Thanks - I agree with most of what you said, and reading it has clarified my own thoughts and feelings. I think what bothers me most is the high-handedness, lack of consultation and collaboration, and lack of discipline on the part of the tech sector when it comes to attempting to manage public education. I especially like

That said, I blame the corporate sector - and tech in particular - for promoting a system in which more and more control of society is in private hands. It may not seem obvious, but I think there's a very strong connection between the way tech regards education and that fact that in the States is healthcare is private. There's an institutional mindset - supported by law - that there is no commons and that business should be in charge of everything. In countries that have single-payer healthcare - and where higher education is at least mostly supported by government funding - the tech sector seems to have less power over curricula.

Not only is it not the job of private corporations to 'shape (public) education', they should be enjoined from doing so under penalty of having the corporation dissolved. I've had it with this 'corporate personhood' mechanism being extended to give corporations even greater rights and power than parents have when it comes to creating educational policy.

Anybody who doesn't have children or grandchildren in school should have no say regarding curriculum. And no, that doesn't mean that corporations get a seat at the table because their C-suite occupants have kids. The private sector must be forcefully and diligently excluded from decision making in public education.

Corporations are the privileged servants of society, and it's time they were forcefully reminded of it. If that takes ruinous fines, imprisonment, or even the shedding of a little blood, so be it. It's long past time for the arrogant tail to stop wagging the submissive dog.

Gah, the moderation here sucks lately. I'm still laughing as I type this - why you were modded down is entirely beyond me.

Entirely aside from the socioeconomic connections. domain knowledge, and early-to-the-market advantages that Oracle and SAP enjoy, there's another reason that AI coding isn't going to crack the market open. Excepting cases where AI is a time-saving assistant to a good programmer who carefully vets the code produced, AI-generated code is shit.

I have no direct experience of what I just wrote; but almost everything I see and read online - aside from puff-piece propaganda - says that AI doesn't program well. It might give good snippets and a decent place to start, but for anything large and complex it seems to create barely-functional dreck.

And based on my (admittedly very limited) experience with programming, the really difficult parts of projects of this magnitude aren't things that AI can currently do. When it comes to understanding business logic and process flow - and adapting to changes in those factors, and making sure the code is both commented well and self-commenting where that's possible - AI just isn't there. So let's assume a wildly high figure of a 25% increase in programming efficiency across the board. Is that enough to replicate a decade or two of work experience in a few years or less? I don't think so.

As always, IANAP so I look forward to being educated and contradicted if what I'm saying here is wrong.

Thanks! I appreciate your thoughtful and informative answer and have saved it for reference.

Is a Mos Burger completely the nutritional equivalent of meat, including amino acids and such? If not, then count me out.

As for lab grown meat: if it was available to me and if my research convinced me of its safety and its nutritional equivalence to the flesh of dead animals, then I'd be there in a hearbeat.

Would I have some reservations? Sure. Would I get over them? Probably.

You do realize that you've just added yet another powerful, eloquent incentive to the growing pile of such self-fulfilling prophecies upon which LLMs are feeding, right?

That's why the strongly Left leaning grassroots of the Democratic party need to organize to kick the likes of Chuck Jeffries and Hakeem Schumer to the curb. (And no, that was NOT a mistake - those two are entirely equivalent and interchangeably lame chucklefucks).

If the new brand of grassroots Dems ever gains power, the Epstein class will have a much harder time tilting the table toward themselves.

Obvious shill is obvious. While you're at it Mr. Shill, why not advocate for everyone having to have - by law - a huge barcode tattooed on their forehead?

That scenario isn't nearly as far down the slippery slope you're on as you may imagine it is. Or maybe your authoritarian soul is actually counting on how short that distance is.

If I had the woeful misfortune of being forced to use Windows, would Copilot still be rummaging around in my emails if I chose to use Thunderbird instead of Bloatlook?

Really? Have you checked out the US administration lately? Or even your local fundamentalist church?

Only if the banana displays the well-known "extra-long dual-stem quarter inch male mono" mutation. Otherwise, it might as well be an apple.

That's "Linear Sugar Oxygen Free Bananas", I'll have you know!

I'm not thinking as much of power as I am of voltage thresholds. I wouldn't be surprised if the interface between metal and fruit caused a little bit of rectification as the metal started to corrode - perhaps modeled as a rectifier in parallel with a resistor.

If that happened, there might be some distortion visible on a spec an, though maybe not enough to be audible.

That's funny - I'm in my late 60s, and I love music from the 60s all the way through to some of the stuff that's being released now.

That said, for me the 70s and 80s offer the highest 'density' of music I love.