I made a scraper that searches through all the news and finds anything 'war' related. It then summarizes it and give me that new in the Star Wars crawl with music.
I love Bret. His outreach work is exactly my cup of tea.
It is unfortunate that the Ivory Tower can't recognize it though. His path to tenure is closed at this point. Yet any school would have a gem if they prompted him.
His star really is rising and his reach is widening. I can;t wait until he gives up the ghost and decides to go to some think tank or another and really makes the dough.
I've got mixed feelings on AI assistance. I'll relate 2 anecdotes.
1 - When I was in grad school (before AI), we had to use Canvas for a class. One day, I got an obvious spam/phishing email in the internal Canvas system. It was so strange. The writer just would randomly hit the capslock button and keep typing away, no salutation, no signature, just a real mess. They were asking for a particular professor to come to their house to teach them about ... something? Again, real strange.
So, I email IT and say 'Hey, somehow a spammer got into the system, do your thing'.
They email back and go 'Nope, it's a student, that somehow managed to CC the entire system, sorry about that'.
Dear Reader, the message was pure garbage. Literally, it looked liked it was written by a 3rd grader without any shame. [0]
I happened to know the professor of the class. So later on, I talked with them over symposium coffee about it. They said that they remembered that particular email because of all the IT back and forth. It was for an upperdivision class in the Engineering department. The email itself was not particularly notable otherwise. In that, they saw such emails all the time, in terms of quality. This was a top 100 ranked (whatever that means) university, by the by.
Shocking.
2 - My grandfather was an officer and a mechanic for the USAF. A bit of an odd combo, but he was partly responsible for instituting many preventative maintenance checks and protocols, novel in those early days of the AF. His aptitude and memory were quite sharp for many mechanical things. Until the strokes from decades of smoking caught up, he could tell you exact measurements and torque values for a variety of airplane related things (I can no longer remember what exactly, the memory skills did not transfer to me).
I do vividly remember standing in that light blue garage of his and him all but yelling at me once. We were looking at the brakes on an old car he was 'restoring' (getting away from Grandma for a little bit). He pointed at the old drum brakes on the axel.
He asked me how tight the pads should be on the inner rim of it.
I had no idea.
So he asked where I might find out.
I figured I'd ask him.
But what if Grandpa wasn't there?
We'll I'd have to look it up somewhere (they had no internet).
Fantastic. Now, what about the next time you're working on the brakes?
Well, just make sure that the pads are at that spec.
And that when Grandpa hit me with the nugget of hard won wisdom: No, you look it up every time. Because these are brakes, and if you are wrong then they might fail, and they might fail when the driver has their whole family in the car at 100 mph. And then because you were lazy, half a dozen people die.
---
These two times stand in my head when it comes to AI.
For the first one, yes, AI would be such a boon to that very clearly struggling student reaching out for help. It would get them back on the path to the real struggle of getting their degree. That level of assistance would be like a wheelchair to a paraplegic.
For the second anecdote, AI is condemning people to death. Using it in life critical situations and care, letting it hallucinate or skip over critical values, that's a recipe for disaster.
Where do we set the fine line of using AI and not? For brakes and X-ray machines, obviously not. For helping kids learn to write emails correctly? Sure, sounds great.
Unfortunately, I feel the old adage about regulations is going to be true here like it is with every new technology: The rules are written in blood.
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> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
Same principle as too much security. One of the things that contributes to this is that the safety side usually doesn't have any incentive to reign itself in.
There is an old adage for that general idea.
"The treatment should not be worse than the disease"
What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do credit work in the first place, granted. But in terms of the classes, none of the readings were ever pointless. If anything, we never had enough time to even do the readings that we really should have - the courses should have been longer. If you are seeing the readings as just busy assignments, you really need to talk with the professor and try to figure out if you're in the right class or not.
My undergrad was in computer science and my master's is a MBA. Both from good schools (think top 50 not top 5).
I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean throw 12 on the floor and 3 are fluff, I mean, take a 12 page case study and 3 of the pages are not adding value.
Articles are even worse because the pay is often by the word and there are min lengths to get into the print edition.
Speaking from experience. I actually wrote a book for a major publisher and the main metric that determined how much I got paid was page count. We had a page count decided before the first word outside of the proposal was written.
I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein.
Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices.
I'm not an MBA guy, so I can't speak to the curriculum in Biz Schools, but I can say that what you say does come across with most MBAs I have met. In that they think similarly about their education being about the networking and not really about the material.
Which is a shame really for both of our sides of this all.
I think you are saying that the publishers are essentially paying for minimum words / word count. Which is the opposite of what any writing upperdivision teacher would tell you about writing. And I'm saying that you are getting busy work assigned from the professor in the first place (and then saying that i haven't experienced that).
The solution is to have the students take charge of their education and be less passive. If the assignments are bad (in selection or in writing) then the student should challenge the teacher on it.
Yeah, that's a harder way to do things, yes, but I think anyone out of school for anytime will agree that it would be a better way.
Thank you for sharing you experience with me all the same.
Just greping for 'Israel' or 'Palestine' gives 13 incidents, the latest occurring in 2000.
It's a quite large share of the hijackings on the list, much more so that I'd have imagined de novo.
Reading through a few of them, most of the hijackers had a fair bit of mental instability (duh?). So, I could totally see them naming a bluetooth something crazy if they had them those days.
Also, most of the incidents ended up being fairly well handled and there weren't many casualties. But if I were a pilot and I were getting paid regardless of turning the plane around or dealing with a possibly fatal multi-day saga, I'd likely just turn the plane around too.
I would be a bit more charitable in assigning motive for the pilot's actions.
Airline pilots are morally and physically responsibile for the lives on their aircraft. This necessitates respect for their authority.
Like other professionals, they must compartmentalize personal beliefs and professionalism.
Playful antics and silly BS, whether it be for the lulz, politics, or anything else, is a disrespectful act of defiance to the individuals you entrust to deliver you safely to your destination.
They are the final authority in flight, and have broad discretion they must exercise prudently with a bias for risk aversion.
I've known 2 airline pilots. They are the most even keeled people I've ever come across. Literally, the coolest and calmest people.
The system (should) weed out anyone who would act unprofessional, like letting their political beliefs cloud their judgment.
It's interesting that you know what the pilot was doing and why they were doing it. Anyways, there's zero chance the pilot will be fired. Pilot unions are incredibly powerful and go to bat to protect their members.
And Nixon followed through with countless post-WW2 policies, practices, and acted on concerns that stemmed specifically from that conflict. The Cold War and all related funding being an easy example.
I’d also be very wary of recency bias when looking at the extremist fringes of religious and political situations that have been ongoing for centuries. We might feel a couple decades is a long time, but in conflicts all parties can veto the other parties subjective interpretations.
Hey look, that person may have discovered that the introduction of Bluetooth on mobile phones somehow prevented future hijackings from being listed on Wikipedia with those keywords they grepped for. Let's not count out this water-tight approximation of commercial piloting procedure. Just think of how many incidents have been similarly prevented around that specific regional conflict by reducing legroom, shrinking overhead storage, and innumerable TSA back-of-the-hand bad touches.
For the non Californians here, there is very important context on admissions that may not be widely known.
Under the 1960 California Master Plan, the top 12.5% of California high school graduates have automatic entry into the UC system.
That is no longer quite the case though. Nowadays, under the Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) system, the top 9% of high school graduates are guaranteed a spot in the UC system, regardless of rejection to school. That said, you will commonly hear about the Master Plan in conversations here without the nuance.
In practice, this is typically UC-Merced or UC-Riverside as the UCs of last resort.
That said, about 32% of all UC entrants are in the ELC system. So, I'd assume that around 32% of incoming UCSD (the UC in question in the article) entrants are ELC.
The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) found that ~80% of ELC entrants came from below average schools.
So, assuming nothing special here, 0.8*0.32 = ~0.25, or ~25% of incoming UCSD students came from an 'bad' high school.
> Statewide, 37.3% of students meet math learning standards in the grades that are tested.
Look, there are a lot of complicated stats and math that I just do not have the coffee for here. But a 'failing' 25% of incoming entrants is in the right ball park.
The University of Texas system has a similar matriculation standard too.
TLDR: Failing high schools are the root cause here. UC professors should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this is surprising.
TLDR: Got over his skis and mad with power and money. Decides to invade Parthia. Gets wrecked by horse archers. That ends up being typical for Romans, but this was the first-ish time that happened. Some of those captured legionaries may have ended up in China, though it is unlikely.
Not going probably never even crossed his mind. Social status in Roman society was very strongly influenced by military success. He was a previously successful general.
Historically (with all the accuracy you get when you summarize all of history) raising an army and not leading it was effectively telling everyone that you should be replaced by whoever did lead it.
I made a scraper that searches through all the news and finds anything 'war' related. It then summarizes it and give me that new in the Star Wars crawl with music.
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