wtp1saac

I will add, too, although less relevant to education than just generally - for all the talk that these tools must be useless and incorrect, that just plainly does not map to my experience using these tools. AI can chew through a debug log on a custom system and pick out root causes on behaviors very effectively, in my experience.

It is just hard to reconcile that denigration of AI with the typical experience I have using these tools in the real world. It is not omnipotent or God, but it can effectively assist in work. There is a certain cognitive dissonance I feel when I walk away from using the tool to help accomplish particular tasks, then hear over and over people say the technology is fundamentally useless and fundamentally does not work. I guess I am just not enough of an academic to understand how something can accomplish work yet fundamentally isn't, somehow.

Respectfully, I disagree. I think there's absolutely a case for AI being encouraged in younger people, and there's room for these tools. I've been leaning on LLMs for side learning in side projects, and it has concretely helped me with conceptual questions about math and Vulkan as I've been trying to learn some graphics basics with side projects.

I would grant: I was not the most studious kid, I could definitely stand to learn how to read code a lot more effectively than I do; but I have found being able to ask a computer, "what portions of the Vulkan Programming Guide are less relevant with Vulkan's design changes since the release" pointing me to the dynamic rendering extensions and placing it into context, with inline code and links out to useful blog posts for additional reading, that sort of thing is very helpful.

Working on a prototype before I was trying to learn Vulkan, I was using it to explore SDL_GPU's API which definitely had some gaps in its documentation. Granted again, I could have referenced the sample code - I am sure you'll prefer I'd have done that - but it helped to get information about what each piece of the API was doing, and gave reasonable results that made sense and did inform me enough to understand what I was doing, turning much of that into an interactive learning of basic GPU programming for graphics. Where the AI hallucinated, it was often on things like method names, which I was able to read through and find the methods it was intending to name. (This only occurred once or twice when I was learning).

Unrelated, but adding the C macro syntax and nesting macros, which I could have an LLM explain inline and link the GNU manual. Never got that taught to me in a C course. Man, computers are complicated!

These have not replaced textbooks; I have been using them alongside textbooks and handwriting code for practice, and they work as a very good complement. I also sometimes use them to unblock me - I don't know CMake very well and lean on AI to do CMake, so I can focus on learning C++ and graphics, which is my primary objective right now.

I would add too, I have for fun given it prompts about various topics I learned in university, and I often will get answers that are bang-on what I learned in university undergraduate courses - the topics I tried were welfare state taxonomies, distributed systems, disk storage performance, filesystem layouts and internals.

Boy, this would've been cool for me as a kid. There's just so much information right there, and pointing you to topics and textbooks a couple questions away, I wish I had these tools. I was a curious kid in a terrible MAGA-esque family that was deeply uncurious about the world, had no knowledge of any advanced subject and basically mocked me for trying to learn more about stuff. And you go to the school library and it's all kids shit, not even an option to try and reach out for more. Now smart kids might be able to go just learn shit very freely and be pointed to textbooks, and go pirate them off some Russian site, and start learning and go tutor themselves, as I'm doing today as an adult.

At least knowing myself and knowing if there's another kid like me, I think they would deeply enjoy having a natural language encyclopedia, if we can get it as close to that as possible. I think even with some error inherent, if the tools can be often and directionally correct, that would be a plus. I went to university, and the professors there hallucinated some things so embarrassing it should bar them from teaching, for the standards people hold LLMs to! i.e., sanitizing conspiracy theories that Android records all language through the microphone therefore iOS is better, Apple Silicon is more battery efficient because it is RISC and not CISC. Got a terrible history of computer graphics technology you'd know was slanted if you watch the 8 Bit Guy on YouTube. Rubbish.

The thing that worries me, and what this article really talks about, are the kids that just don't give a shit. They are not new - when I went to high school, before AI, stupid kids would copy code off the internet. I think AI probably makes it worse because it makes it harder to call out and enforce against it, and agreed, that should be stopped. But to me, that is mainly a cultural problem. Too many Americans are completely uncurious and just spout garbage; there are a lot of kids who grow up in that cesspool and are going to grow up uncurious, and then AI acts as a shortcut rather than a vehicle of curiosity.

And granted, maybe AI is less useful when you are in a structured environment - but the structured environment has its downsides. Even in that environment many of the TAs were clueless and unhelpful, or just too damn busy or already too knowledgeable to meet students where they were at. Again, talk about hallucinations with TAs! Many times in my experience. And that's all to say nothing about getting people to not just do homework but actually go get curious about things and try stuff that isn't required of them.

I think there will be some culture that remains curious, and has these tools, will come to grips with where they can help, where they go wrong, how to balance it with other learning methods; and I think they are going to have kids that absorb a lot more knowledge and get to play with topics and learn things, faster, to each kids' interest, perhaps even individualized tutoring at better scale - I hope that is possible.

I hope the United States as well, but maybe not, because holy cow our culture and attitudes are plainly terrible these days. Your comment is pretty representative of how most people react if I suggest this or talk about my own experiences I'm describing here. But I hope at least I'm arguing something comprehensive here. There is too little conversation beyond hyperbolic nonsense on the internet; I consider "FUTURE LUDDITE" etc. to be in that realm.

I'm not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over).

Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility.

But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective.

Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort?

EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.

From Wikipedia, United States government and policy, citing several democratic institutes:

"The United States was the most prominent liberal democracy for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, but has undergone significant democratic backsliding and a shift toward a hybrid regime—a political system combining autocratic and democratic features.[185][186][237] There is an ongoing debate among political scientists on whether the country is more appropriately classified as an electoral autocracy or illiberal democracy, with few still considering it a robust liberal democracy.[238]"

It is interesting to see a general bias taken away from the study, which I wouldn't necessarily guess given my own experience. My X "For You" feed mostly does not read pro-Trump - instead mostly pushing very intense pro-European and pro-Canadian economic and political separation from the USA, and pushing very negative narratives of the USA, although I suppose it occasionally also introduces pro-Trump posts, and perhaps those do not sway me in the same way given I am a progressive American.

That said, the Trending tab does tend to push very heavy MAGA-aligned narrative, in a way that to me just seems comical, but I suppose there must be people that genuinely take it at face value, and maybe that does push people.

Less to do with the article:

The more I think about it, I'm not really even sure why I use X these days, other than the fact that I don't really have much of an in-person social life outside of work. Sometimes it can be enjoyable, but honestly the main takeaway I have is that microblogging as a format is genuinely terrible, and X in particular does seem to just feed the most angry things possible. Maybe it's exciting to try and discuss opinions but it is also simultaneously hardly possible to have a nuanced or careful discussion when you have limited characters, and someone on the other end that just wants to shout over you.

I miss being a kid and going onto some forums like for Scratch or Minecraft or whatever. The internet felt way more fun when it was just making cool things and chatting with people about it. I think the USA sort of felt more that way too, but it's hard to know if that was just my privilege. When I write about X, it uncomfortably parallels to how I would consider how my interactions have evolved with my family and friends in real life.

If it is not a small fee, I do wonder - is there still advantage to having a provider which one may take out a lawsuit against if something goes wrong? To what extent might liability and security vetting by scaled usage still hedge against AI, in your view?

I would add: open source throws additional curveballs. The EU wants to push for open source, and that is admirable, but I wonder what the sustainable funding model would be, and how that could attract attention. I wonder about business models and ability to generate return on investment.

I would think the saner solution is allowing proprietary companies, but imposing technical standards which companies collaborate on, enabling interoperation. Am I mistaken, that the EU is trying to do this with the DMA? I have heard general overtones, but I haven't looked at it very closely, and our media doesn't cover EU tech regulations in much detail in the US, though in a decent world it would, I wish it would.

Certainly no investor, but my own feelings:

AI replacing vendors feels like a strange risk, though I'm not sure if vendors view things through a technical lens. Security concerns and service maintenance alone, IMO, makes writing internal software a large proposition - one that I would want a trusted vendor if it wasn't a hobby project and I could just afford that. Particularly if that data being lost or broken would severely harm a business.

There are also already frameworks in languages like Python that make putting up an internal website very, very simple. If you don't need production grade, you might have already had a pretty low barrier to entry, if you have the skills to figure out how to host the service you just vibe coded, you can probably figure out some basic django to throw data in its ORM, or find libraries that do the work for you.

AI does feel in those technical ways to be an overstated risk, to me at least.

Far more worrying to me is the breakdown of the USA and its role. We are going to have blocs of software and hardware entirely from competing geopolitical regions, which may not be able or authorized to communicate with one another. Any businesses in the USA with significant CA or EU marketshare right now will decline in value to the degree client companies choose, or are told, to stop using USA systems.

(My own governor in California outright antagonized the Europeans at Davos calling them "pathetic" while telling them to get tough on Trump, which means in practice, stop using US, meaning yes California, tech goods and services. A lot of revenue from tech comes from overseas, and we are going to lose at least some portion of that. Particularly in California which already has budget problems with what revenue it's got. Stunning how even The Guardian treated those remarks as "tough" and not insane and self-destructive... sadly it's nothing compared to the worst of the US right now.)

So, where do you throw investment right now? To the US where the marketshares will likely decline, and the political and trade environment is insanely uncertain, but there is momentum on AI and generally decent hardware design, and the existing software companies and knowledge? To the EU or Canada where maybe a nascent software industry will take hold, or perhaps American companies will relocate talent if the USA collapses into civil conflict? To China, if they end up becoming a hegemon, given their strength in hardware and their growing efforts to invest in software alternatives?

I suppose I read markets don't react to "tensions," and maybe it is unprecedented to modern memory, but I think about these things more than AI.

I suppose I should add, I largely fear more and more regulation around software, especially at the level of "commercial vs. not" - one, much commercial software uses open source; two, I am extraordinarily wary that we may lose pretty much all digital freedom to increasingly authoritarian societies - I sort of expect such licensing requirements to keep pushing that along and breaking any possibility of making modern technology less bad, instead burdening the field such that only major corporations may effectively contribute, and cutting off all funding to independent developers. It's already grim in that respect to be sure. Licensure feels like it is on the path to whitewash intense restrictions on computation in the language of protection and security.

Many big technology companies have zero ethics or desire for it. I only have faith in smaller groups and independent developers, and I don't want to stifle them if they have some path to come back and compete.

Hell, at this point my main computer is Linux, with a mixture of open source and donation-driven (this could be considered commercial!) software. My desktop environment is made by someone in a bedroom in Poland and it's better than anything Apple or god forbid Microsoft can ship. I would prefer to not have some licensing body to come and make it illegal for me to use that desktop and send this developer money so he can pay his rent.

I am ambivalent about this, leaning towards negative.

I have some open questions, though this is more implementation than concept - what categories of software would need what licensing? Is there a delineation for platforms with more or less effective sandboxing, e.g., mobile vs desktop platforms? Do we need licensing for non-mission-critical software like game development (not a trivial question given multiplayer transmits and parses data)? Memory-safe versus memory-unsafe languages?

Now, I can think of some good situations that should maybe require formal licensing, e.g., cryptography, though how to delineate that could be tricky. Certainly I would want someone building a cryptographic vault or library to have very good knowledge of cryptography - I am not sure this is needed if you are effectively dispatching to a known good library, but it is still possible to build highly insecure protocols on top of it. Wondering if I would want a single large license, or some kind of specialty licenses for such cases, though.

My biggest gripe though, is that I feel most of the problems of software come from companies behaving irresponsibly - collecting too much data, rushing features through, pushing top-down control and schedules making it difficult for engineers to push back for needs and to build systems effectively. A lot of corporations pretty much give marching orders to their engineers. Maybe if software engineers were licensed, and there was personal liability against one's license to disobey, it would create a strong incentive to not implement such systems. I have my doubts this would get implemented in the USA though, as we have already unfortunately mostly stood against regulations like the GDPR. Maybe the EU would do this - but I am not sure if it is a better strategy, if that is the intent, versus focusing the state on attacking companies with malicious intent and sending them directly out of business.

if you’re not a Moscow bot I am in disbelief of you. do you not see where this road leads? this is not politics. this is a nightmare.

this is pure horror.

this can’t be allowed to stand. it doesn’t matter the offenses, criminals have Constitutional rights El Salvador de facto does not grant them.

what the fuck are the Democratic governors and states doing right now? the union is being tortured and rewritten to authoritarians before our very eyes.

It is no longer the 90s.

A quick trip to Wikipedia illustrates that education is indeed an implication of digital divide, and that quite often teachers have homework requiring internet access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide

I would speculate it is easy for such gaps to exist because it is easy to assume internet access is widespread.

Perhaps, as it is no longer the 90s, and with interest in human progress and easier living for all, we could aspire to not trap our lower classes in a decade now 24 years old and counting, with institutional knowledge on how to support techniques of that era fading to time.

‘Rep. Gottheimer hopes this is the end of the road for congestion pricing, and as far as it coming back after the upcoming elections are decided, “I don’t think so,” he said. “We got it done. ... indefinite pause, the word indefinite is key here,” he said.’

what a joke of a statement; then none of you mean to pause it, you meant to kill it. if you’re going to ruin what little progress this damn country can make at urbanism in its most urban city, at least wear your mockery and ruination on your sleeve proudly, rather than weasel out of it with a bullshit “pause.”

garbage politicians.

Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread.

In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience.

(To be clear, I doubt most of the US will urbanize given the rural nature of a lot of it, but I hope at least bigger cities can move in that direction)

it’s worth reading his book “The Internet Con” - i found it fairly prescriptive on specific issues and fixes to try and enable further competition in the industry.

honestly don’t get this take. it’s a perfectly catchy word, and i find most of doctorow’s writings on the subject of capitalism’s destruction of the internet to be pretty accurate.

what particular things about him are so unpalatable you would be willing to support anti-consumer practices (“turning evil”) to spite him? I assume you’re probably kidding for exaggeration, but still it’s not clear to me what is that offputting about him.

also, Pacific Beach, La Jolla, UTC, Downtown/Gaslamp, Hillcrest/North Park are all pretty dense neighborhoods - so I suspect despite our major flaws, we have the capability to improve car alternatives pretty well. Much better than a lot of places with zero dense areas.

the idea that there is either the zero-density of single family homes, versus giant apartments that are skyscrapers with thin ceilings and walls, is a false choice due to the US’s bad urban planning.

there are a lot of density options between everywhere USA and Manhattan - row homes for example - that would give a pleasant middle ground and still massively improve density and walkability

I also live in San Diego, and have gone between Pacific Beach, La Jolla, Clairemont, Mission Valley, Downtown, and even as far as La Mesa or National City via e-bike (sometimes also using the trolley / light rail).

Is it convenient? No. Is it outright impossible? Absolutely not.

Work can, should, and is being done by the city to improve bike safety, and that’s a crucial factor that should be supported more. e-bikes are surprisingly capable at navigating the clusterfuck of US urban planning, however, so I suspect with effort we can massively improve and make this more viable. (This also includes densifying neighborhoods so you don’t have to cross the city for something you need).

yeah, I should say less. you can thankfully opt out of it - and I do - but it’s pure enshittification and with the premiums Apple charges, the fact that they layer in ANY kinds of advertisements and related tracking mechanisms is an insult to customers.

Pinephone Pro. Absolutely not usable for everyday use as far as I can tell - missing camera support, constant app crashes and hangups, web browsing is a decent but hacky version of Firefox with drawbacks associated to that, inputs are not consistent, and overall performance is shockingly poor and inconsistent.

However, some good notes - the Phosh/GNOME interface is nice, hardware privacy switches are included on the device, and there’s a particular joy in seeing a terminal up and running and realizing you’ve got a full desktop OS on a slab :)

it definitely needs work, but it is exciting.

this is the false choice we get presented by these evil companies: we have a duopoly where you choose between surveillance but having control (Android), or having no control but no surveillance (Apple). Both are horrible in their own right, but there’s no open alternative that’s viable for mobile at the moment.

For my part, I bought a Linux phone recently. Hopefully at some point I can find the chance to find places to contribute and make some contributions, although first impressions are… unideal. I would’ve hoped it would move past Android 2.x era performance - but then again it’s in need of people to contribute and improve it, so I oughta do that. As should others interested in carving out a better mobile option!

Being in the US, it’s a shame these countries are making this same mistake. I’m probably warped being in Gen Z, but cars/car-centric infrastructure seem like a fundamental mistake, and a shameful investment. Everyone should have a right to walkability, and frankly in my experience, cities without it feel substantially less pleasant. Having good inner-city transit and inner/inter-city rail makes places feel so much nicer and more developed.

Obviously, cities with good transit are substantially rarer and probably far worse maintained in the US than Europe, so I’m sure Europe is in an overall far better spot with it - but I struggle to understand the appeal of developing against walkability and transit-ability in 2023.

This 100%. US regulation is woefully inadequate, and even if the EU has teeth, US companies are gonna treat them as toothless and see how far they can get screwing over the world.

It’s time to fight back against Big Tech by refusing to use it as much as humanly possible. Especially those of us on the software side that could contribute to improving the FOSS space.

I think the primary difficulty is not telling planners this, but telling citizens. Most people are so ingrained to use cars in the US that any mention of transit or biking gets a pretty severely negative response, and I’ve seen this in people I know across conservatives, liberals, and even (dumbfoundingly) progressives/leftists. To do this well also requires more dense apartments and mixed use zoning, which similarly upsets many across the political spectrum.

I am somewhat hopeful the trends are angling towards proper cities, but my impression of those trends is that it is moreso forward thinking cities/planners trying their best against an extremely misinformed citizenry + our existing terrible infrastructure + under/misfunding + impossible bureaucracy. It’s going to take a lot of effort to get people to actually use alternatives, and I think those channels will only appeal to a very small bubble of urbanism focused leftists.

(side note: e-bikes are my personal urbanism bet; they seem good enough to vaguely navigate surface roads and even some stroad conditions, while being able to interface with old bike path networks, and can be easy to park in areas where cities provide bike racks. I’ve had a good experience with one, and no longer use a car for most trips)

Man I feel out of sync with the hivemind sometimes. Young 20-something and work from home seems to effectively be the standard for most programming work, and it makes me wish I pursued a different career. I hate being stuck at home, video calling to endless pfps, and never seeing a single coworker’s face.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. The best license is the one that meets the constraints of your situation. Good luck getting *GPL software onto iOS, for example. And yes, that’s Apple / Apple users’ problem, but it also means that iOS just can never use your software, excluding it from tons of users.

Personally I don’t mind something like MIT / Apache. If you wanna hack it and not guarantee stability, just hack on and make it clear in your culture, and companies relying on it get the instability as their problem. How you support your software isn’t the same question as how you license it.

I don’t know the research on this, so this could be totally off of reality, but my gut feeling is two main issues with social media:

1. It’s too focused on broadcasting yourself rather than cultivating close friendships

2. Social media at large scale seems to become increasingly toxic, with no real winning moves because different people want different moderations.

On (1), most social media is largely one sided. you’re tweeting out onto your own profile or making some grandstand on a post. hell, what I’m writing now isn’t anything more than some random words from a random person who doesn’t matter in your life - whether my words resonate or not being somewhat irrelevant. about the best I can hope for is someone to read this and either agree or disagree, and maybe discuss on it. but there’s some implicit desire for me to shout out my opinion into the void of the internet, and so here I am.

very little social media seems designed to take people on common interests and actually link them into longer term relationships like friends. it wouldn’t be close to this form of interaction if it did. the best example might be dating apps, but even those aren’t great bc they profit off a lack of success and so don’t put in the effort to be good, imo.

On (2), this seems nearly insurmountable. maybe client side filtering would help, and maybe LLMs or ML client side is getting good enough to be mechanisms for really intelligent filtering, but without each user being able to determine what they want to see and filtering, i don’t think large scale social media is tenable. I think you literally can’t moderate a good experience for everyone.

I happen to like the idea of going into an office as a young adult isolated into their home with no real life relationships. /r/technology immediately becomes frustrating to read because there’s a solid post a day where the comments section collectively calls anyone who wants an office a bootlicker; how is that going to make me feel?

in a different vein I’m quite progressive. if I read a comment on a programming subreddit trivializing the terrible conditions in much of the US because they make a programmer’s salary, it’s going to piss me off. someone reading this sentence who’s conservative has now gotten pissed off because of me by reading that above line.

so maybe you just moderate to repress opinions or anything strong? maybe we could start with decency? except to some people being decent and kind is an endorsement of status quo and makes you a bootlicker. so that won’t work. and beyond that do you really want to have a sterile experience? or is something in you craving the opposite? because I’ve found I went on Reddit far past fully knowing it was damaging to my happiness, because of some pull into the awful toxic doomer discourse now prevalent there. call it addiction or whatever, but it’s hard to stop.

we aren’t built to run at the scale of the internet, or the world, or even our own cities. social media as it stands makes it so difficult to turn any of that off; corporate incentive and profit also feeds off the anger it creates. the only good social media would be one detached from the capitalist profit machine, substantially smaller scale and dynamic to groups of compatible users, and it should probably be unrecognizable from the social media of today. (It also probably needs to be designed by psychologists and not tech bros, and given I'm in the latter I’m not volunteering to try.)

Relating to this a lot. I've barely had much in person social interaction since 2020, where college for me ended up remote for the pandemic. Was a relief when classes went back in person a year later, but too little too late for me to build up any meaningful social interactions there, and now I'm in a remote job to the opposite end of the country (and other parts of the world with even more disparate timezones), so I'm pretty much in a similar boat of no meaningful in person interaction.

I like technology as an auxiliary means of communicating with people, but having pretty much 95-100% of my interactions occur over texting and calling (people don't even usually bother to turn on their cameras) has been a personal hell, and honestly has soured my opinion of the entire internet. Beyond just work, what few personal relationships I do have at this point are usually also remote, so actually spending real life time with people is this far distant tertiary form of interacting, when it's the natural bloody thing we're evolved to do as a species.

Now you have companies like Meta investing in the metaverse "future" where we sit in VR headsets, trade crypto for fake digital goods, have romantic relationships with virtual avatars, and sit in virtual offices so our twenty-poly character models can discuss around a fake whiteboard. I just want to be around people again.