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Comment Re:You need this for an emergency (Score 2) 189

It's not expensive to add AM coverage to the radio itself. However, many cars, especially EVs, flagrantly exceed FCC limits on RF noise pollution, and this is far worse on AM (which picks up noise as signal) than FM (which suppresses some noise and receives less due to the higher frequency). So the cost is not in the radio but in fixing the el cheapo badly filtered car power system so that the AM radio isn't wiped out by it.

Of course after you do all that almost all that's on AM is junk, lots of Rush wannabees, though there is diverse ethnic programming in some cities.

Comment Re: How about fruit (Score 1) 159

Young whippersnapper, hold your tongue.

I grew up eating Gros Michel and remember it fondly. Cavendish is not nearly as tasty. And yes, I am over 70 -- it was the 1950s.

If you hunt around you can find a few sellers offering Gros Michel bananas as exotic specialty fruits, grown in remote (from other bananas) areas like Miami. But they're not in stores. And a blight is coming for Cavendish, so they'd better have new varieties lined up.

Comment Re:Nintendo Digitech 2.0 (Score 1) 119

Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment truly the steward America needs (Score 1) 260

"We need to call it Super Intelligence!" Trump demanded, waggling a finger at an iPod.

Lol, this is the president some people are willing to tolerate for a party that promises you'll have lower taxes (while only giving them to the upper class) and less thinking about trans people or something. Communism! Boo! It's quite astounding.

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