Lower risk of lung cancer, I figure.

Accelerationists have never been more bullish.

He’s one of the richest men in the world and you’re harshing his vibes. Isn’t that enough?

Round here we gotta cure fer callin anodder man feadderless, hehehe…

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

Plato: “Everything is a shadowy echo of its perfected nature. Even gender.”

Ken Paxton: “Any teacher caught mentioning that last bit is fired.”

Guaranteed a bunch of ex-girlfriends are getting extra double stalked.

Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I’ve explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the “Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?” toggles.

I would sooner download a tire fire.

You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.

Schools generally buy anything microsoft offers with the little budget they have.

Far more Pearson than Microsoft. The “teach to the test” regime is all about selling schools test prep material that effectively tells you the answers to the next round of Pearson-written standardized exams. I’m sure Pearson is eagerly integrating with Microsoft AI tools, so they can cut their own internal staffing and roll out more profitable digital variations of their material.

But schools pay top dollar for these resources because state administrators use exam scores as a benchmark for school funding. So the $10M you pay for test prep material may determine the next $50M in funding your school receives, relative to the poorer districts that couldn’t afford to buy answers in advance.

Why did any school higher ups pay to implement these?

Tons of kickbacks to high ranking administrators, double-dealing with teachers being contracted or poached by Pearson for test-writing gigs, state administrators moving between jobs in the school board/legislature and positions within Pearson, people with stock and other debt instruments that profit when Pearson does well…

FFS, the Houston ISD takeover by the State of Texas ended with a Colorado private school management guy sending tens of millions of dollars from the Houston public schools to pay consulting fees to Colorado private school agencies. That’s as corrupt as it comes.

I mean, the bitter truth of all this is the downsizing and resource ratcheting of public schools creating an enormous labor crisis prior to the introduction of AI. Teachers were swamped with prep work for classes, they were expected to juggle multiple subjects of expertise at once, they were simultaneously educator and disciplinarian for class sizes that kept mushrooming with budget cuts. Students are subject to increasingly draconian punishments that keep them out of class longer, resulting in poorer outcomes in schools with harsher discipline. And schools use influxes of young new teachers to keep wages low, at the expense of experience.

These tools take the pressure off people who have been in a cooker since the Bush 43 administration and the original NCLB school privatization campaign. AI in schools as a tool to bulk process busy work is a symptom of a deeper problem. Kids and teachers coordinating cheating campaigns to meet arbitrary creeping metrics set by conservative bureaucrats are symptoms of a deeper problem. The education system as we know it is shifting towards a much more rigid and ideologically doctrinaire institution, and the endless testing + AI schooling are tools utilized by the state to accomplish the transformation.

Simply saying “No AI in Schools” does nothing to address the massive workload foisted on faculty. It does nothing to address how Teach-The-Test has taken over the educational philosophy of public schooling. And it does nothing to shrink class sizes, to maintain professional teachers for the length of their careers (rather than firing older teachers to keep salaries low), or to maximize student attendance rates - the three most empirically proven techniques to maximizing educational quality.

AI is a crutch for a broken system. Kicking the crutch out doesn’t fix the system.

My experience with DIY home networking and self-hosting has been “This is going to eat up your weekend if you want it to work as intended”.

Meshtastic

If someone could find an extra 8 hours a week, I would so make this one of my hobbies.