It's not the birth rate. The number of people in the USA is at the highest point in history. Which means we have more than enough students to go around.

There are lots of reasons enrolment could be down. Price of classes, rise in demand for blue collar jobs, lack of certainty in getting a white collar job, economic instability, and increased cost of living.

This may sound crazy, but if you have a large population who struggle to pay for basics, a lot of them won't pay insanely high rates to get an education which might not land them a job.

> "How big is McKinsey? How many people do you employ?"

Since they don't employ any AI bots the answer is obviously the bots are not people. None of the bots get a paycheck, none get health benefits or vacation or have SSNs. So the company employs zero bots.

> " A human won't accidentally make up facts, cases, or sources."

Have you ever met a human? People make up "facts" and references and misremember things, including sources, all the time. There are entirely fields of study related to false memories and people unintentionally sharing false information.

This is a big part of why witness testimony is so unreliable. Even when people want to be helpful they often make up false information or fail to remember facts properly.

> "Reading a clock is not some abstract skill"

This tells me you either don't know how to read an analog clock OR you've done it for so long you've forgotten all the steps you now automatically make in your head. Reading a clock is a highly abstract task.

You need to identify the big and small hand (not always clear cut on some clocks). Then remember the hour value while reading the minute value. Then multiple the minutes by 5. Then, if the minute hand is not exactly on a number, estimate its position between numbers and add that to your earlier total.

Then, since you read the clock presumably to know how much time you have left before class (in a school setting), you then need to subtract one time from another. If it's 12:47 and your next class is at 1:25 this is not straight forward subtraction. You need to convert the "1" hour to 13 first.

Then since your current minutes are higher than your target time minutes you'll probably convert 25 to 85 because 60 minutes in an hour, remembering to knock off the hour from 13. Then subtract the minutes to give you 85 - 47, which isn't exactly a round number.

All of that just to learn you have 38 minutes of time before class.

That is significantly more than "thing pointing to number" and definitely does require arithmetic.

I'm curious how this is different from how Linux works on mobile devices? postmarketOS and Android and so on do this already, don't they? The screen is off apps are not getting much CPU time, but the network is still active and the user can still receive notifications and the OS still responds to scheduled events. Isn't this basically the same thing?

This tightening of computing software was one of the aspects of the rise of smartphones I enjoyed 17 years ago. Desktop software and websites had been growing at obscene rates for years since hardware capabilities tended to double every few years. Then smartphones came on the scene with their single-core ARM CPUs and limited memory and suddenly developers had to scale back, make things more efficient, and create websites that would load over a mobile 3G network connection. It was nice seeing massive Flash sites get replaced with HTML and huge applications get scaled back to work on phones.

Of course, eventually, smartphones got more and more powered and the pendulum began to swing back toward bloat. Limits on RAM sales might help us swing toward efficiency again, at least for a few years.

"more than a dozen significant interfaces exist today, and DistroWatch lists "upwards of a hundred""

DistroWatch lists 75 possible interfaces, including window managers and desktops. None of which matters because people will use whichever desktop ships with their beginner-friendly distro.

> "I would expect to see that people replace cheap phones more often than expensive phones, and Android more often than iPhone. But that's just a guess. It would be nice to see it in the data."

I too would be interested in the data. My expectation would be the reverse.

In my years of being the family & friend IT guy, from what I have noticed is people who can afford to buy one high-end phone will usually buy a new one each year. The folks who are getting the iPhone Max Pro (or whatever it is called now) will upgrade to the next version and the next version each year. The people who buy low-end phones aren't doing it for status or fancy features, they just need a phone (any phone) that can function. So they only replace their phones when the hardware dies.

I find this situation and interesting contrast to what I faced when I was in high school. Back then I was taking computer programming, math, and physics classes at the same time. I'd learn the basic concepts and then write a program to answer my physics/math homework for me.

Technically it might have been cheating, but I had to know the basics well enough to teach the computer how to answer my homework questions. (This was pre-WWW so I couldn't just go on-line and look up how to code the solution.) So I got to learn how to code practical solutions, my homework got done, and I had to understand the concepts in my courses. It seemed like a win-win-win.

In contrast, these days a student can go home, ask AI to write answers to its questions and (apart from the occasional hallucination) the student can pass in functional answers without learning anything - not the concept, not the steps required, and without putting in effort.

It's easy to see the short-term appeal from the student's point of view, but the long-term effects might be regrettable. This feels different from kids having calculators in schools in the 90s. This isn't just a shortcut or a faster way to solve an equation that they need to know how to input. This is the machine providing the logic, equation, and answer all at the same time. I don't like the idea of students graduating and having all the "answers", but without any idea of how they go them or which answers to trust.

So to recap, the GrapheneOS project (which is famous for spreading false information and attacking other open source projects, is planning to work with another phone, of unknown make, at some point in the future? This is about as vague and unreliable a a "news" story could possibly get.

I was one of the people who left GitHub this week.

Originally I created a GitHub account (back before Microsoft bought it) because that is where the developers were. People kept complaining to me that they wanted to contribute to my projects, but didn't want to do something so difficult as e-mailing a patch or using "old" technology like svn. The new devs are all about pull requests.

So I made a GitHub account and uploaded some of my projects there and I did get the pull request. But, over time, it's been a less and less good experience. I get almost no pull requests from real developers fixing real problems anymore. It's all AI slop and harassment and trolls and nagging from Microsoft to enable 2FA to enable tokens to upgrade to an Enterprise account. The GitHub experience is almost all pain and next to no benefit.

I've started migrating my projects to another platform that doesn't demand 2FA for a fun weekend project, doesn't try to up-sell, and doesn't push its automated crap into my projects.

The summary says people will typically click on the links in phising e-mails to learn about things like changes to the vacation policy. But is that really "falling" for the phishing attack? The employee isn't putting in any information, isn't giving away any secrets, isn't trying to login to anything. They're just clicking a link to see where it goes.

It's not _good_ that the employee is getting that far along in the process, but it's hard to say that just clicking the link is falling victim to a phising attack if they aren't doing anything that gives up information or affects the company. Now, if you got them to sign into the fake website or take action in the company based on the info on the fake website, then I'd agree the employees fell for the attack.

Someone trying to train AI agents on bad data soon won't have a job. It's not an unsupervised position where anyone can just toss bad data into the machine. Typically there are a couple of layers to the process. Person A provides training data. Person B makes corrections. Person C verifies those corrections. To get bad data into the system you'd need to have all three random people working together to provide bad training data. Anyone not working in good faith would soon be caught and fired.

Superman _can_ be an interesting character, when written well. The probably is studios usually want to show the big, flashy, punch-up scene and that is pretty boring when it's Superman.

Superman is at his best, I think, when we see behind the scenes. Who he is as Clark, how he navigates balancing his double identities, how he resists doing things the "easy way" with his god-like powers.

The New Adventures Of Superman (for all its faults) got that right. It focused on Clark most of the time and brought out Superman sparingly. We got to see him trying to be a good guy in an imperfect world, not just a super strong guy that could lift stuff.

I've tested a variety of chat bots on a regular basis to see how they perform in terms of coding or suggesting logic solutions. I've tried ChatGPT, Copilot, and Llama. Most of the time they are pretty bad, particularly doing anything above entry-level.

So I could see them being useful for a complete beginner (as long as the beginner checks the results) or as a way to fill in some common boilerplate stuff, but it's not really useful for anything beyond that.

Most of the code LLMs have given me (in Bash, C, Java, and Python) doesn't compile or doesn't run properly or is _close_ but has the logic backwards. It looks okay, but it's not actually functional for the task at hand.

Where I have found LLMs semi-useful is in brainstorming. If I give it a problem I'm working on and ask for a couple of approaches it'll usually give me one way to solve the problem that makes sense. It usually can't actually code the solution properly, but it'll give me some ideas and then I can code the solution myself.