Years ago I was an adult leader on an event where we took a group of teenagers to a remote island with no services (we took our own food and water and used composting outhouses). When we got back to civilization, the kids all engaged in a bunch of physical activities, variations on tag and simon says and that sort of thing, while the adults all huddled around the wifi access point. It was disturbing to the point where I put my own phone away.

The kids are just doing what their parents taught them. As those parents were taught in turn.

You are right, but also ... someone who is half-assing everything and gaming the system is not going to learn more from two hours than from fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, someone who is actively engaging with things, might spend the fifteen minutes and then go on to do two hours of additional exploration - but maybe not in the same direction as the specifically-assigned homework. You can't beat learning into people, but you can beat the love of learning out of people.

The crazy part is in assuming that a piece of paper can successfully keep a student's attention for two hours when a living human teacher can't even keep that attention for 45 minutes.

Society is dumb, that's just the way it is. The problem is normalizing it so that everyone thinks they are educated when they actually aren't.

But even if we fix that, people are still going to be dumb.

In order for a product to upgrade to newer kernels, they necessarily have to build their system so that you CAN upgrade it to a newer kernel, and then you have to have a team periodically rebasing the product onto the newer kernel - with a ton of testing to figure out if things still work (hopefully mostly automated, but you still need proper real testing behind that). This is just not the case in a lot of embedded systems, because building your system to those standards takes proper engineering capabilities in the first place and an ongoing engineering support team. Generally they ship with the kernel they were using when developing the product, and they have a bunch of half-assed patches against that kernel to customize it to their hardware. If you're lucky they'll pull in some patches backported from later kernels, but often even that is asking too much.

Hmm. Let me invert the entire point - as a result of this change, we aren't going to see tons of i486-based embedded systems only upgrade to 6.19 or whatever and then be orphaned. Because there were likely still running on 2.0.28 or 2.6.16 or something at the point where they stopped releasing firmware updates 12 or 15 years ago.

A large proportion of existing meetings aren't really necessary, and yet we have them. Often you're only having the meeting because someone in a position of power over you requires it of you. In many cases because they simply couldn't be bothered to simply review the information available to them, so instead they optimize their time by requiring everyone else to update them every week forever. Why would they stop requiring this farce just because there is a different way to package discussion?

Non-meeting contacts with colleagues are to exchange information. In many casese, non-meeting contacts happen because your colleague is a dumbass who would rather waste 30 minutes of your time to solve something than spend an hour of their own time figuring the damn thing out for themselves. Or just reading the docs. Again, why would they stop doing this just because there is a different way to waste your time? Them having an AI assistant doesn't make them any smarter or more diligent. They'll ignore your AI assistant just like they previously ignored the design docs and other documentation, because they still are trying to leverage your time to accomplish their goals.

Maybe their children can have a little neighbor desk to live under?

For instance, which OpenSSH private key types should be used, and which types should be removed from circulation? How often should they be rotated to help prevent issues? Are there tools to point at a site to query whether it is following best practices or not? I'd ponder a browser extension, but ... obviously that's how the malware would be carried in, sigh.

True. If more people in the US beat the $133k bottom edge of their definition, but most of the growth is in expensive metros, then that is pretty suspect. And given that metro areas are concentrations of population, well, it seems reasonable to assume that most of the people in this basket are in metro areas and not in Sioux City.

[I just looked up Des Moines housing prices, and now I am sad. Not sad enough to move back to the Midwest, but still.]

If the people building the stuff are not onboard with security issues, then have a modern kernel which could run on their hardware will not improve the situation. Such people probably already forked the kernel ages ago to patch it to run on their device, and they've included 23 explicit compromises to ease their internal needs (wouldn't an open remote shell be useful for debugging?). They won't be merging in security fixes unless the issue has made the news with their specific devices, and they won't be patching their fixes to new kernels and pushing those. And even the bare minimum that they do at first will fall away to nothing after a few months when their new device hits the market.

This systems helps to build more houses. But you can only build more houses if there is a place to build them. It doesn't matter how cheaply and quickly you can build the house if you can't find a reasonable place to build it.

This is today. Eventually there will be a recession, or a downturn, or a rainy day, and we'll have to drop those pledges because of "they economy". Everyone in the room profits, while things get ratcheted a little tighter for everyone else.

Someone needs to get their press secretary or some other trusted person in front of a microphone to say that this isn't true, and we don't have to do anything, and it would cost business too much to fix. Think of the poor stock market!

Unfortunately, they'll be unemployed because if they can't do better work than an AI, why hire them?

I write 600-word responses to technical questions in emails. Then I go back and edit because nobody asked for an essay.

But this isn't a "younger generations are weak" issue. We only notice this with younger people because they are being asked to do it. We have entire generations who skip right past explaining their position to insults, because they don't actually have any rationale for why they think what they think. They've never actually sat down and thought about it.

Many of these techbros miss that the point of the economy is to provide a context for human livelihood. We could build a perfectly decent Earth without any AIs at all, if we decided to. For humans, there is no point to Earth without humans.

I could understand making an argument for some sort of evolutionary thing, though I wouldn't agree with it. But right now, today, that is also a dumbass argument. In a human-scale apocalypse (high-death-rate plague, nuclear winter, asteroid, etc), AIs will be among the first things to be discarded. Regardless of the current status of AIs or where they'll be in the next few years, we are a minimum of decades aware from AIs being self-hosted, even if you just give up all semblance of stewardship of the the ability of earth to host biological entities.