This is very likely BS. These guys are the worst kind of publish or perish academic lice, of the variety that recently inhabited the President's office at Stanford. I would bet a stick of bubblegum that these results were never in doubt, in the sense that everything was done in the experiment to yield some kind of headline worthy outcome, like the one described.

Eisenhower knew the deal in 1961.

There is incentive to manufacture this kind of story to gain attention.

But what was the model? OpenClaw is only as smart as the harnessed model. Many people try to "run local" with a weak model.

That's true. Even without the connections, the kids develop social polish that they wouldn't have otherwise. Later in life this serves as a shibboleth that they can use for admittance to elite groups.

I have to say I disagree with this viewpoint. If you have kids you *should* spend all your money on them (in an intelligent manner). For some people that means no vacation home and no Rivian so that the kids can go to private school. For some (especially in NYC) that means eating rice and beans so that your child can get special tutoring. I'm not sure if you have children in the public educational system, but what happens there is nightmarish, in my experience. I theoretically live in an excellent school district and I view my friends with means that leave their kids in public school as borderline abusers (I am aware I have extreme views). Education for kids is everything, after food and shelter, and a suitable social environment.

The well-to-do in NYC want elite educations for their children. The current city administration is phasing out "gifted and talented" for the lower grades, and gives the impression that they would like to go further.

  In case you are not well-versed in US educational standards, being "gifted" in an inner city school basically means you are on grade-level by a classical standard (e.g. able to read and add single digits by first grade). There is some equity messaging in the rationale that sounds good in theory. However, if you put all students in the same ineffectual educational stew, many feel that the intelligent and well-raised children will be bored to tears and the complement to that set will continue to do poorly, despite the interventions. The changes mean that parents who prioritize the education of their kids have stark choices: move; pay for private school; do nothing and sacrifice their child's happiness and future well-being. I know many people who choose the latter in order to martyr themselves (very easy when someone else pays the price and you get the social kudos).

People with means understandably want out of that dilemma. Private school tuition is going to go through the roof until more supply can come online.

The problem is not that top level domain names were pounced on my charlatans. The problem is that most people have no interest in learning the basic things they need to know to be a self sovereign internet user. I'm thinking specifically of running a mail server and a website. Because of this slight amount of friction, rather than billions of cool quirky web pages we have facebook, gmail, etc. The thing that breaks the internet is that a dearth of self sovereign users leaves a space for companies to frictionlessly knit people together. Then network effects yield a winner take all scenario.

There is *some* hope in the fact that vibe coding now lets everyone make simple sites and solve basically any technical issue.

I'm a CS professor. The problem with AI is that allowing it and disallowing it both lead to awkward outcomes.

Suppose you allow it. Then what are you going to ask students to do? Implement bubblesort? No. That would be pointless -- AI trivially generates all boilerplate code. Of course Chegg long ago broke the oldest and best coding assignments, which consisted of implementing classic algorithms from pseudocode. Still, all traditional undergrad assignments are out the window.

What *can* you ask students to implement? Realistically, they should be able to do just about anything. The order to "Recreate Facebook" is a valid 2 day HW assignment. But that's so broad that it's ungradable. And the students' ability to do the task means very little about their inherent ability.

So, suppose you *don't* allow the use of AI. Then almost everyone will use AI anyway. Now you're not a professor, you're a detective, and everyone in your course is a suspected criminal. If students are smart AI work is easily disguised. Then who are you giving A's to? Cheaters. Solution: Give everyone an A. Educational value for most students, who need to be threatened and cajoled to do work: Zero.

Does that mean I'm saying that AI makes everyone a genius and you can't tell the difference anyway? No. The pinch happens when you get out on the bleeding edge and try to do something truly novel. But that is not how instruction of any kind traditionally works. Things at the bleeding edge are incomprehensible to students. Asking students in CS 101 to blaze a new trail is a stupid assignment.

Conclusion: Things are very broken and many students are in trouble. The only thing you can really do to educate the typical person (who requires cajoling and threats) is to lock them in a Faraday cage for four years (and they would probably still cheat). On the other hand, for the *very* rare individual who is self motivated and just wants to learn, it is a golden age.

I suppose we should really be teaching students how to use AI to educate themselves.

Prediction: This will provoke a military response from the US within days

Caveat: The strikes will be featured in the media as being in response to civil unrest not control of the world financial system.

This is what happens when planning is done on the basis of perceived pain rather than incentive structures.

Real disabled people should have real accommodations. There should be non-trivial negative consequences for assholes filing spurious claims. Otherwise it's a race to the bottom, and everyone eventually has to capitulate and fake a condition. Or the most moral hold out, and become the most severely punished by the system.

I agree with this 100%. A few years ago I used a grant to get a powerful ipad pro, thinking I could use it for work on the commute. Nope. Turns out it's just a boob tube. Was totally useless to me.

I teach math to unprepared college students at an inner city university. I would never show a college freshman a temperature plot with time on the x axis and expect them to understand it. Incoming freshmen have something like a traditional 4th grade mathematical background. And these are college students.

There may be cognitive biases that explain why the ice/no ice imagery works better. But another factor is that anything mathematical that doesn't make sense to a fourth grader doesn't make sense to a vast swath of the population.

Hmm it used to send him to official sites without advertisements, but now it's sending him to 3rd party knock on sites, probably with lots of ad services. I wonder what's happening. Must be model collapse.

Losing access to the garbage on the web is the best thing that can happen to kids, provided they have books.
I only wish there were a way to eliminate access to the internet for more children.

The digital divide has now completely reversed -- the more internet access a child has, the bigger the detriment.

I wonder, in a counterfactual universe, how far the American public and political system would tolerate Trump's genuflections before Putin. If he lie down on television and let Putin walk across his body, would Lindsay Graham soon be telling us that this was appropriate behavior, while Tucker Carlson nods on approvingly? Or would they not? What if Putin spit on his face while he had to keep smiling? Smacked down to the ground after which he has to crawl to Putin's shoes? At what point would the population cross some kind of threshold by which everyone agrees Trump's behavior is unacceptable? I hope this remains a theoretical question, but it seems like we are headed toward a breaking point about as fast as we can go.