Wow that first photo almost looks like a sci-fi contraption!
(insert suggestions here)
And wonderful such a building that embodies in stone all kinds of mathematical relations, religious references etc. Let's hope it'll stand at least as long as it took to build. :)
HN's skepticism on this subject (which I share) is understandable. At the same time I share your view of its enormous potential.
Personally I'd question the "who is this coming from?" (you answered that in another comment), and "what's the intention behind it?".
If you're a commercial company, I'd be tempted to suspect a "hook 'em while they're young" thought behind it. Perhaps not now, but turning into that over time because 'reasons' (cough "shareholder value" & the like).
If you were a non-profit otoh, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.
To address that, would you be willing to pursue a non-profit status for your company and/or platform? Has this been discussed @ some point?
Btw: thanks for taking the time to address the many issues raised in this thread! HN can be a brutal place for people not used to its audience! (trust me, we're mostly friendly but with an extreme no-bullshit attitude at times).
> In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.
If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)
If you'd have a ~5y old yourself, what would your prefer for your kid?
> One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.
Interesting! Also note a caveat (quoted from Wikipedia):
The phenomenon's associated problem, as described by Bloom, was to "find methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring".
Perhaps it would be better to focus on that problem?
> and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.
How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario? Toddlers on a video conference call hours a day? Physical contact is a basic need for humans. Especially kids.
> eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers
Ah yes: WILL (and although likely, not guaranteed). How about re-evaluate our options & stragegies once that's the case?
> Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+
True. It's well known that some % of students do well with individual tutoring. Move faster, understand things better, etc. And another part of students don't do well with that. They need other things. Maybe help from their peers in smaller groups (like 3..8 students), some after-school extra, a fix for problems back home, whatever.
But 5y olds? They need contact with peers, play, attention from humans, run around, build stuff from Lego blocks, touch grass, etc. Learning to read, "3x4=12" math etc isn't hard enough to warrant putting 5y old kids on AI tutors.
<meta name="description" content="AI Generated. Black cat laptop on kitchen table. Window with view of misty Welsh mountains and Blodwyn the sheep in the background
So.. AI generated cat? Blodwyn also, or is (s)he a real sheep? But then I stumbled onto this page:
Compare the pics. Same-looking window, same view, different table/kitchen.
So I'd guess the 'sheep' is just a small element of AI-generated pic. With that element looking like a sheep. But why would it be called Blodwyn then? Did it ever exist as a real sheep? Did author know a sheep called Blodwyn @ some point? Was there a real sheep named Blodwyn whose photo wound up in AI model's training data?
Different GUI toolkits look & feel is more or less unavoidable if you want backwards compatibility for 3rd party apps (and on Linux, one could read "3rd party" as "anything built on a different UI toolkit than the default desktop environment"). But Thom's conclusion:
"Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face."
That's just pathetic for a multi-$B company with >200k employees. At least an OS's built-in apps should be functional, performant, easy to use, and get out of the way of users getting work done.
But that's not even the worst. The worst is that MS clearly doesn't care. MS only seems to care about slurping user's data, pushing unwanted crap (ads, AI features nobody asked for etc), and making sure Windows comes pre-installed on as many computing devices as possible. End users be damned.
If MS would care, then 30y+ of refinement, MS's resources, and Moore's law could have turned Windows into the smoothest, fastest, easiest to use OS on the planet. But alas.. here we are in a different timeline.
There's also the dual-screen b/w LCD game (running off 2 LR44 batteries iirc). Back when I was a kid, that was a prized possession during school breaks.
We'd exchange those handhelds with other kids & play 'em to death. Plane & Tank Battle, Highway and Q-Bert spring to mind as some favourites.
It's disappointing how often the public gives a silent thumbs up on military spend. Okay I'll grant most US citizens would have preferred Trump hadn't gotten into this war.
But most talk is about the $$ cost of this war, how little Trump has to show for it, and price of gasoline & groceries.
Instead (for US citizens), the talk should be about what else could have benefitted from those $$, and now isn't because it'll be used to re-stock weaponry. Think healthcare, infrastructure, education, research, etc etc.
Article spends many words on [training during product development] and few words on [security issues with devices sold to consumers]. Risks are the exact opposite.
'Guinea pigs' in this case were company employees, who at least gave permission to be recorded. And aware of that.
Consumers often don't give such permission (or are tricked into that), may not be aware of a device's capabilities, and post-sale firmware security is often weak to non-existent. That is the bigger risk.
I don't understand why so many devices 'need' 24/7 internet connectivity. In this example: do the training. Product works? Ship to consumers with connectivity disabled. Updated firmware available? Plug in USB stick a few times a year. Or have consumer push a "connect" service button, device downloads new firmware & disconnects. Why provide a 24/7 playground for hackers/bots etc?
Yeah I know companies selling these things have many reasons. But security-wise it makes no sense.
"Google’s total claim for emissions reductions “enabled” by their products is a whopping 41 million megatonnes of CO2-e, more than the company’s entire footprint by a good margin."
Author trying to exaggerate by squeezing in an extra "million" factor?
If you look at the captions under the pictures in "Figure 15.", they add up to around 41 Mt CO2 equivalent. That's either "41 million tonnes" or "41 megatonnes". NOT "41 million megatonnes".
Author's number didn't make sense anyway. Wikipedia:
"Over 60 billion tons were emitted in 2025, higher than any year before.[2] Total cumulative emissions from 1870 to 2022 were 703 GtC (2575 GtCO2), of which 484±20 GtC (1773±73 GtCO2) from fossil fuels and industry, and 219±60 GtC (802±220 GtCO2) from land use change."
41 Million megatons = 41,000 gigatonnes. Easy to see that doesn't compute no matter how you slice it.
> The chance that one would have anything important on a floppy that is not already backed up in the year of 2026 must be close to zero.
In the case of personal files: probably true. Who needs 20y old tax filings.
But there are exceptions. For example: sometimes games were released (binary only), decades later an author dies, relatives clean out the attic & flog some old computer junk on eBay, buyer goes through the stuff & discovers source code for a game that was believed to be lost long ago.
Or a never-released book manuscript is discovered in similar fashion.
Some 'slave wage' person spending their time to produce crap that wastes other people's time. All to increase a number on some CEO's dashboard.
Same workers could instead be building actually useful stuff, up their skillset, contribute to their country's culture, etc etc.