I’m 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I’m out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I’m glad I did it anyway even if I didn’t always believe them.

Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn’t for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.

I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.

I say history is for analysis because honestly anything that would let you truly understand today isn’t taught. Yes you will learn about segregation, but my history classes barely touched my grandparent’s time, so it’s hard to connect that middle missing period to today. Sure. I’m the mind of person to go fill in that middle period, but many people aren’t.

What was useful to me was the analysis part. Seeing how bias was in sources. Seeing how different people had the same sources, but different conclusions. Yes, seeing how a past event caused a future event.

But, I don’t think many people in the US connect US history with why we have many things going on today. Grade school history isn’t going to give that. My college history lessons did though. I had a whole ass history class on nothing by lobbying and I really gained an appreciation for why lobby should exist, how Americans are ridiculous, and how writing laws to keep the good of something, but not the bad is really hard. But no, I cannot tell you anything about the history of lobbying to day I spent 3 months studying and debating about it.

Back to math for a bit. I think that the logic part of math needs to be brought more into focus again. I think that programming is only going to become more and more important and it’s a shame we’re not teaching any of the fundamentals to allow people to even do things by make fancy excel formulas.

Oral would suck for the transition students. It’s a completely different style and skill set of answering questions and no kid would have training or the mental framework on how to do it. It’s great if you’re the kind of person who can write a mostly perfect draft essay from start to finish no skipping around or back tracking, but if that’s not you, it’s gonna be a rough learning curve. This is before we ask questions like how does a deaf person take this exam? A mute person? Someone with verbal paraphasia?

This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn’t about the subject it’s about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren’t really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I’m an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.

Even in college I had classes like that. It’s why just programming the answer wasn’t always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn’t always the point.

To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don’t realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.

I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you’ve keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it’s so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can’t vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they’d bumbled something by hand. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of in the future. I don’t think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they’re looking for before they’re taking this shortcut.

I hear you, but I’m just saying that he probably won’t have any regrets about his kid’s childhood or literally everyone would. He’s spending a typical amount of time with his kids.

Could he spent more? Yeah. Will he have regrets around his life? Yes. That man will die of a heart attack or exhaustion, but his children will know him. And worse still, they’ll know that compared to most super rich parents, their dad paid them more mind than others in their peer group. Wealthy parents tend to offload their children onto others.

I get it. I have a kid and kids really eat into living your life even if you love them.

on his deathbed will regret only spending 2 hours a day with his family. That’s really sad.

I don’t know if you work and have kids, but honestly 2 hours of focused quality time with your kids is honestly amazing. I get 5 hours with my kid in the afternoon and that’s because I’m privileged and I can pick her up exactly when she gets out of school. I still don’t get to really hang out and just play with her those whole 5 hours because I still have to do things like cook and clean.

Sure on the weekends I manage more, but honestly 2 hours of just nothing but you and kid time is pretty normal for a working parent that isn’t working insane hours. That guy will regret not going to recitals and stuff, but he won’t be disconnected from his kids. I sure didn’t get 2 hours a day during the week from my exhausted parents.

Firefox literally used to be a significant browser before Chrome showed up. Users have to download Chrome. It’s not like it default. It’s just a matter of changing habits. They swapped from Firefox to Chrome they can back. They’ll do it for thr same reason so many people left IE for Firefox: it sucked.

When ads get overbearing and scammy, your favorite neighbor IT guy will install Firefox for them or something and tell them to use it. A child or grandchild will do the same. So it has always been. That’s how adblock even became so big. People didn’t use it before.

Ads are so bad now, I actually went out of my way to install Firefox on my phone. My less technical relatives just refuse to use anything but apps.

Thank you. I hate it when people say Twitter wasn’t profitable. It was profitable. It just wasn’t an infinite money printing machine like people (investors) wanted. Twitter didn’t need investor money or loans to pay all its bills unlike say Tumblr.

Twitter was the victim of the same financial BS as Toysrus.

I have a 4 year with unlimited access to her tablet. She will throw it down in a second to go to the park or play with friends. Or just because I told her to put it down.

I gave it to her at 2. I think the key for me is disallowing it in combination with anything else. She can’t hang out with me and play on her tablet. She can’t play in the park and use her tablet. I also keep her in Amazon’s walled garden for now. I’ve decided that Amazon’s opinion about what’s good for kids is better than most others. I’ve also been encouraging my daughter to use it as a learning tool like she’ll have to as an adult. She’s used to to trying to learn Spanish when she got a friend who spoke it and to reinforce what she’s learning in preschool.

All in all, I think that technology is mostly about boundaries. My nephews are addicts but mostly because they have no boundaries. My sister overruled me over having a “digital detox” day after her son had been playing videogames non-stop for 3 days now. Kid watch some YouTube or something. Nope apparently it’s summer so he can do whatever. This will definitely not be a problem when school starts 🙄.

Any kid who is desperate enough to leave the house for wifi was failed years ago about boundaries and healthy usage. Their parents are silly anyway. Parental controls can make a literal any device a brick. This is the first lesson I taught my kid. Tablets work at my pleasure. My daughter doesn’t even whine about it anymore. Tablet becomes a brick at 8pm sharp and she just plugs it up and gets into bed.

I mean there is still the very real threat of niche irrelevance. If enough instances are aligned with corporations, the embrace, extend, extinguish can happen. You really want Independent instances to have at least a 1/3 of the population. Threads is gonna make that extremely tricky when it federates.

I ended up at tiny beans because I had to accommodate the tech illiterate and iPhone users. It’s just easier if the app emails my grandma pictures. She gets emails and no one has to even make her an account for her to get stuff.

I have a 4 year old and I post a lot of pictures of my kid, but like privately. I use an app called tinybeans. You have to be explicitly invited. Grandma gets emails because she can’t use apps. everyone is happy. My kid’s pictures are hidden away from facebook and family members have to take much more active action to share her photos beyond themselves. And they know that means excommunication from the picture firehose, so they don’t. That’s how I’ve managed this. I mean… there’s still a bunch of embarrassing stuff in there, but at least the only people who can see it are the people who were traditionally privy to embarrassing kid shit anyway.

I have been using lcs on another account for a small instance and it has been amazing for making the instance feel connected. Thanks!

I feel like this is only true of internal or enterprise software where switching is expensive. For business to consumer, the impact of bugs can cause a company to go under or at least become a zombie. For any type of company, the thread of a competitor is high and can cause your company to stagnant and slowly go under or bleed and rapidly go under.

There is a real impact to a high amount of bugs, it just doesn’t happen in one quarter. It happens over years and results in higher stress foe the developers. A stagnating company doesn’t hire. It doesn’t give raises and slashes benefits. A lot of terrible things happen before a company goes under. We can watch Twitter speed running this.

I wasn’t talking about rewriting an existing system either. I’m talking about adding to a system. In order to do that effectively, you need to understand the system as it stands and consider how any requirement could clash or be impossible with the current set of requirements. This is why I bring up the AI needing to pull a set of requirements from the existing code. You cannot add requirements without knowing the requirements that already exist.

I think that hallucination is still a massive issue. I don’t even like to call it hallucination because what it really is bad guesses. We should never forget that all any AI does is guess. It doesn’t reason about anything or connect information together. AI will hold contradictory positions because of this.

Currently we have no way to make an AI declare that it just doesn’t know or even very often ask for more information in order to make a decision because the method of training an AI is literally guess and check.

For that reason, I don’t think that AI will ever be the tool for the job when it comes to any kind of requirements gathering. I mean I guess you could, but I always run the risk of being like that lawyer who had made up cases in this result. AI made things up because all it does it make its best guess and it doesn’t care I’d that guess is grounded in much of anything at all.

I feel like AI would fall down even harder here. A lot of long running applications have “secret” rules in them that developers have as either tribal knowledge or they have to reas the code and see is the case. Will AI be sophisticated enough to read a massive repo probably dependent on several others and have a realistic understanding of the requirements inherent in that code system? Because that’s what we pay senior devs to be good at quickly figuring out. I find myself skeptical that AI will be able to do that in a trustworthy way with how it “hallucinates” now and doesn’t have the concept that it just doesn’t know sometimes. If a developer has to spend time checking the AI’s assertions about the rules, is that actually going to be faster than just keeping them in their mind or doing the research themselves?

Well… yes. That was the point made in the article. Validating the email address doesn’t do anything. The easiest way is to just sent a link to the entered address and see if the user can click it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a working definition of a business rule beyond what feels right intuitively. I’m going to carry this forth with me.

Perhaps you’ve been reading this with mounting frustration: How about validating the address according to the SMTP spec?

Indeed, that sounds like something one should do, but turns out to be rarely necessary. As already outlined, users can easily supply a bogus address like [email protected]. It’s valid according to the spec, and so what? How does that information help you?

I feel like this is the difference between an academic and a professional. One is trying to do it provably right and the other is trying to satisfy a need with limited resources.

I think that for school, assignments will just evolve. We’ll go back to in classroom essays probably. We’ll also see the nature of assignments change. I remember when I was in high school and the internet was in its infancy. My history just gave us more specific topics to write on to force us to use books. My young cousin who came a decade behind me. Found himself with topics that necessitated using scholarly sources. Wikipedia wasn’t gonna cut it. I imagine in grade school it will be like that with assignments that need some kind of human invention while allowing for inescapable technology use.

I went to a top engineering college, to say that cheating wad rampant and creative was an understatement. I thought how the professors got around that was fascinating in retrospect. Some assignments were intentionally unpassable. If you got a passing grade, you failed. Your curved grade was based on standard distribution of not only your class, but every other class that had every been.

Projects and in person things were super common. Assignments were keyed to you as a person and no one in the class had the exact same assignment. For that reason collaboration in project based classes was expected and encouraged.

The one thing AI will never have is discretion and yoi can’t get their output with a linked computer. I look forward to seeing how schools adapt their assessments around these facts.

To be honest, I’m not sure how one could reasonably regulate AI. It feels like “locks are for honest people. For everyone else, there’s windows.” Unlike a nuclear bomb, it’s fairly trivial to make an AI of any sort. I think it’ll be interesting to see how we catch rogue actors in this space.