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Comment The short answer is "yes". (Score 1) 48

David Deming is conveniently ignoring the middle of Covid when people were being literally paid not to work.

This is almost trivially obvious across the white-collar universe. Companies aren't hiring junior-level employees because in many cases, AI can do almost as good of a job for a tiny fraction of the price.

The reality is, of course, more nuanced. Case in point, Most fields have both back-office and front-end workers. If you're back office, you'd better be 40+ and at the peak of your career, because new juniors and (paid) interns are literally nonexistant over the past few years.

On the flip side - Someone needs to run cable, and ironically enough, the one thing robots don't seem good at replacing is the shit-work of the real world.

Comment Re:We put 8 protesters in jail for life (Score 1) 286

First, I want to say I'm staunchly anti-establishment. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck ICE, fuck Cheeto - And yes, while we're at it, fuck Biden, Clinton, and any other puppets of the pedogarchy you care to name.

All that said, the incident you describe is not a situation we should be defending (at least not until we're ready to actually declare war on our own government). The people involved drove up in a van full of weapons, dropped off a goddamned sniper right before arriving, and their sniper shot a cop when the "peaceful" plan to launch fireworks at a prison unsurprisingly went south.

Unless we've completely abandoned any pretext of rule-of-law, there's absolutely nothing defensible about that situation. FAFO, and they did.

Comment Re:Shocked! (Score 3, Interesting) 52

That is not what they found. What they found is that if you spend 60 minutes doing the homework with AI, you learn approximately as much as someone who spends 60 minutes doing it without AI. If you spend 20 minutes doing it with AI, you learn as much as someone who spends 20 minutes doing it without AI. Etc. The only real difference is that the AI people get way better homework scores, and as a result, tend to stop spending as much time, and thus tend to learn less.

That's what this preprint study found.

Comment Re:Get rid of homework (Score 1) 52

100% this. Even a short 5-minute quiz with just a couple questions at the start of each day will do the trick. But you simply can't rely on homework scores to be a proxy of learning or time spent studying anymore. Brief daily quizzes on the previous day's material will force them to.

Also, It's not like students have the excuse of, "I couldn't study, I didn't have anyone to explain X to me" anymore. The very AI that they might otherwise use to cheat on their homework can also explain to them the things they missed in last year's algebra class that are blocking them from learning this year's calculus, or whatnot. Congrats - you now have an infinitely patient personal tutor who will spend hours dumbing things down for you until you get it. Now you have no excuse - learn the material. It becomes all about actually putting the time in.

Comment Re:Shocked! (Score 2) 52

Yeah. There's been widespread misrepresentation of this (preprint!) in the media. What they actually found: test scores correspond to how much time you spend doing homework, regardless of whether you use AI or not. Which should not be a surprising result! Of course, the AI people, esp. those who had been using AI for more than a few months, stopped spending much time on their homework, and then their test scores fell to match the non-AI users who didn't spend much time in their homework either.

The TL/DR is, in today's age, you cannot use test scores as a proxy of how much time a user is studying or knows the material.

There are of course some caveats, beyond the fact that it's just a preprint - notably that there's nothing to separate why the user started using AI to do their homework, so there's potential confounders in there. For example, if a student is in a poor family, maybe they had to get a job to help pay the bills. But working a job itself can lower test scores - for example, having to work late the night before an exam. So there are some confounder problems with the study. That said, I'm sure the general conclusion is correct: time spent doing the thing = amount of learning the thing (relatively independent of what tools you're using in the process).

Comment sudo make me a data center (Score 1) 94

Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

Comment We do not accept your lack of acceptance (Score 1) 19

The company disputed any characterization that the data was "exposed," saying that an "ordinary member of the public" would not have come across it.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?

Comment Re:Any way for both sides to lose? (Score 1) 115

I don't mean this to be pedantic, but humans do that as well. I'm singing along with what's on the radio as I write this; and someone far more musically talented than myself could no doubt substantially reproduce it word-for-word, note-for-note, and beat-for-beat.

If nothing else, I'm excited to see how the next decade of AI-related legal cases shines a spotlight on the (usually unspoken) legal assumption that only humans have agency.

Comment Don't complain about the flavor of the milk (Score 1, Informative) 150

There are at least four major Federal subsidy programs for providing high-speed internet access to rural and underserved populations - BEAD ($42.45B), ReConnect (open-ended), Community Connect (open-ended), and RDOF ($20.4B).

Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?

Comment Re:A company buying another company (Score 2) 25

I feel like I'm in a constant race to flee enshittification : Used to use Cursor (it's still my only option at work), but then Musk bought it, and they instantly went in on hard-sell tactics. Switched to vscode + copilot + OpenRouter, but was getting concerned about API costs. Just yesterday I set up a Tencent TokenHub account with their Max package, which required that I switch off copilot if I wanted to be able to use some models like Kimi K3 (had a temperature=1.0 requirement, copilot doesn't let you set temperatures and hardcodes them to very low), so now it's vscode + Pi + TokenHub.

Sigh. Please don't make me move again...

(Not that Tencent is in any way "the good guys"... but they're also providing a very generic product)

Comment Re: How this may play out (Score 1) 72

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

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