One has to walk before one can try to run. One has to walk before one can try to dance.

This vision of producing capable independent thinkers who meld their own knowledge with that provided by machines tools sounds great. But how does a student get there, if they never ever stand alone and show they can think at all without the mental crutches? How do you judge their own capabilities without asking them to at least sometimes put down the crutches? How do they improve themselves in their role as AI partners when they have limited or no experience they can call their own?

At some point, a few colleges will throw down the gauntlet and ban all AI assistive tech from most classes, even if this means oral and in class exam are the entire grade. And what employers will discover is 90% of those graduates are pretty competent at many things, and 90% of the students from the AI lemming colleges suck.

To build on what you just said...

I am very wary of any argument that may boil down to "I do not not really understand what is going on here, but surely it will be easy to do better with a rebuild". Such claims are often founded on broad ignorance regarding the complexity of the real underlying requirements. And what I mean by "real underlying requirements" are those yardsticks by which the success of the project will be judged by the users/consumers who rely on the software. If the PRD was woefully incomplete you can argue failure is not your fault all you want, but you are still a failure.

However...something that is very messy primarily due to a poor choice of architecture, that is a reason to be auspicious about a rewrite being better. But do not be naive about the previous point. It is so easy to make incorrect assumptions about the requirements scope that your very promising new architectural approach will not save your project from disaster.

You handwaving argument that is so weak on specifics requires no refutation. The fact that you feel compelled to put words into my mouth in order to pretend to have a point is a mark against you.

You are right that "paradox" is not really the right word, but that is the label commonly slapped on.

It really a kind of Measurement Dysfunction, where an incorrect/misleading or fatally incomplete measurement drives counterproductive business behavior.

The underlying cause is the tendency to make linear extrapolations for all outstanding issues, where the poorly understood issues are presumed to be approximately as hard as well understood issues. Someone with a little self awareness would realize that if I understand X well and not Y, it could well be that is not random but because Y is much harder, the genuine difficulties hiding behind the cloud of my own ignorance.

Fair question.

I would say these were necessary but not sufficient for outsourcing jobs to foreign countries. So the 10% growth is there over the last 30 years in certain sectors, just harder to measure here in the USA.

Presenting conjecture as the truth is simply lying -- that is likely to offer negative value. Presenting conjecture as an idea that might worthy of further investigation -- that has a significant chance of bringing positive value.

At face value, you are arguing for a position that I am 100% certain that no sane adult believes.

It is a matter of context.

If I have a feed whose topics include politics, of course it would be lame to curate away all opinions that differ from mine. Of course, I accept that some people will make lame choices -- that is how freedom works.

But if I am running a feed where the topic is organic farmer and someone keeps goading participants with off topic political posts, I am going to be quick to shut that down. Gentle persuasion would be best, but if that does not work other means would be applied. Anyone who is bothered by a little moderation there is simply a childish crybaby.

My SO tried Twitter and despised it yeeeeears ago, long before any of the political controversies alluded to on any of these comments. Long before Trump even dipped a toe into politics. She has strong reasons for like Bluesky.

The key feature of Bluesky is the control of your feed is in your hands, not some central authority.

Want certain topics? Go find specific tagged streams on those topics.

A troll is annoying? Block the troll (and deny the troll access to your posts). And because trolls are so easy to never see again, those childish attention getting antics used by attention whores do not work.

Nobody has to listen to you on Bluesky. Your conservative friends were not "banned" from Bluesky. They were blocked out of reading and posting to certain groomed feeds that were controlled by individuals. It is called freedom. Individuals who control certain feeds may or may not be making good choices here, but they are making the choices, not a company algorithm.

Don't like it? Make your own feed for like-minded people. Take responsibility. Freedom gives you options.

Or let a corporate algorithm whore your attention to its feed, if you are not up to being responsible.

Your choice. Real freedom works that way.

It is a place for people who want control of their feed, rather than let their personal attention be whored by a corporate owned algorithm.

And because it is easy to block trolls, the childish attention getting antics common to most social media work poorly.

People who abhor civil discourse are quick to claim that civil discourse is some kind of "Democrat" thing. They may be right about that.

Same story about UC Berkeley. I would say well over 98% of Berkeley students are indistinguishable from any other college student body -- mostly kids who grew up fat and happy in a suburb and care more about getting a lucrative job than any social justice issue. The difference is a couple percent of the student body is energized by the local community in the city of Berkeley and vice versa. It takes only 100 students plus 100 locals out of a university of student body of 46,000 to make a lot of noise.

What is the university administration supposed to do about that? Disperse them with violence, rather than simply enforce the law? Are the administrators supposed to censor objectionable signs?

There is no pleasing the cryptofascists -- they will always get their panties in a bunch and mewl about it, no matter what. Apply the laws of the land in a reasonable fashion, and the fascists will complain about the Marxist administrators. Break some bones, and they will declare the Marxists are fighting the Marxists ha ha.

While TFA shows a graph with a recent downward trend that looks unfavorable compared to the last decade, perhaps we should consider that data in the context of the 15 years preceding?

Are the young entering the workforce weak and unable to cope with the real world? ("It's a ten year low! Clutch the pearls! Panic!")

Or are they more resilient than any generation before them, with a minor blip in recent poll results in a picture that looks generally positive over the long term? ("Today things are so much better than they were in 2000 or 2005 or 2010, and these young adults are our promising future!")

The pretty graph allow us, the readers, to impose whichever interpretation will prefer.

As far as Copilot goes, that is an easily avoidable hazard. There are many easily avoidable hazards. There are a whole lot of subtle hazards out there.

That said, as much as I agree with your attitude, as a matter of general principle, I have my doubts that you can genuinely "seal your borders" against AI.

Are you certain that even the law firm that handles your treasured IP has completely and truly locked down, say, whatever PDF readers they have on their machines so that nobody is scooping up that data to "improve your experience".

They can sign an NDA. They can faithfully try to protect your IP to the best of their knowledge. But the potential leaks are everywhere, and a whole lot of people have significant holes in their understanding. Even I do, and I am surely well within the top 0.2% in terms of knowledge on the topic.

You can be an author who carefully protects your work, only to submit it to a publisher. Then the publisher can use a consultant who knowingly or unknowingly employs an AI assist that scoops up your entire book. Everyone has signed the NDA. Everyone seems to be a professional about doing their work. How do you prove anything about how that copycat work appeared on the market before your original? Keep in mind, that a whole lot of people would not even know how to lock down their MS Word.

Use MS Word or Adobe Acrobat, and you have 40 pages of legalese to have a chance of understanding what the heck the software might do, and you have to click every link to read everfy addendum, too. And I absolutely guarantee that even lawyers are confused. My SO literally pointed out a worryingly loophole in the MS Word legalese to lawyers of her professional organization, and the lawyers came back with basically "well, the MS lawyers say that there is no intention to do that naughty thing that is allowed by the letter of the EULA".

If we are going to bother to make a change, I would get rid of both the penny and the nickel at the same time.

I would rationalize things to deal with $0.10 as the increment. Keep the dime. Make a $0.20 coin instead of the quarter. Emphasize $0.50 coins and $1 coins, and ditch the paper $1 note. A $2 coin would be reasonable to add, too.

It happens when the majority of elected Republicans view the personal risks of not opposing Trump to be greater than the risk of opposing Trump. At this point, we have not crossed that line. Trump has a very loyal 25-30% of the Republican base, and it is believed he can destroy any GOP candidate who dares openly oppose him with a primary challenge.

I would bet most GOP Congress persons are privately hoping Trump loses big in November and he goes away. Even a lot of Trumpy Republicans are probably thinking that. If Donald is gone, they can try to seize his constituents casting themselves as the New Trump via flattering Donald and angry tweets.

Assuming that Harris wins, the real test will be the 2026 primaries. I guarantee that Trump will continue to try and flex his political muscle in some way -- he just loves the attention. If the GOP proves cowardly, they may be accidentally inviting Trump to haunt them through 2028. Common sense would suggest that Trump's star is descendant if he were to lose in November, but common sense said that about the 2020 result, too. I have to admit that Trump's loyalists proved more stubbornly stupid than I ever imagined they would choose to be.

From the POV of the perp, "stealing", "embezzling", "borrowing" might look a broad spectrum with fuzzy borders. From a legal perspective, there is very little fuzz here; it is a crime to use bank funds for personal enrichment, even if they are being used for "investments" and you so happen to successfully pay the bank back before the shit hits the fan. Save the mitigating arguments for your sentencing hearing.

It is unlikely this fellow was really so foolish as to imagine that money that is just plain gone would not eventually be noticed and then law enforcement would get involved. His Plan A was to get rich quick and pay the bank back, patting the right employees on the back to get them to look the other way. Unfortunately for him, he had no Plan B.