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Comment Re: Russian problem solving (Score -1, Flamebait) 47

Meanwhile, there is no corruption in Ukraine, and certainly not in the office of the president, the Ukrainian military conscription office is not treating Ukrainian citizens as cattle, and Zelensky isn't making fake statements about "future" victories and an imminent collapse of Russia. What happened with the Flamingo cruise missile? Ukrainian president announced that they're building seven a day a YEAR ago.

Boy, 14, Found in Azov Secret Prison near Kyiv, Budanov Admits Similar Sites Exist

Comment Re: In-class tests (Score 1) 151

that you are taking your own personal experience with what is apparently a poorly-run math major,

That was not a poorly run math major. That's pretty much the standard STEM major experience at the top research universities. That's based on my experience from attending two such universities, talking to faculty, and other students. Hell, even going to graduate school myself. The education is basically driven by homeworks, and students' work with each other. You end up learning at least as much from your peers as you learn from the faculty, and most of the learning done outside of the lectures on your own with your peers. Clearly you didn't do a stem major at a top level university.

Comment Re: In-class tests (Score 2) 151

Obviously you were not a math major. If you're studying upper division math courses or other stem fields at a major research university, the pace of courses is such that it is expected that a student should spend something like 15 hours per week on one such course outside of class time (So taking more than two such courses during one semester is basically a suicide for most students). If you fall behind the lecture material by more than a week, chances are good that you're going to fail. Because of the pace of the course, there are weekly homeworks, the homeworks are often worth 50% of the final grade to encourage students to keep up with pace. By the way, group work is almost always encouraged because many problems are freaking hard to solve alone. I am not talking about first or third semester calculus courses with BS homeworks that have the numerical answers posted on the back of the book, but formal prof-oriented courses like Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra, etc.

If homeworks are nit going to be graded any more, the way I see it, more students are going to fail advanced STEM courses unless the they're going to get seriously dumbed down.

Comment Re: uh no (Score -1, Troll) 173

This is war is not about the borders. There is no denying that Putin is in the wrong here by starting a war of aggression. There is no excuse. However, Ukraine and the west have done everything they could to provoce a Russian invasion. It's like, if you live next to a crocodile and for years you keep poking it with sticks and throwing rocks, one day this croc will attack you.

AI

A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."

But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.

"Hello?"

"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.

"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."

"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."

"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."

"Oh! My bad...."

Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...

[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.

"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."

SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."

Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."

Comment Re: What's old is new again (Score 3, Informative) 46

Well, remember how every Unix app, server, and utility in the 80s and 90s was written in C? Because there was only one refrigerator-sized departmental server with a only few megabytes of memory and two dozen users connected through serial lines, and writing in C was the only way to squeeze out every bit of performance out of it. There was a disk usage quota system allowing each user only a few megabytes of storage. The developer mentality today is that the resources are infinite and they can write code in the least efficient programming languages, and download frameworks the size of a Walmart when they need only a pocket knife.

Comment A very low priority goal (Score 0) 64

Saving publishers? You gotta be kidding. The priority should be helping Ukrainian citizens survive at all. Books can be printed later. This country already lost roughly half of its population to emigration because of war. Those who remain in Ukraine are preparing to survive another winter without central heating or electricity.

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