Boils down to one thing:

Teach them.

Homework doesn't teach them - that's "independent learning" which, though a skill, isn't something you can really instil in them, but which they have to bother to learn themselves... it's also, incidentally, how private schools achieve results. They encourage independent learning, and they more use it to PREPARE, rather than after-the-lesson chores. "This is what we'll be doing next week, read up on it now so I don't have to explain all the minutiae when we get to that part."

But without a teacher in the class, the significance of where/what they learn is diminished and turns learning into a chore. The biggest assets in a school - any school - are not budgets, facilities, fancy tech... it's parental motivation, and teacher skill. Private schools already have parental motivation ("I lose 30k if you mess about", says Dad, and the school won't tolerate you risking their 600k of tuition income across that class just to keep your 30k).

His last paper was a multi-year study on the different methods to teach boys and girls science (especially physics) and maths in Kuwait (where they have segregated classes for such things) to achieve best results for each... I'll see if I can dig it out.

Well... I think "delivered" is stretching it somewhat.

So far only Pepsi has some hand-built models. It's gonna be years before their earliest larger orders are even close to being fulfilled.

RAM isn't the issue.

But some software is trapped forever in old, outdated (and insecure) versions and never gets updated.

Some software is trapped in a "bottle" and you can't explore the filesystem (e.g. you can't save your downloads / other files created in it anywhere sensible without tweaking a load of things).

And some software just plain doesn't work but it's still on the store.

If I were to introduce a newbie to Linux, they would be led to use snap, and so much would be incredibly frustrating / out of date / not work that they'd think it was awful. I think snap does Linux a MAJOR disservice. I would have to recommend people switch the Ubuntu store to prefer apt, for example, before I could just leave them to use it on their own.

My father-in-law is one of the most highly-educated people I know (several PhD's in education, etc. plus any number of bachelors, masters, etc. in all kinds of subjects), and teaches all over the world and is HIGHLY sought-after. Chinese schools were offering him huge sums, Kuwait, the US, Spain, UK, all over.

He has a bunch of published papers on education, and has been teaching for over 40 years.

He has always, and still is, against homework in all forms.

Same guy, for reference, who took a job at a school in Spain purely to get my daughter a place in one of the top private schools there. The condition of him working there was that she got a free place. They agreed.

He took the worst classes and transformed them within a year. To the point that the school accused him of cheating on the exams. So, because his students loved him so much, he had another teacher set another exam, and the same students VOLUNTEERED to come back under exam conditions, sit a similar exam, in invigilated conditions, without any influence, connection or presence of him... and they all passed on their own merits... every one. Not just passed. A's all around.

Then he left, because he was insulted by the accusation. But he just needed to prove his point.

Any number of doctors, lawyers, etc. owe their education to him, all over the planet.

And he hates homework and never sets it or, if he's forced to, it's always pathetic and he doesn't bother marking it. He thinks it's an absolute waste of time.

As someone who has, similarly, spent their entire career in education... I can't say I disagree with him on that.

Oh, good, they're only snaps.

Because snaps are shite and I turned them off.

Brand-new, fresh, Framework, highly-Linux-supported laptop, clean install of Ubuntu on it, over Christmas.

I'm willing to try almost anything... so I went with the defaults.

And within the first week I found myself uninstalling every snap package and replacing it with a traditional apt one.

Steam snap - simply doesn't work. It makes it look like Steam is shite, in fact, and it loads but NONE of the games work properly. Uninstalled the snap, used the "Steam recommended" download/method, and it worked perfectly every since.

Vivaldi snap - downloads and stores shite in ridiculous paths that you can't find easily. Constantly out of date. Gave up trying to play nicely with it, copied the data to the apt-package locations and it worked perfectly with predictable (and useful) paths immediately. Uninstalled the snap.

qBittorrent, Shotcut, VLC, etc. - all had RIDICULOUS problems with the snap version and I'd had enough by then so I just uninstalled them, disabled the store install snap by default, and used apt for everything.

Roll out what you like via snap, because I ain't gonna be touching it. Honestly... I tried. I tried not to be an old fuddy-duddy Linux guy and to just use the stuff they foisted on a "new user" to "get with the times". And I lasted a week.

And this is someone who had the patience to run Slackware 3.9 as a primary desktop for many, many years, build their own distro, modify and compile their own kernels, etc.

I was honestly hours away from just choosing another distro until I realised what the core problem was and just got rid of snap.

Everyone wants roads near their house. If you don't have a road going to your house then your house is worthless. Once the government has a right of way for a road, expanding the road might be expensive, but it doesn't get the whole community involved in a series of lawsuits.

The only people that want to live near the train tracks, on the other hand, are the people out in the middle of the California desert that would love to have a way to easily get to the parts of California that aren't a wasteland. In the nice parts of California, every home owner within visual distance of the proposed route has hired a lawyer and vowed to fight the tracks to the death.

This means that California has built a tiny bit of tracks out in the middle of nowhere (near Bakersfield but not in Bakersfield). It also means that every single foot from this point on is likely to get even more astronomically expensive. The homeowners involved know that houses that are far enough away from the tracks so that their home value doesn't plummet are going to get a windfall as their prime real estate will become even more valuable with decent public transit. The rail system is going to be a serious amenity eventually. The homeowners near the tracks, on the other hand, are going to see a serious drop to their net worth. Everyone in California wants more light rail, but only if it doesn't go through their neighborhood.

It could easily be that California real estate is simply too expensive in this day and age for something like this to be built.

I can't believe anyone ever looked up to that twat.

Honestly, working in tech, I had conversations with a number of people who should know about things, going back decades, and they absolutely couldn't get why I couldn't stand the man, or his companies, or his actions.

People commented on me closing my Twitter (yes, Twitter) account.

He was a clearly-identifiable twat, WAY, WAY, WAY before things like the Thai cave divers, WAY before he just bought and bankrolled companies for the sake of it, etc. Back to the "I founded Paypal" days (no, you didn't).

Sorry but like Trump - I judge you for EVER having giving a damn about anything the man has ever said. Or almost any "tech celebrity" come to that, especially the ones - like Musk, Jobs, Bezos, etc. - with absolulely zero personal technical knowledge, expertise or skill.

They're salesman. Bad ones. And people fall for it like they fall for dodgy car dealership patter all the time. And I honestly can't fathom how people DON'T SEE THAT.

Don Quixote was quite literally delusional and insane.

It's hiliarious that Trump keeps unwittingly aligning himself with that character. I very much doubt he's ever read A book, even his own, let alone that one, though.

Notice how, in each case, he's screwed over the people he was actually trying to help, plus a huge amount of collateral damage.

Why anyone aligns themselves with him, I can't fathom. He has no loyalty to even his own sycophants and overseers, and when he does try he just ends up screwing them over even more.

And their custodians are doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT IT.

Still.

It's because one went up near his Scottish golf course, he fought it and lost, and he's been pissed about it ever since.

It's still not "green" if you just pump it into a datacentre.

In a datacentre, it gets used up by what are effectively space heaters (computers), and then vented out into the world. And about half of that power is used to try to cool that heating by... venting the heating to the world. The actual "AI" output barely even registers in the efficiency of the overall system, even if you use that to design something actually useful (because, yeah, AI can innovate, invent, infer, right?).

There are far more interesting uses you could put such huge amounts of electricity to that don't just directly convert it to heat so that people can see a funny animated cat picture.

That argument isn't logic, though, is it?

You say that before AI, people still shot people. And after AI, people still shot people.

So it's not AI that's shooting people.

But then you jump into the McDonald's analogy which is implying that the guns (that were around before AI, and still are) aren't to blame either.

So there's no logic in lumping those two together by opposite arguments.

Now... you can say that PEOPLE are to blame, and that's fine. And people existed before AI and after AI.

But if the person who does it is to blame, and LEGALLY a human advising how to do that would ALSO be to blame (e.g. someone goading a mentally-incapable person to commit an atrocity on their behalf, which happens more than you think! Think child-soldiers, suicide bombers, etc.)... then there are PEOPLE to blame, not just the person.

In this case, those people are doing so via the use of a tool, the same as the gunman. Whatsapp isn't to blame if you want to plan an atrocity via Whatsapp, so the AI isn't the problem there. It's the people BEHIND the AI services. Because, to my knowledge, the Whatsapp software has never SUGGESTED to people that they should commit atrocities.

Either AI is a tool - and the creators and users are responsible for that tool. Or it's not a tool but a "person", and that way madness lies.

But if I wrote a bit of software that, say, taught you how to commit atrocities... even if I wasn't there when you ran it and learned how to do so... I'm pretty sure that I'd be in BIG TROUBLE. Especially if, for example, I was charging money for that software.

"Lug around"?

It goes into a rucksack.

Like I say, I used to carry a 19". That also went into the same rucksack.

And I don't mean a huge "hiking" thing, I mean... literally just a small bag that every commuter is carrying, the kind of thing you have your kids put their books into to take to school.

I've used it on planes, I've taken it abroad, I've taken it to people's houses... it's not big at all. This is precisely my point. 13" is the kind of thing that, working IT in a school, I give to the kids to take home. They all carry them home in their little bags, as little kids (e.g. ages 10/11), back and forth every day. Hell, I rejected 10" / 11" Chromebooks/laptops for them BECAUSE of that... the difference in size/weight is minimal but it means they aren't all squinting at the screens all day, and they are also often elbow-to-elbow in the classrooms.

Hell, mine has the RTX 5070 module, so it's more "sticky-outy" than the normal 16, but only by an inch at the back. It just slips into a "school" laptop bag I got from a vendor... 15 years ago? Maybe even 20? I'd had to do the maths.

The Thinkpad T43 released in 2009 had a 14.1" screen, ffs.

As an owner of a Framework 16, I honestly don't know how people are using a 13" screen in this day and age.

I'm the last to care about 4K resolutions, etc. and in fact am always moaning about such things because I'm an old fogey apparently, because I can't SEE that damn resolution.

But 13" is pathetic. I can cope with 16". My last laptop before this was 19".

I just hope this doesn't mean that we're going to end up with all kinds of "variations" of the laptop that it becomes a bark to find replacement parts for.