Growing up if I wanted to see a show I liked, it was planned into my week. We had three channels in English, one in French. I remember the day we got cable. The guy came in and hooked it up, and I switched the TV from 13 to 8 to finish watching Gilligan's Island.

Know what was great about this inflexibility? I was bound to a small amount of time. I couldn't lose a weekend binge watching seasons of stuff. I lost time to entertainment in 30 or 60 minute chunks a few times a week, plus some sports.

The introduction of the DVR was when things started to go south. I could schedule series recordings for stuff I didn't know if I wanted to watch. I could watch a show while recording others simultaneously. I was effectively filling large swaths of my future time. Now there's no end of immediately available material, and if I wanted to I could fill every waking moment with streaming. It isn't healthy.

If we suddenly had to go back to a handful of channels with scheduled broadcasts, I struggle to think how we would be anything but better for it.

Hah. Momentary lapse. Pardon me. :)

They erred in the other direction. The English descriptor of "forty-three trillion, eight hundred billion per year" is correct. The number shaved a trio of zeros by accident.

8,760 hours x 5B = 43,800,000,000,000

And I, too, am skeptical. Sounds like a meaningless calculation based on really silly choices of data points.

Now, I am neither a denier nor a skeptic. I am fully on board with anthropomorphic climate change. But this kind of rhetoric is worse than useless - it's counterproductive.

I once watched a news segment where they did bacteria checks of a home of a woman who kept an immaculate house. They found contamination all over the place. I looked around my home and thought, "Well, fuck me. If she can't keep it at bay, I certainly can't, so I won't worry about it."

Somebody's going to get angry, make some threats, bluster, cave, go silent, then defend H1B while saying "America First".

Nobody in particular. Just the royal "Somebody".

No generalization ever applies universally. That doesn't make them useless. My father knew the difference between useful and problematic complexity. I get your point, and I also completely understand his.

"do you really think the grades are that important?"

If I'm asking somebody's opinion of John Stuart Mills, probably not. But if I need them to design a bridge, the yes, I want to know they were graded. And, to one point expressed in the article, I want to know the institution is concerned about maintaining a reputation for producing capable graduates.

If we think a bachelors degree has low utility now, imagine what value employers place on it if grading stops being a gatekeeper. It might be slightly more favorable than nothing... but barely.

Are smart people more prone to psychological issues?

As my father (a heavy duty mechanic) told me often, "The more complicated you make something, the more likely it is to break down." I think that's true of brains. But I doubt that would account for quarter or more of the student body being "disabled".

Rather, considering how the number of self-diagnosing jackasses I've met has skyrocketed in the 2000s, I can totally see victimhood being part of the problem.

"There are no more stupid people anymore. Everybody has a learning disorder." - George Carlin

It's sad to say, but this is part and parcel for the US. The rich want to get every advantage they can, and their money allows them to. So as students with real disabilities get accommodations the rich see it as someone getting something they don't and immediately go about finding a way they can get it to. It doesn't matter that they don't deserve it, they think they deserve it simply because someone else is getting it. And with the US healthcare system, they can always find someone willing to give their kids a diagnosis whether they need it or not because they are willing to pay the price (And can afford to pay the price). This is what the US has become, a plutocracy. The rich get whatever they want because they can afford to buy everything and in the US, everything is for sale.

If you deliberately introduce malware into your species boot process, it's not that evolution got it wrong.

Well, yes. That's some of the "necessary few" I refer to. :)

When the thinky works is handled by some necessary few and a whole lot of technology, we still need people to do the shitty, unskilled work. I don't want to do it, so I'm glad people fail out of the bottom. If your skillset is knowing how to ask an AI to do it, the clock is ticking.

* Ingredients: 65% sarcasm, 30% wary sincerity, 5% other

Once production is established, we need to improve the property values around the plant to the point where they have to relocate to another neighborhood so that plants making Cloud Dancer can move in.

Not to anthropomorphize... but yes, to do that just that... this set of behaviour sure looks like the logic of a well spoken toddler, being clever and finding the loopholes that mess with the spirit of the ask. To me, it's more concretely a demonstration of progress towards general AI than any amount of code completion or shitty album cover generation has been.

I've described the boot process of a modern PC to people in the past, to make this point.

From power on to firmware and POST. Then the lights are turned on for all the areas of hardware responsibility. Some happen right away, others further down the line. Boot managers, OS, drivers... logins, more drivers, then - finally - the system subsides into an orderly management of resources using an incredible juggling act of interrupt management and carefully segregated multitasking where everybody must be orderly.

And all this, in the PC world, happens across a vast array of hardware participants, each bound by protocols, hardware and software specifications, and a presumption of compatibility.

My point?

When it fails, that sucks. But each time you turn on a modern computer and get to the log in prompt, you should be well and truly amazed. Because what you just witnessed is amazing.

That the infamous Windows BSoD, at least since the WinNT era started, are almost always caused by dodgy hardware, is common knowledge to anybody who has spent the least amount of time as a support tech on Windows machines. It's true that they could be better at communicating this.

I've never used ECC in my personal machines - I'm sure it's great - but since the early 00's or so, BSoDs are just not a thing that regular users experience unless they have bottom-tier or broken hardware, and people that buy low quality stuff are not likely to want to spring the extra cash for ECC anyway.