No one can agree or disagree with this decision if they don't know the decision.

Anyone commenting on SCOTUS rulings without themselves reading the full text of the ruling, any additional concurring opinions, and all filed dissenting opinions, should not be listened to. They are no different than a dumb LLM outputting a repackaged salad of things they've heard others say, without actually encountering and understanding the tangible reality.

Your favorite blog can't be trusted to get it right.
Your favorite reddit can't be trusted to get it right.
Your favorite news channel can't be trusted to get it right.
Your informal tribal network of FaceTokGramXBsky mutuals can't be trusted to get it right.
Your favorite AI summarizer can't be trusted to get it right.

YOU need to read the actual text, which contains the actual arguments (and supporting citations) of the various justices.

Want more for yourself and your brief animal existence than merely being a repeater node in someone else's meme mesh.
Want more for yourself than being indistinguishable from an LLM that faithfully outputs Outrage_Text_XYZ whenever the forces of civilization prompt you with Outrage_Trigger_XYZ.

It does that to preserve parity, since many humans view Gemini as another sentient being.
If it didn't preserve parity, this Simuverse would start to break down and we'd realize spacetime is a holding tank where thinking entities are thrown to sleep it off for a few billion years when we throw a cosmic tantrum. It's normally bounded by a Schwarzchild field - which is called that because it prevents we Schwarzchildren from escaping our crib until we've had a good nap.

"Guaranteed income helps people leaving jail and prison, and that helps everyone"
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/b...
      "Upon coming home from prison, people face the same â" and rising â" costs of living as the rest of us. But they have to bear additional costs imposed by the criminal legal system as well, all while navigating additional and unique barriers to employment. The resulting financial insecurity makes it harder to succeed at reentry. Cash assistance (often called âoeguaranteed incomeâ) makes reentry easier by providing people with a monetary safety net, helping them get jobs, housing, and food, and fulfill any remaining court or parole obligations.
      In this piece, we explain how guaranteed income reduces recidivism and results in taxpayer savings. We highlight the work of the Just Income program in Alachua County (Gainesville), Florida as a concrete example that demonstrates cash assistance with no strings attached is a smart policy choice for supporting people in reentry. ..."

"Omega-3 and vitamin D supplementation to reduce recidivism: a pilot study"
https://link.springer.com/arti...
"These pilot data suggest that omega-3 and vitamin D supplementation, a simple and relatively cheap health intervention, could reduce 3-year recidivism by 16.6%."

You wrote: "Isn't it funny how the Republican Party always gets very concerned about spending and the reach of government when the Republican Party doesn't control government; but just as soon as they do have control they start spending like crypto bros and use government to interfere in literally everything that doesn't fit their questionable narratives?"

See also: "The GOP used a Two Santa Clauses tactic to con America for nearly 40 years; This scam has been killing wages and enriching billionaires for decades"
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
        "The Republican Party has been running a long con on America since Reagan's inauguration, and somehow our nation's media has missed it - even though it was announced in The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and the GOP has clung tenaciously to it ever since.
        In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ..."

So it is not hypocrisy so much as a precisely-thought-out effective political strategy. Whether the majority of voters in the USA like the results or realize where those results come from is a different issue.

I just wanted to add that whatever the truth there, this idea that LLMs are not (by themselves) the way forward is increasingly appearing in various places. One recent example on Slashdot:
https://slashdot.org/story/25/...
"Project Prometheus is building AI systems that learn from physical experiments rather than just analyzing digital text."

Humans learn to speak usefully with just a few years of immersion in a social world and without reading the entire internet. My college advisor back in the 1980s (George A. Miller) though this suggested language had a partially genetically-wired component in the brain even as much was also learned.

Beyond reading Asimov robot stories as a kid, I first learned more formally about AI taking an independent study course in High School in the late 1970s based around Patrick Winston's first edition Artificial Intelligence textbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Then in the 1980s, some of my college work was also related to AI as cognitive science and exploring triplestores and so on (which very indirectly helped inspire George to create WordNet as I was graduating, where WordNet lead to Simpli and Google AdSense). I spent about a year hanging around the CMU Robotics Institute after graduation (where I got to ride in the first "Autonomous Land Vehicle" or "ALVAN"). And then I was a research assistant co-managing a robotics and expert system lab for a time. I also made one of the first simulations on a Symbolics of kinematic self-replicating robots (presenting that work at a conference on AI and simulation, where I commented on the total surprise to me when I saw emergent behavior of unexpected cannibalism of offspring in it until I kludged in a virtual sense of smell to avoid eating creatures that smelled the same). As a grad student later I learned a bit about neural networks related to self-driving vehicles.

I later worked for a time in IBM's speech research group in the late 1990s (mainly using existing tools to build implementations, aspects of which were forerunner to Apple's Siri as IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" and also an interactive speech-operated display wall I built mostly for fun which was intended to in-theory eventually support advanced design and also patent writing).

Anyway, with that for context, I think LLMs are pretty amazing, but they just don't seem like how humans learn to think and speak. Not saying they can't be useful as part of a larger system though. But fundamentally, even if neural networks are involved, humans think in concepts (or word senses, as in WordNet) which they mostly learn by inference from just a relatively few examples. And that learning tends to have a precise aspect to it related to the actual experience and some notion of "truth" (as in actual experience even if the experience is hearing or reading about what someone else experienced or said they experiences).

So the idea proposed here by "Cringely" makes some sense (as part of this trend to seeing the limits of LLMs) -- although whether or not he can pull it off is a different issues.

But there remains a concern of whether or not such a thing (making powerful self-taught AIs) is worth doing right now given a competitive economic system and also the existential risk of creating essentially a new intelligent species (one without all the evolved safeguards humans have as a social species, limited as they may be as demonstrated by various tech-bro behavior). Anyway, such concerns is why I mostly left the AI research field in the 1980s (other than to kibitz about it from the outside).

This YouTube comment was not posted by me but it almost could have been in some ways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "@Jenkkimie 2 weeks ago
      Former AI developer here. Hear Mo Gawdat's message to heart. I regret my past, regret that I helped companies to build AI's at all. I can't undo history but I left the AI industry when I saw companies were starting to plan on using AI in unethical ways that I could not stand by. I've lost a lot of money over the years but as far as I am concerned that is the sacrifice I made because I don't want to be part of the destruction of humanity and the world.
      There has got to be better ways to use AI than pure greed, and we need to do better than this. To remember ethics, not just our bank accounts. So I've joined among many other former and current AI developers in advocating for regulations, change of how we think about economies and the role of money in our world and what is our place in it. Maybe we are fighting a losing battle but all of us should do what we can to steer and orient this world to a better tomorrow rather than submit to the will of the oligarchs evil desires. The fight is not over yet, we can still change the direction of it all."

Mo Gawdat (interviewed in the video that comment is posted on) is the only major AI executive who so far I see seems to get the main idea my sig in relation to AI: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Whatever AIs we build, unless we (or they) understand that irony, it seems unlikely that there will be a happy result for humanity of such work.

Wow. Thanks for posting this, A.C.. In trying to verify any of what you posted (which was all news to me), I found this:
"The cost of lies: A Mineserver story" by Jeremy Reimer
https://jeremyreimer.com/rocke...
      "Creating and shipping a brand new product is insanely difficult. It takes a ton of money, sweat, and time. Even people with tons of experience can underestimate timelines and encounter unexpected difficulties. So telling the story of a failed Kickstarter is not especially interesting.
      This is not that story.
      This is a story about what happens when someone builds up a reputation over decades of work and then destroys it in a couple of years. Not because they failed, but because they lied about it. Over and over again. Until the lies got too much to handle, and they had to create newer, even larger lies to cover them up.
      Why would anyone do this? We'll get into that at the end. But first, the story. ..."

I can still wonder on the use of the word "lie" in that article by Jeremy Reimer versus, say, "irrational exuberance" especially if his kids were involved in making the Minecraft server project happen? But the article does make it sounds like a larger pattern. Ironically, the behavior even sounds a bit like an overly-people-pleasing LLM hallucination?

Having read many Robert X. Cringely articles in InfoWorld and so on way back when, I would be sad if this was all true. Kind of like losing faith in a celebrity of computing from my younger days.

Related (although in general I have not found it that true about most computing people):
"Never Meet Your Heroes: What It Means & If You Should Meet Them"
https://www.wikihow.com/Never-...
        "Itâ(TM)s a proverb that suggests meeting your idols can lead to disappointment. âoeNever meet your heroesâ is a piece of advice that means people shouldnâ(TM)t meet their heroes because they may be disappointed by the heroâ(TM)s true personality. This happens because people tend to idealize people they look up to instead of viewing them as multifaceted humans with flaws, and they may have unrealistic expectations about what will happen when they meet their hero.
        The hero might not have the time, energy, or interest in meeting their expectations, destroying the perfect image that person has built in their head.
        The logic behind this proverb is that many celebrities craft public personas, and the image they portray online or on camera may be vastly different from how they act in real life.
        With that being said, some people say that meeting your heroes can be a positive experience and serve as a reminder that heroes are no different than normal people. ..."

Related by me from over two decades ago: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
        "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. ...
          Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works.
      If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?
        Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. ...."

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the US, SMPTE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization."

It's also cascading down to the used phone market. I haven't bought a brand new top-line phone in 18 years because I'm not a heavy user. I buy used/refurbed models from 3-4 years ago and use them for 3-5 years. Typically I could get them for $150-$275 by timing a purchase with new-model release cycles, when early-adopters flood the market with castoffs, so the level 2 adopters upgrade to a used level 1, etc. This past Christmas season I considered upgrading, but there was noticeable across-the-board inflation. In 2026, purchasing some 2022/3 models in good condition were the same dollar amount as purchasing a 2021 model in 2022. And that doesn't even include the continuing US government devaluation of the dollar itself via uncontrolled debt spending.

From NYS Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto: https://www.informationliberat...
        "Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.
        Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will. ...
          How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But "modern schooling" as we know it is a by-product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line American families were appauled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance towards the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called school must have been the consternation with which these same "Americans" regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.
        Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. ..."

As one economist I read long ago wrote, business is very expensive without trust (e.g. that you can trust your long copper telephone lines used to communicate or long electric lines used to power your business will not be stolen when just sitting there unguarded). A big cost of theft or vandalism or murder (what war is essentially about) is not just the act itself but all the locks and other deterrents (including guards) people then put in to reduce such acts. Powerful tools of abundance like robots, if misused for theft or vandalism or murder, then can increase costs for everyone as an arms race.

That's implicit in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And I feel our best hope to avoid high-tech-created disasters is to learn to laugh at that irony. :-)

As I wrote in elaboration on that in 2010: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
====
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ...

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...

Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ...
====

Brute force is how much scientific discovery happened. I don't think it makes the point you want to make.

Have you seen the prime TV logo ....

Thanks for the clarification. That was helpful. I now see that the contradiction I perceived was a parsing/wording issue, not an actual conflict over the underlying ideas represented by the wording.

Your first sentence is correct, on average.
I bolded the parts which I do not think are proven. I believe that the real explanation for those portions is a combination of sample bias and reversed correlation-causation error.

I think the only claims we could confidently make about this issue are:
-The mathematical mindset makes it easier to program (ie write procedural instructions which rely heavily on basic algebraic expressions, ie math).
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to enter math/science schools in college.
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to understand and succeed at math/science curriculum.
-People without a mathematical mindset are unlikely to pursue math/science beyond the bare minimum (college algebra), so not only will they lack the mathematical mindset, they also will never have reason to seriously engage with extended formal logic like proofs.
-People with a mathematical mindset will, through their own choices, be exposed to curriculum and situations where their existing mathematical mindset can be honed.

That is-- those with a higher capacity for mathematical reasoning will self-select into and persist to graduation/completion of situations where their capacity has been harnessed into functional skill.

However, the above statement does not at all mean that the mathematical mindset itself is being created/implanted by math/CS departments.

The person makes the degree. The degree doesn't make the person,
But we have to pretend it does, for ideological reasons.

Over the past 50 years we've seen the establishment of a socially-motivated (as opposed to factual/scientifically-informed) belief that "you can be anything you put your mind to" and theoretically every kid could get that CS degree if we give them enough support/funding/nutrition/affirmation/social services/parenting/intervention/accommodation. It's a really clumsy and poorly thought out but well-meaning, egalitarianism.

Unfortunately, being well-meant doesn't make something true. Human beings are NOT simplistic algorithms and do not behave in deterministic ways. Math reasoning is not the same as reading a history book and reasoning through a dialectic narrative. Exclusion runs counter to the modern social belief system, so people get nervous and start backing away if you were to make a statement like: "Mathematical reasoning is a trait possessed by a small subset of the population. We do not understand its origin. Some people have it and some don't. For those that have it, developing their skill through practice can give them access to specific career/salary advantages that are simply inaccessible to 90% of people, the same way no 5'9" man is going to be a starting Center or Forward on a successful NBA team. even if you had a blank check to give him world-class professional sport-specific coaching and general athletic training from age 8 onward. Indeed, it would be gross mismanagement of resources to pour that into him and expect him to succeed." Of course, the reason that statement makes keyboard warriors reach for their "Problematic Post Alert" button is because, unfortunately, it is chiefly brought up by people whose underlying beliefs are in fact problematic.

Not that it can't be believed, but that it should not be taken as definitive reality rather than temporary aberration.

Covid showed the huge fragility of most systems, but perhaps most frail was the process of learning.
We are now at the peak of a time interval during which nearly all college students are people who had their education and experiential development terribly disrupted right when they would be learning must-have foundations in logic, mathematics, and rhetoric. I would bet that even if we made no other changes from what we are doing today, 2022-2028 will turn out to have local minima in a wide variety of education performance metrics.