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Comment Re:Universities don't make good devs (Score 1) 77

If I were designing a university CS program, I would have my students program every day (every weekday). Just a 10 or 15 minute assignment each day, but do something. Over a four year degree, they'll have written a lot of code.

Make the stuff they write start to interconnect as the semester progresses too. It will help them learn a lot more about how to make reusable code, common libraries, etc.

Comment Re:Gatekeeping (Score 1) 174

Social media has a fundamental problem: it spreads misinformation much more easily than evidence-based facts.

Gatekeeping has a fundamental problem: we don't trust the gatekeepers. But it drastically reduces misinformation spread.

The only nit to pick here is that while gatekeepers might reduce misinformation spread, it is more about who's paying the gatekeepers and how misinformation is defined. It's more accurate to say that gatekeepers drastically reduce misinformation spread based on how misinformation is defined for them by their bosses, whether those bosses be a government entity, an interested corporation, or some other special interest group.

Comment Would be funny if... (Score 1) 27

... everyone who has an account there went in and disallowed use of their accounts for this. But as others have noted, it's Microsoft... so who knows if they will actually honor it or not.

Opting out is relatively easy compared with overly complex social networking settings we’ve become accustomed to. ‘Data for Generative AI Improvement’ is found within ‘How LinkedIn uses your data’ under the ‘Data privacy’ section of Settings.

Comment Re:Why sugar itself isn't included? (Score 1) 84

So what is the effect of eating as much sugar instead with similar/equivalent sweetness? That could actually provide useful information to people choosing to use or not use artificial sweeteners.

Eating too much sugar is just as bad and can cause problems as well. Try looking at the nutrition labels on packages... compare a "fat free" version of a product to its regular counterpart. Fats bring a lot of flavor to food... so making it "fat free" means they make it bland. The only way to bring flavor back is to add sugar, so that nutrition and ingredients label will reflect that sugar was added. Sugar is addictive too. I refuse to drink "diet" or "no sugar" drinks. I'd rather get 100% fruit juice and dilute it with some sparkling water.

Well, maybe take a look at who pays for this study may give some hints...

Always!

Comment Re: The AI is not the problem (Score 1) 93

however German is a distant third in course quantity and quality.

Going through German as a refresher, what I find very wrong about the way they teach it is when it comes to nouns... you would never learn it as Hund, Katze, or Kind (dog, cat, child)... you would learn der Hund, die Katze, or das Kind (the dog, the cat, the child) because you need to learn whether it's masculine, feminine, or neuter, otherwise you'll pick the wrong definite or indefinite articles in different situations.

Comment Re: ok? (Score 1) 59

Bottom line up front: Maybe check the numbers with an old school "yellow pages" phone book.

A printed phone book came in handy when a big storm took down a lot of cell phone towers and damaged land line equipment.

Beyond a local neighborhood-maintained book or some kind of advertisement from my county of residence in a "Best of X County" type thing, I haven't seen an actual newly updated phone directory in a couple of decades. I remember delivering them as part of a Boy Scouts fundraiser back in the day too. White pages, yellow pages, and "Let your fingers do the walking"... it wasn't difficult... but then again, we also used to go to that big wall of tiny drawers to search for a book, author, or subject. :)

Comment So let me get this straight... (Score 1) 49

We have AI making up court rulings that sound completely legitimate but a simple Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis search would tell you that there was no such case... AI will gladly spew drivel about one side of a political argument, but when asked to spew similar drivel about the other side it will say, "I'm sorry but I cannot delve into politics"... and now they want ads in there? In baseball that would be your three strikes and you're out.

AI is a toy. Treat it like one.

Comment Re:Time to close the doors? (Score 1) 74

The only way to deal with this stuff is to ignore the paper mills completely, and allow only places that passed muster have their research considered as legit. If some research institution starts making fraudulent papers, they get their plug pulled.

Basically an accrediting agency. This is probably the only way to deal with this for now. Of course, who watches the watchers, but at least this will close the gates a bit.

This is fine and dandy... but who controls the accreditation agency? We have seen plenty of times in the past where junk science was pushed as part of the dictatorial takeover of Russia, Germany, China, and North Korea. At first, it's to help swing the populace to the side of the rising dictator... but once in power, it's about "the official story" to keep them there. Go against that official story and you could end up in a lot more than hot water.

What needs to be fixed is the lackadaisical peer review process. Once upon a time, you had to rigorously document your methodologies... how you collected and analyzed the data, and how you came to your conclusions. These days, too many peer reviews are glossed over and an insufficient number of attempts are made to repeat any part of the process, actually go through the data and analysis process to see if those conclusions are correct, etc. It leads into some of the stuff others posting here have said: "publish or perish" mantra.

Comment Re: How bad things have gotten (Score 1) 106

India is the "I" in the BRICS alliance. That makes them Soviet aligned, second world.

Considering that BRICS was so named in the late 1990s (it was first called BRIC), that means it cannot be second world unless the definition has been updated to make China the central point of second world. Basically, Second World is largely an obsolete term otherwise.

BRICS

Comment Re:Not clicking on sources (Score 2) 84

No they literally take the AI answer why wouldn't you? It's not like Google has an interest in giving you any type of truth even with old people links.

Bingo. The real trouble is with failure to confirm what's been assembled. Just ask that one lawyer who got his rump roast chewed out by a judge for submitting six cases in support of his position... that were produced by AI... and never actually existed... which could have been confirmed by a Lexis-Nexis search. My overall problem with AI is that it is still controlled by humans... with political leanings/preferences/outright slants... who will adjust AI filters to match their ideas. It doesn't matter the direction of the slant. The fact that the slants exist are the real problem. Those slants can be in the AI response filters or the choice of material to use as the source of the LLM.

Comment Adware, malware, etc (Score 4, Interesting) 81

The problem with all of this has much to do with the ad networks themselves. If the ads weren't intrusive and didn't screw up the page layout (meaning they obeyed the size restrictions and placement of the ad spaces by developers), it wouldn't be as much of a problem. Couple that with the ads sometimes containing some form of malware and the inability to dismiss popups easily, and you have a recipe for disaster: I visit example.com and it pops up an ad that I dismiss, but by sheer coincidence it's got scripting in it and it installs some kind of malware. I get the computer disinfected, and I go blame example.com because that's how I got it. The people who run example.com will come back and say that they buy their ads from GenericAdNetwork, so you need to talk to them. I then contact GenericAdNetwork, and they say that it's not their fault because they're just a distributor. It turns into a finger-pointing and red herring-chasing session, and you never learn who actually created the malicious ad. Someone needs to be responsible for these things... I don't care if it's example.com or GenericAdNetwork... one of them has to do some kind of filtering and/or vetting of the ads. Until then, browsers like Brave and a pi-Hole are my friends.

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