If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.
And, obviously, the administration of education should never be a for-profit venture.
Valuing democracy and being able to select sensible leaders depends on it.
>If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.
I can't tell you're being serious or you're being hyperbolic for the sake of defending education. Most people, given the choice would rather get free food, water, or healthcare.
Where I come [1] from, they would prefer education over everything else .
Material benefits or wealth can be stolen away on the whim of the stronger party, as history has proven over and over again.
No one can steal my education however.
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[1] This is a thing both the strong and weaker groups understood very well for over 3000 years. Who could learn which skills and therefore do what job is what the caste system was all about .
Teachers were and are considered only step below God, your teachers commands supersede even those of parents . Stories like those of ekalavya are venerated for a reason.
The power of knowledge and education was well understood and also closely guarded to create and manage oppression for thousands of years
There's so much that you cannot learn from the Internet, but must practiced, coached, steered, etc. That needs fysical things to interact with. That need teams, colleagues, or other humans.
People who think you can learn "everything" from the Internet have a very limited view of "everything". And could probably learn about the world by going out there ;)
I've learned a lot more from YouTube videos than anything else, and even without archive.org there's all the other shadow libraries I can get books from.
But sure, keep telling yourself that your overpriced "education" is worth anything in this era of truly massive information access.
Amongst all the things I have learned last decades is Beekeeping.
Yes, I watched online video. Read books, blogs etc.
But the true learning was done as apprentice with a few experienced beekeepers.
Beekeeping is only a part theory. There's a big part of practice. From training precise and calm hand movements to how to properly tucking in your vest to listening, feeling, and reading bees mood.
My point isn't that education should be expensive (my beekeeping journey cost me less than a few hundred Euro). But that education is far more than just putting theory in a brain.
Other examples are sports, art, crafts, cooking, music, acting, dancing, maintenance, building, gardening etc. lots of stuff that you can start in through YouTube. But that, in the end, requires fysical training, experience, and therefore at least guidance from experienced humans.
Ahh yes, the internet. Teaching babies about cursed Elsa, young children about alternative history, frustrated young men to blame women and minorities for their problem, and women that they will never be pretty enough without consuming product. Oh and the practically unlimited porn along all stages.
Crassness aside.
1. the internet is getting more and more pay walls too. So proper education isn't even free on the internet without months of curation.
2. People who make this claim must not have seen studies about homseschooled kids. That social element in being around a group of peers is crucial development that you can't really simulate anywhere else (without again, a crap ton of money for camps or something). Especially these days when everything is trying to isolate off.
there's perhaps something to be said for this argument: if you paid a lot of money for something you might be more motivated to use it wisely.
Also I can now get on the Internet and research jet engines or kidney transplants, but unless someone makes me learn the whole curriculum around it and then tests me to check if I understand, it's not worth much.
yeah, and also one's personal responsibility to make sure they are indeed learning and practicing.
implying i need to be dependent on a school to help me retain learning is a concept that is foreign to me. if i had that kind of dependency in my learning life, i'd be unemployed.
It’s never free. People in Europe say it is when they want to take a jab at the USA. But the reality is that earning potential is severely limited in Europe. And let’s not pretend that every degree obtained is beneficial to society. People get degrees with no marketable skills all the time. And the losses are distributed among all the taxpayers.
It’s not free, it’s paid by my taxes. I don’t get why you keep calling it that. That’s why we get paid less in the EU: subsidizing everything for everyone.
Yes, you must be able to recognize the right answers and separate them from the hallucinations and crappy engineering.
Maybe it’ll get to a point where even people who don’t have a clue can click Apply and never have to worry, but it’s not quite there yet.
If it does get there, I’ll find another occupation; it’s not like my job ever defined me as a person.
I have been doing this for 30 years now. The software industry is all about selling variations of the same stuff over and over and over. But in the end, the more software there is out there, the more software is needed.
AI might take it over and handle it all, but at some point, it would be cruel to make humans do it.
Business as usual. While electricity is remarkable, no one gets extremely rich selling it.
End-user value is the only value that can be sold at a profit.
And guess who has a grip of the end user? Operation System owners. Now that you might not need an app for most things, OS vendors are in even more powerful position. Gone the days of "this amazing app can do X", now it's going to be "have you noticed you can ask Siri to do X?" They have all of the context that app developers are going to miss about the user.
Both Apple and Google are doing a poor job of integrating AI capabilities into their Operation Systems today. Maybe there is room for a new player to make a real AI-first Operation system.
An AI-first pane of glass (OS, browser, phone, etc.) with an agent that acts in my behalf to nuke ads, rage bait, click bait, rude people on the internet, spam, sales calls and emails, marketing materials, commercials, and more.
If you want to market to me, you need to pay me directly. If you want to waste my time, goodbye.
I agree that the OS vendors are in a great position to add value via broad, general purpose features. But they cannot cover it all - it's breadth over depth. So I think the innovation for niches and specific business processes will be still owned by specialized 'GPT Wrappers'.
Siri will not even play my very specifically named Spotify playlist unless I prefix the name with “my”. It will rather just play something completely random public thing
I read this and of course couldn't believe it. Isn't 14.7B enough to be considered extremely rich these days[1]? In the the Forbes real-time billionaires list is quite easy to find _many_ such examples.
Just imagine a textbook that gives you the understanding you need to score high in math competitions…and it describes less than 1,000 problems. This in itself is a major discovery in metacognition.
I'm not knocking the work. They report large improvements using relatively little data. That's good. But let's be clear that this is further training of a good sized LLM that has read far, far more than any human that ever lived
already.
I know. The question is: How much of the Internet trove, including the smart bits, but also the tremendous amount of inane content, is actually useful to building the foundation that allows 1,000 problems to have such an effect?
Most of the math competitions people are working on are high school math competitions - these have problems from a relatively small set of mathematics, so that high school students can reasonably know the appropriate background.
That’s such a show of confidence! It’s an entirely different driving world over there. Particularly in terms of what is expected outside of what is mandated.
Looking forward to trying it.
In my experience the cars are highly regulated and very predictable on the main roads. Marked out lanes, low speed limits, many red lights.
But pedestrians and bikes are everywhere, and they don't always obey the rules. I wonder how well collision detection handles sharing lanes with bikes without suddenly braking in the middle of the road.
I was in a Waymo last week in San Francisco that had a bicyclist cut in front of us, no hard breaking or jerk just a gradual decrease in speed. I would've hit the break relatively fast myself but Waymo handled it without issue in a very smooth way.
I don't know how it'll handle significantly more pedestrians, but I assume that they're confident enough in the models and have run enough simulations to expand to Tokyo.
I bike in SF regularly and I actually cut in front of Waymos intentionally since I know they will slow down gracefully vs regular drivers who might not see me for a number of reasons or trigger road rage. Several months ago a Waymo would over correct but now they're so good at anticipating where I'm heading.
In San Francisco, pedestrians and bikes can appear anywhere around your car, at any speed in any direction. Including wearing all black, no light and taking 2 steps forward then turning around and taking 2 more steps forward (repeat but vary everything randomly). Or doing lasso circles with something heavy at the end of a rope in the middle of the street (last weekend). Just because this is not 100% of the time is not a license to run over ANY of them.
This is a kind of environment that human drivers are NOT made for. All the more not while clicking around on their Uber app or changing the music track or trying to read street signs or understand a Nissan dashboard map. In San Francisco, computers with multiple sensors have a gross advantage over humans.
I live in rural Japan, and in my experience, drivers are also crazy:
* They stop on the side of roads and streets whenever they feel like it without worrying about blocking the traffic.
* They don't turn the lights on no matter how bad the weather is. Super fun to be in the middle of a snow storm and people are driving white cars with the lights off.
* Whenever someone wants to turn right at an intersection, the cars behind will pass it on the left, without worrying if someone is coming the opposite direction, which is really dangerous. I am not sure about the Japanese law, but in my home country (Spain) that is highly illegal.
* Many people watch TV or anime while driving. I even saw one guy reading a book while driving, somehow holding it open over the driving wheel.
Add to this the awful state of most streets and roads, and I can see more accidents here in one year that I saw in 33 years in Spain.
How would passing on the left would risk a collision with a car coming from an opposite direction? The opposite lane is on the right hand side (in Japan)?
I assume they mean: Given turning/waiting car A, passing car B that is going straight and car C coming from right going straight. Car B likely has right of the way as they are going straight and they are on the left from viewpoint of car C, but car C may not see behind car A (like due to it being truck for example). Both B & C might think they have right of the way. B due to fact they should normally only need to avoid people coming from left and he can see there is no one there, C due to fact he entered intersection when he only saw A who is waiting to turn. I don't know Japan law so I don't know actually has right of the way here (in Finland A would actually have right of the way in mirrored situation as you always need to yield those coming from right in equal intersection, even if they are turning left).
Yes, it is a question of visibility. You have two cars coming from opposite directions, both want to turn right (Japan drives on the left), and both think they can do it safely, but all of sudden another car pops from behind.
I have seen many near accidents due to this. That's why such a maneuver is forbidden in many countries.
True. It doesn't help that most streets don't have sidewalks and you are forced to walk on the road. And even when there are sidewalks, people ignore them...
Oh, I mean — that's a thing even in the densest parts of Tokyo, people (and not just tourists!) just have no concept of moving aside to not block the flow, frequently walk like 3/4-abreast and block the entire width of the stairs/sidewalk ;P
Kinda surprising considering how everyone can do it perfectly on the escalator. To the point of ignoring the signs that tell them to stand two abreast.
