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Comment Nothing to do with emergencies (Score 1) 198

by EmagGeek (#66363834) Attached to: Radio Broadcasters Support America's 'AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act'

In a dire emergency, your car is the last place you should be, and the last thing you should try to hang onto. FEMA's official disaster preparedness communication calls for you to have a PORTABLE AM radio and to avoid travel unless absolutely necessary. "Let's get in the car and go to Disney" is not part of FEMA's official recommendations.

Also, to assume that AM radio will even work in an emergency or disaster is a stretch in the first place. Ancient broadcasting equipment living in swamps with hundreds of meter tall towers, seldom internet access, and nonredundant uplinks, are not reliable.

When Helene hit us in 2024, AM/FM radio was the first thing to go off the air, followed by the land-based Internet providers, followed by the cellular networks. We got by with local amateur radio operators who were able to communicate outside the zone on batteries and solar panels.

There is no "one thing" that is going to be universally reliable in a disaster. You have to have an "all of the above" mindset and prepare to communicate by different available means.

Comment Re:Rude (Score 1) 149

by EmagGeek (#66328750) Attached to: Why Google Told Drivers to Drive a Longer Way On Purpose

This is exactly analogous to the power companies pushing people to "efficiency" programs at the cost of comfort just so they don't have to spend money to build out infrastructure.

"We'll provide a worse experience for you so the powers that be don't have to do anything substantive to solve the problem"

Comment Why do I care about instruments? (Score 0) 165

by EmagGeek (#66320774) Attached to: Instrument Clusters Are Now Paid Extras In Two Hyundai Models

As long as I know how fast I'm going and how much fuel I have left, what do I care about engine speed and oil pressure and coolant temperature, and so on? I don't need to monitor all of the minutiae of my engine's operating point while I am driving. That is handled by the FADEC. The FADEC will tell me when and if there is a problem. I do not need to monitor these things myself. This emotional attachment to the past is just that, an emotional attachment.

Comment Re: The existence of the database endangers us (Score 0) 142

Tell me you've never used an AI coding tool, without telling me ...

I don't know about the rest of the peanut gallery, but I can say first hand that claude is excellent at commenting and documenting code and architecture, as well as keeping track of lessons learned.

Submission + - How Big Tech Captured American Schools

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In How Big Tech Captured American Schools (alt source), an adapted excerpt of the forthcoming book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, the New York Times' Natasha Singer begins: "Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked. Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain."

"Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn."

"This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas."

"This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?"

In an accompanying LinkedIn post, Singer adds: "Every few years, Silicon Valley has urged American public schools to quickly adopt the latest technology or teach the latest tech subject: Big Data analytics; laptops for every child; algorithm-driven math and reading apps; computer programming; virtual reality. And each time the urgent arguments sounded remarkably similar: if schools just adopted the latest tech tool, or taught the latest tech subject, it would democratize learning for every child and equip students with valuable career skills. The campaign to expand student access to computer science and other efforts had good intentions. But today we know some of those classroom tech drives did not exactly pan out as advertised. Now some of the same companies that urged schools to provide laptops and coding lessons are employing similar arguments to urge schools to quickly adopt A.I. tools. I've spent years covering Chromebooks and student chatbot use. And I'm troubled by our collective amnesia around school tech."

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