I have only owned one subaru, and it is a 2007 that I've had for a year. I bought it with 243k miles, specifically because it was cheap, so my daughter can drive herself to school and all her activities.

I've spent more on fixing it than I spent on the car itself. I have needed replace tons of parts. It was basically a lemon (with no rust). However... it does not flash ads. I would rather have this lemon than a new computer on wheels that shows ads.

I have taught C++ and other computer science classes at a community college for the past 9 years. I started out only using paper exams, and students had to print their code for homeworks and projects. Then during the pandemic we moved online, and other than a couple of semesters, my classes have stayed online. Virtually all of the community college CS courses, for the entire state system, are online. I lecture virtually instead of in person and all assignments and exams are done through Blackboard.

Now with AI, I cannot distinguish between what a student wrote vs what AI wrote. It's absolutely impossible to tell the difference. Before AI, I could often tell when someone got help (if you submit code that doesn't match your skill level on the exams) or copied someone else's assignment (if you hand in the same code with the variable names changed...). Again, now I can't tell at all.

At the community college level, the deans are stuck with a problem: fewer students are enrolling, and those students want to learn about AI because they see it as the next job skill you need to have. At the state university level, the CS dept has gone the other direction: exams are on paper and homework is now 5% of the final grade instead of 50%

I tell my students at the beginning of the semester "You are paying tuition to learn the material in the course. Using AI to do your classwork is like going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights for you. Don't use AI"

When I was a computer science and engineering undergrad 25 years ago, there was talk of creating a licensing process for software engineers, similar to civil engineers. It was a terrific idea and I hope it got traction. But AI has turned software engineering into a mess. Software is every bit as critical to the safety of humans as civil engineering, but you would never trust AI to create buildings. The software engineering students of today are absolutely ill-equipped to write the vital software that is used today.

How does this help me (or anyone) socialize? It doesn't help bring people together, it drives them apart into their own little silos with the AI being their only gateway outside of that silo.

Reminds me of war dialing, looking for modems to connect to a network.

This doesn't take away freedom of opinion, but it does let the viewer know whether the influencer has any credibility.

Think back to the time when America was "great", which may be the 1950s according to MAGA. If an average person didn't understand some scientific topic, they didn't pretend to. They trusted Jonas Salk and others because they got to see the horrors or polio and the they saw the effect of the vaccines. The children saw some students not come back to school in the fall because they contracted polio over the summer. The parents saw the same thing and understood just how important vaccines were, whether they understood how it worked or not. Now everyone pretends to be an expert, even if they're actually an idiot. Even idiots knew their limits in the "good old days" before social media.

Oooofff...

I just have one word for you: BIT. COIN.

People are literally making money by selling the solutions to complex math problems. It's amazing. Those times tables I did in 2nd grade would be worth a fortune now.

Also, everything is a bubble if you wait long enough. It's just nicer when we don't have to experience the ebb of a bubble within our lifespans.

Let's replicate that in the US. Many school districts already ban smartphone usage during school hours, with very positive results.

Hopefully the Russians choose not to go looking for this guy.

Sounds good.

IBM used to create products like the ThinkPad... then they sold that business to a Chinese company. The company's past actions are the only solid data by which to judge whether this current promise will come true.

I remember watching a program on Nickelodeon when the HST launched, I think it was SK8 TV, and they said the show is so great that it blows the doors off the Hubble telescope. I thought that was the funniest thing ever. Apparently it was so memorable, I'm writing it on Slashdot, 35 years later.

as Stephen Colbert said the Whitehouse correspondants dinner so many years ago "Reality has a well known liberal bias"

I wouldn't be proud of it.

That's as clear an analogy as possible for the value of AI vs a human doing the same job. So, a masters degree, software engineering... is worth maybe $15k/mo in eyes of OpenAI? I can only imagine that cost will go down, and then what? A handful of people make tons of money while the majority of white-collar workers are out of a job.

This is just fundamentally different than previous technical revolutions because of its broad scope, and terminal heirarchy. In previous technical revolutions, a replaced worker had the potential to get more education and move up into a different job. This time, there are no roles to move into. If you replace the doctors and lawyers and engineers with AI, there is no moving up. It's only possible to move down.