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Comment Re:Wat (Score 1) 47

Moving from 1024 to 2048 when 768 is broken is one thing. But so far, quantum computers have only managed 6 bits and had to cheat a bit to do it. It took longer than a child with pencil and paper would take. The new improved quantum computers that were going to do better than that some 6 years ago just kinda didn't happen. We'll get 'em next year?

Comment Re:okkkkkkay (Score 1) 47

The fact that this RSA weakness is not based on quantum computation is irrelevant

It's extremely relevant. An actual computer that we can build today can exploit the new RSA weakness. We have no computers today that can run Shor or Grover and the timeline for one that can on a useful scale is somewhere between years and never.

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 Old news (Score 1) 2

My late wife did undergraduate research in photosystem II where there was quantum effects back in 2002. She did her PhD thesis on proton coupled electron transfer (PCET) in soybean lipoxogenase, then had a long career developing models for Fortran code that did quantum simulation of proteins (she was behind Tagdock in Amber MD). This is nothing new; several biological systems have quantum effects that are central to their mechanism.

Comment No; audit. Correlation is *NOT* causation. (Score 1) 172

Person, the reason the https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... -- has the NULL HYPOTHESIS as "no correlation", is because OF THAT. Your senses LIE!!!!

Fucking take your left and right hand, and 3 buckets if water of different temperatures. Let's say ONE is HOT, ONE is COLD, and the final is LUKEWARM/GOLDILOCKS.

Put your left hand and right hand into C and H, respectively. Wait. Minute.

Put both in the lukewarm.

Do your hands agree on temperature?

No. Fucking pay attention to your mental biases. That's why science is a DISCIPLINE OF MIND.

FFS.

Comment Stop voting in idiots. (Score 1) 172

"This ALPR mass surveillance â" the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion â" should not exist. But because it does..."

Because of all those who predate upon those with lack of critical thinking skills.

"Wake up to reality" is the double-think that they say is dumb when they pejoratively call people "woke."

"Woke" is just a word for "slave that doesn't know its place."

Comment Re:Functionally illiterate is the new norm (Score 1) 98

Exactly. For example, spreadsheets were often used day to day but the accountants kept the actual books as books and had the final word. That changed over time, only after spreadsheets proved out (and got the bugs out).

Also, humans stayed in the loop. Sure there were occasional funnies like a medical database claiming a few male patients had a history of pregnancy, but humans were in the loop and cited those as obvious errors. There were still backup paper records to fall back on.

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