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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

    The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.


  • Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

    To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

    If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

    tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.




  • I think the point is valid, but maybe not presented well. When the 40 hour work week was established, the understanding was that a single parent could work and earn enough for the family.

    Now, two earners are not just common they’re almost required. People are stressed, wondering how they’re supposed to juggle work and family and chores and all of the other things that need to get done and the answer is that they shouldn’t have to juggle so much.

    To be clear: women having the ability to work is undeniably a good thing. Women don’t have to be beholden to finding a good husband, they have options now, and workplaces have benefited from new perspectives. But it also got messed up by capitalism making it the default expectation… More people joined the workforce, but wages just sat still and ate up the gains.

    I’m not saying women should choose family over career, I’m saying that it should still be an option today for one parent to make enough for the family to live off of so that the other parent can help balance the workload of life better.