I agree we're in the state of decline. Every nation in history has gone through or is going through the same cycle of ramping up, peaking, and then declining.

It's not just in the level of formal education people absorbed .... It's everywhere. I've always been into music and played in an alt-rock band for a while, back in the 1990's. I used to say there was no such thing as "bad music". It was all subjective and anything could be pleasing to the ears of the right listener. In recent years, I'd have to say that's still a fact -- but ... we're seeing a sharp increase in popular music that's mostly computer-generated or simplistic/repetitive, vs requiring a lot of musical skill. How many of today's rock songs actually incorporate complex guitar parts? How many have complicated drum riffs or musically interesting bass lines? Even with just the lyrics -- I'd say it's the exception, today, for a song to tell a full story or have deep meaning or clever lyrics. With your classic rock of the 60's and 70's, that was more of the norm.

The movie industry is the same way. Our local theater has such poor attendance for the latest Hollywood spew, they had to resort to showing random documentaries, which turn out to be far more interesting and draw in a more intelligent crowd, willing to pay the ticket prices.

Oh yeah, the math thing. That's almost entirely because all the curricula is being decided by people who don't do math. My wife, who is probably in the top 1% of math talents, tutors on occasion. She spends more time trying to figure out what they're trying to teach, than actually working the math. Usually, after some work, she figures it out and explains the old timey way. The response is almost always "Oh, is that what they're trying to say?".

Most math education is being concocted by education majors experimenting on our children.

Boomer here. I was just young enough to avoid Nam (born in '53) and young enough to see America peak. Unfortunately, I am also young enough to have seen my successful education and employment eventually get shipped off to China before I was ready to retire. I still had a mortgage and 2 kids to send to college. I've made it through. I'm glad to have lived through our golden age. We're past the age of rationality and basically in rot mode now. No better evidence than more than half of the US voted for the orange one. I feel bad for the youngins.

I do consider taxation theft, there is no purpose to it except for controlling the population. The fact that people accept different *levels* of theft depending on how much money they make just proves how much of theft it is, because they more money someone makes, the fewer people there are in that category of people, given that, it is easier to structure theft in such a way as to convince the majority that they don't suffer as much as the other people, who are hit with a much bigger crime.

What happened to slashdot? At one time this racist alt right trash world have been modded down to -1. But instead it's at +5 and This post is at -1. Trump voters are just plain stupid.

Her wife was giving him the cold shoulder.

If you are a programmer and you are given clear instructions on what is expected, then yes. If you are a programmer and you are not given clear instructions, then no. However if you are technical lead/architect then you really should be responsible for it.

OTOH if you are a programmer and you raise these concerns then you are on your way to become a technical lead/architect.

In my systems I insist we keep a database table of various common passwords (tens of thousands of these) and we do not allow people using them as well.

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

It is like saying: someone will do some work for free, because they like it, lets then make sure that we take away the product of their work, they don't need it anyway. How is that a moral stance, how is it good economically? People feel a certain way if someone tries to steal from them. One thing is to work, even if you don't have to, but to understand that the result of your work is yours. It is a completely different proposition to enslave someone just because they can survive without keeping the results of their work. Practically speaking, if someone sees this type of attitude, they choose a different jurisdiction to do their work, where there won't be such blatant abuse.

I disagree with this approach because I am against theft. Whatever an individual can create for himself is his to do with as he desires, not anyone else. I don't understand this sentiment, is there anything in it except for envy?

A "Disable all AI crap and stop pushing this shit already" switch would be more desirable.

Higher quality slop and approaching pink slip.

I am talking about Bezos in the exact sense, that as any developed human individual, he needs to feel useful, which is what motivates him, because clearly it is not money that is his motivation. You added the 'virtuous' part, which is why you started on the path of class division. I did not prescribe a moral aspect to his behavior, only the fact that he is moved to do more than just enjoy his leisure, this has no relation to him being virtuous, this has to do with him losing himself without work.

Longer than most think.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

-Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford

"Harvard is a hedge fund with classrooms" - Scott Galloway