storm. I for one am going to enjoy watching your oligarchs burn your house to the ground.

Wow, this idea is dumber than anything I expected to see in this thread. And I came in with low expectations.