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.
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.
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.