MangoCats

everyone is getting passed along

In the US that was codified into “No Child Left Behind” - one of the worst things to happen to US education, ever.

I agree with all your points, but want to add one: cheating with AI should be redirected to effective use of AI as a tool. I would approach a writing class topic like this:

1. Welcome… as our first assignment you are going to switch off all technological assistance and write a paper for me on XYZ, just using what you know off the top of your head here during class. Turn this in and keep a copy.

2. In classroom, tech limited to non-AI research - read and cite original sources, improve your paper with the research, check all of your assumptions, correct them when appropriate, cite backup when you find it. Does your conclusion change? Again, freeze a copy of this iteration.

3. Homework “use AI” (with no instructor direction as to how). Write the paper using all available technological resources (including AI) now, provide helpful starter links to AI resources that “can help,” then compare that to your previous versions.

Instructor / teaching assistants now grade papers 1, 2 and 3 with maybe 10% total weight in the final grade for each.

4. In classroom guidance on how to use AI well, with copious embarassing examples of AI used poorly (names withheld, but students might recognize their work…)

5. Homework: for any students who turned in “less than ideal” papers in 3), try again. Fail again. Fail better this time.

6. In classroom pop-quiz: just like the first assignment, switch off all technological assistance and write the paper on XYZ just using what you know during class.

Grade 5 and 6 for points, 30 points for 5, and 40 points for 6.

In mandatory attendance schools, some will do more poorly on 6) than 1), that’s just the nature of the setting. Those who want to learn should be able to improve along the way, rather dramatically.

In the late 70s / 80s we didn’t have cell phones, we had pocket electronic games - and that was just obvious: lunch / recess time only stuff, duh. Cell phones have that nasty “safety communication lifeline” hook that single purpose electronic games don’t have, but in reality they’re just 10,000x more addictive entertainment widgets than those old pocket games ever were.

I think a lot of U.S. schools got lazy about enforcing “phone off and put away” in class - to the point that kids feel like it’s a right. Same thing actually has crept all the way up into the armed forces even on deployment. If anybody were to ask me where we need to start drawing the line, I’d say right there: if you’re forward deployed at sea, you do NOT get unfettered access to a personal communication device that would have been the wet dream of every spy of the last century. Hell, if you’re enlisted at all you should have an armed forces standard issue phone for all your communication needs, complete with a pre-enlistment acknowledgement that all those communications ARE recorded and you WILL be held accountable for EVERYTHING you communicate through them. Personal phones should be locked down and even less accessible than firearms, because they ARE more dangerous to the missions.

American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I’m being taught or refut it.

In high school we had a mandatory senior year “Americanism vs Communism” (AVC) class, if ever there were an obvious propaganda slot - taught by retired navy no less. In reality, he didn’t know much about Communism and had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about it, basically taught freshman Civics all over again.

The problem I have with your position is: you can find anything and everything on the internet, from stone cold facts to complete fiction and everything in-between, and especially with AI assistance in building websites it’s becoming harder than ever to differentiate between the two. Now, you get some 9 year old who lives in a 3 generation Faux news viewing household, hears “the facts” from all his family and all their friends every day, armed with a browser full of shortcuts to all the “Best” websites - I, as teacher, absolutely do NOT have time to knock your head off and screw it back on straight, nor would that be a good thing for me to do career wise. FAR FAR easier to get 45 minutes of captive time to say what I want to say - which may or may not be fed to me by the state censor board - and at least give you one perspective instead of having open debate with 30 children and their website “sources” every day, all period long. Having said that, maybe 10% of classroom time should be devoted to intelligent, safe, thoughtful internet research of the topic at hand - but not every time a child thinks they have all the answers.

Our AVC teacher was about 5’4" - MAJOR Napoleon complex - he didn’t give a damn about the anti-communist propaganda, his (mostly failed) goal was to instill respect and discipline in our about to graduate teenage minds… That was his core driver every class every day all 90 days that he “had us.” Lots of teachers have these personal agendas, they’re not all bad, and it’s actually an important part of your education to experience some diversity among your teachers like that - you never know when you’ll meet someone more or less like them in real life, and having that school experience might just teach you how to work better with the versions you meet in real life.

Your doom-scroll will always be waiting there for you at home, if your parents allow it. If you’ve made it to 18 years of age and still feel repressed, you’re welcome to make your own way in the world and discover the truths, lies, and half truths that await you all on your own. I’ll submit: if you’ve got enough skepticism to fact check your teacher in class, you can probably resist the brain washing without needing instant gratification from “sources you trust.” And, classroom time isn’t for you to convince your 12 year old peers how wrong that tool at the front of the room is, you’ll have plenty of time outside of class for that.

Anyone who seeks political office should be categorically banned from having it.

The purpose of a leader isn’t to enforce a hierarchy, it is to lead in a direction. Not to decide everything, but to decide where there is genuine ambiguity, when the answer isn’t clear: to make it clear.

Some direction is established by principles, some by circumstances, some by goals, and how all these are prioritized helps to decide. But, at the end of it all, with all the best information being gathered and synthesized by all the best people for their respective areas of expertise ranging from technical, to financial, to ethical, to political, etc. etc. there still needs to be interpretation of: what does that all mean to us.

And, ultimately, power should be flowing from the consent of the governed - the first 50.1% contra-coalition shouldn’t (usually) have the power to overthrow and install their replacement, but ultimately, at some intervals in time, at some levels of dis-approval, change is healthy and that change should be to the leading candidate which most represents the will of the governed.

Yet, we live in a world where “he who has the gold, makes the rules” and, so, we get these violent backlashes against authoritarianism when it is installed and maintained via power and money. As we should.

Cry me a river. These kinds of “business intelligence” reports have been overpriced, near zero value slop since they started publishing them (a long long time ago.)

The reality is no one person is qualified to “run” a multinational megacorp. Not a single human being knows enough for this level of complexity

This was true of the United States of America in 1789, but still you need a leader. A leader like Buzz Lightyear, he’s “always sure.” Confidently pursuing a plausible, coherent path has value, even when it’s not the optimal path - difficult to see, the future is, always in motion - direction by committee of “the best people” has its place, but so does decisive leadership.

To be fair, AI slop is probably higher quality information than the “in depth meticulous analyses” these kind of clowns have been peddling for thousands of dollars for the past 40+ years.

This kind of slop for research has been passed around for decades. In the 1990s I read a “corporate intelligence report” on a company I was working for, it was 90% incorrect and 40% far far off target. Over the years I had several occasions to read and check these kinds of business research reports and they’d rarely even get the things that were published in the quarterly reports right, anything beyond that kind of public information was a lot of speculation, most of it wrong.

My approach: I don’t expose anything (that can’t handle it) to the internet. So so many things are “out there” that don’t need to be, shouldn’t be…

One threat: people using the models are finding bugs and the more rare exploits at a much faster rate than before, perhaps 10x. This means that zero-day exploits are coming into the hands of the kinds of people who use them for bad purposes about 10x faster than they used to. It also means the white hats are creating these CVEs faster and people addressing the CVEs are able to do so faster, with the same manpower… so… if either side slows down, it will shift the balance we currently have toward their opponents.

I’ve had a subscription to Anthropic/Claude for a bit over 8 months now, and I just added Google’s Gemini Pro - While Gemini today is a bit better than Claude was last November, it’s far far behind where Claude is now.

It seems to me that they’re converting at about the same percentage rate bugs->exploits as before, they’re just getting a lot more press than the old bug reports did.

Tiny little example: Azure DevOps supports ssh key access, but only the old - now considered insecure/inadvisable for continued use - RSA ssh keys.

Their priorities for providing that kind of convenient secure access lie elsewhere, in activities that generate more revenue for them.

they rely on being closed source to survive penetration

M$ always has.

But even open source relied a great deal on the volume and complexity of their code base to survive penetration… until now.

its great at creating this busy work but not so much with fixing it

Actually, if you know what needs fixing, LLMs can accelerate the fixing process quite a bit too.

The problem is: LLMs don’t know what they don’t know, so they’ll declare “good enough” and it’s up to the LLM operator to call BS and give them additional context to ensure they keep going until ALL the applicable concerns are addressed.

It it is unsafe to code, full stop.

The things we’re expecting our code to handle, with the lack of formal verification testing we’re expecting our code to ship with, there’s no such thing as safe. It took 50 years to “build the stack” to where we’re at, and we did it fast and cheap. There’s so many bugs hiding in the lasagna it’s amazing it doesn’t eat itself.

If you re-build your system from first principles, open source silicon with peer review and constant scrutiny, then the BIOS, then the OS, then the application compilers, and the libraries, all open AND reviewed by multiple concerned parties with formal demonstration of correctness all the way up - the entrenched bug filled lasagna stack owners will smother you, they can’t withstand that kind of competition on an open playing field, your project will die of financial starvation, regulation, buyouts and treachery.

The picture of the past / questions of character give a sense of what they might do next, but the real questions are what are they actually doing next? Those are the things that need focus, and I get the sense that the current ruling class has learned to manipulate the masses with distractions about the evils of their past in order to get what they want in the future.

Idle hands being the devil’s workshop and all that… can’t let people do what they want, most people don’t even know what they want, and of those who think that they do - if they ran around doing that they might “change the world” - and that would be bad for the status quo, so those in power in the status quo are certainly going to try to stop that…