quacked

Teachers' jobs are difficult because they're expected to be behavioral specialists, social workers, and prison wardens. If they didn't have to do that, they wouldn't need to rely so terribly on printed worksheets and PowerPoints.

I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."

This doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. I think all screens should be banned from schools. No TV, no phones, no projectors, no slides. No shortcuts for anybody, no distractions. Everything handwritten. I know this sounds like I'm sarcastically criticizing phone bans but I'm serious.

(Edit: obviously will need some accommodations for disabled students, and computer labs will have to exist for technical literacy classes.)

I've considered using Lilypond, but I really like the autoplay feature in Musescore, as well as the lack of delay between placing notes and seeing the result.

How do you use it for music composition?

I admit this leans into pedantry, but I think it's important not to conflate "amount of education received" with "amount of knowledge possessed". In the US our people are more educated than they've ever been, but I wouldn't say they're more knowledgeable than ever.

I completely agree that the more knowledgeable a society is the better off it is, but if the education industry is allowed to prop itself up with the widespread belief that more years of education necessarily result in a better-off population, you get the military-industrial-style propagation of institutions, loans, debt, and wasted time that we're familiar with today.

I understand and somewhat agree with your point, and might have phrased my comment differently. I think my main point is that experts aren't always going to beat "a dynamically simulated extension onto the training material". Often they will, maybe even usually, but sometimes they won't, and I feel like the people in this thread insisting that the experts will always know better are thinking about a competition between experts and a crazy robot instead of a competition between experts and math.

The thing that annoys me about AI discourse is that AI is a mathematical technique of rapidly increasing efficacy, and yet everyone personifies it. It would help if every time someone said "AI" they supplemented "a mathematical method where extensions onto a very large corpus of information are statistically simulated".

It's not true that "AI makes mistakes" or "ChatGPT is sycophantic". It's just that sometimes the simulated extensions to the training material are accurate, and sometimes they're not.

Typing it is a complete waste of time unless getting up close and personal with it will result in some kind of useful and actionable improvement in you or your understanding.

I believe this is the general belief about basically every human skill, that if you stop doing the technical fundamentals you get worse at understanding the activity. The question is whether coding is like sailing a square-rigged wooden ship, which became completely useless knowledge after the invention of the steam engine, or if it's like playing an instrument, which while technically unnecessary after the advent of MIDI and other tools, absolutely hurts your ability to arrange, compose and perform if the skill is neglected.

For my money: I think the AI scenario is more like the latter, but "humans are worse at coding" isn't the consequence I see coming. I worry that in ten years we will be awash in software that's impossible to understand. I don't think that's happened in any human industry ever. Someone has always understood how the machines are built, even if they're very remote from the users of the machine.

Why?

In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:

1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on

2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group

3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)

How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.

Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.

The majority of the "more housing = cheaper rent" success stories crowed about on the internet correspond with net population exodus. Austin, Minneapolis, now San Diego.

Edit: I think we should build several million more units of housing in the US. I'm salty because all the new housing I've seen is ugly shitboxes owned by national property firms that make everywhere feel like nowhere.

I don't know, I looked at their demo video and it was tile/cards all over the place. I haven't seen an old-fashioned user interface like the kind we saw before 2020 in ages.

I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons.

AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"

I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.

Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service,

The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.

If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:

Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled

The illegal workflow looks like this:

Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it

It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of me if I could just pay one-time prices. "Sure, fork over $10 and you can have a temporary account to watch the US Open this year." I will do that. In a single month I'll pay twice the cost of a monthly NYT subscription to read online articles, maybe $0.50/pop.

But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.

The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding; but that moral platform differs significantly from our own today. The adjective "moral" does not mean "in good standing with what I believe is proper morality", it means "of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior".

I do not believe that the majority of Americans today believe that there is any "moral" purpose for the American government to exist. The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate country founded by the dual sins of slavery and genocide that should be improved by dismantling its own myth structure and importing as many foreign cultures as possible to supplant whatever came before. The right wing is only interested in the existence of American hegemony insofar as it can use it to crush its cultural enemies or enrich itself, and is happy to violate by theft or violence any American principle in name or in spirit so long as there's good short term gain.

Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.

The frustrating thing about the empire collapse is that it doesn't need to happen. There are still tons of highly energized and ostensibly disciplined and competitive people here. It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands and the aesthetic and moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued, for reasons unclear.

Forget modern computers. I booted up my dad's COMPAQ from 1998, running Windows 2000, and was blown away by the speed and logical layout of the applications. I have to grit my teeth using W11 File Explorer because of what I recently re-experienced.

I take some issue with these kinds of articles that minimize the impacts of "street crime" in favor of the admittedly much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime.

Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.

A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.

I'd be fine with either:

- The massive regulatory burdens on American businesses are dissolved in order to permit genuine competition with the globe

- Economic protectionism is applied so that the heavily regulated American business can compete on price with less-regulated foreign businesses

In both cases, the prices of goods would increase--in the first case, less than the second. But both would be better than the current status quo, in my opinion.

I don't want to live in a country where I have to pay American prices for goods and services, but the owner class only has to pay foreign prices for labor and supply. I have no desire to be outcompeted by foreigners while my hands are tied by local laws.

What are you talking about? I haven't said anything against capitalism. If anything, the problem with the current scenario is that there's not _enough_ capitalism.

How do you propose to compete with foreign workers when the government prevents you from matching their employment conditions within your own company?

That's a critical question that isn't being asked enough.

Americans aren't allowed to compete like that; there are too many labor and environmental protections in place to experience "Chinese working conditions" even if they wanted to. We legally can't work Chinese hours or affect the environment like the Chinese.

So while it's true that Americans aren't really willing to work hard enough to compete on price with the Chinese, it's also literally impossible.

And many outsourced jobs are like this. Americans can't compete because it's illegal to compete. Our hands are tied. We can't bend the local laws to make life cheaper for ourselves, and most of our products are sold to us by people who can and do.

I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.

Well, of course, I agree with you. That's why I said I don't think it would happen.

I personally wouldn't mind a world where consumer goods were much, much more expensive and difficult to acquire, even though it would mean that my life would feel harder and less wealthy than it does now.

What I don't understand is whether or not there's any path to take besides watching the country gently sail along the sunset path into oblivion. Is that it? We gave away the keys to the country's wealth generation mechanism, and now we're at the mercy of the global economy to do whatever it wants? I don't want to compete with foreign firms who can hire foreign labor to compete with me and sell on my territory, but do I simply have no choice?

I agree, but the fact of the matter is that for voting purposes there are two "teams" in the US, and they vote and argue in public down pretty well-defined ideological lines. If you know the two or three most strongly-held moral-political beliefs of an American, it's highly likely that you can guess another 150 sociopolitical beliefs they at least profess to hold to their friends.

The two American political parties are so perfectly shielded by their own ideological blinders to avoid any possibility of national protectionism against offshoring and outsourcing that I don't think there will ever be any kind of movement against this.

The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. And the business owners and shareholders who love to outsource generally aren't true blue voters.

The liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.

What ICE is doing is naked incompetent fascism and the entity needs to be disbanded with hostility.

With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.

I completely agree with you, and now that I am far away from being a student (and at the time, I vehemently hated any system that demanded memorization), I regretfully say that sometimes you just have to force young people to do things they don't want to do, for their own good.

The answer to "why should I know anything" is a value judgement that, if advertised in my top-level post, provides a great deal more rhetorical surface to disagree with or criticize. My main point is that regardless of why anyone wants to know anything, in the age of AI, if you want to produce students who actually know things, I recommend dropping the tech and returning to a more rigorous, in-person curriculum with a foundation of memorization.

Here, though, is my answer: an excellent long-term goal for any band of humans is to create, inhabit, and enjoy the greatest civilization possible, and the more each individual human knows about their reality, the easier it is to do that.