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Stonehenge tale gets ‘weirder’ as Orkney is ruled out as altar stone origin
  • Another great example is probably starting a fire only using materials from the environment. Anyone can learn how to do so, but most people never have it come up during their lifetimes!

    Someone who knows knapping and how to start a fire is 90% of the way to surviving long term in temperate wilderness. Yeah, building shelter and knowing what to eat are important too, but making sharp things and creating heat are the two things that are make or break in a survival situation.

    Speaking of not leaving written records, a large number of cultures had strong oral traditions that passed information down for thousands of years. Oral traditions have the additional benefit of being taught personally, allowing for time to ensure it is actually understood! It does have the danger of being lost when the culture changes significantly.

  • A class of 20 pupils at a $35,000 per year private London school won't have a human teacher this year. They'll just be taught by AI.
  • When I was young I lived on science fiction from authors like Isaac Asimov that regularly featured tons of technology including robotic teachers and technology that had general artificial intelligence. That lead to an interest in computers and in 1995 I enrolled in a computer science program at a state college and I currently work with data collections that come from student information systems. I also have a kid in high school right now.

    My dad worked at a university and we had an electric motorcycle and car prototypes in the late 80's/early 90s that used racks of car batteries to drive their electric motors. Man that bike was bulky, but it was quiet and the potential was obvious once the battery bulk was addressed. It has taken decades to get there, but now we have tons of electric vehicles and that is awesome! Hell, I didn't expect the miniaturization of computers to fit in the current form factor in my lifetime.

    But the thing is, having the idea and the possibility of something involves multiple parts. Electric vehicles wouldn't be possible at scale until they solved the battery bulk problem. Working towards it was good, as there was an end goal that could be met if only we could solve the form factor. The whole thing with AI not being a realistic thing for replacing teachers is that there is far more to it than a computer and it will require hardware advancements that are pie in the sky at the moment in addition to the actual process of machine learning. Science fiction modeled advanced computers after the neural networks of the brain, such as Asimov's positronic brains. For AI to be at least as smart as the average person they will need a network of a similar complexity. We are currently using massive amounts of energy to regurgitate jokes from reddit as facts. To have something like a teacher we will need to make the energy requirements similar to a brain, in a form factor similar to a brain, and with the ability to learn and share with other fake brains to improve over time.

    But then we get to the reality part which is nobody is going to do this work at scale to make pretend teachers of any quality any time soon. Student software systems used by schools are pretty rough because the money isn't there. That is just tools for people to use, not as a replacement for people! There is far more to being a teacher than the subjects they teach. They need to motivate students, act as human beings in real meat space, and even then a lot of teachers are mediocre but trying and some are even terrible because teaching is hard.

    Now you might say that ai home schooling would be done by a motivated kid, but a motivated kid doesn't need ai to learn on their own. They do that already! We already have tons of available content like Khan Academy that motivated kids can use to learn. But Khan Academy can't motivate a child to learn, and ai won't either because it is a thing and not a person who has life experience and a complex biology in addition to their brain that can improve success in teaching. For ai to be used to teach more than 50% of students it would need to be at least as good as the better teachers including the ability to motivate the students.

    Between my wide eyed youth and today I have seen a ton of technology that gets touted as the next big thing and some are some are hits and some are obvious misses. There are tons of technologies that are promoted for specific uses that are clearly bullshit either due to the technology itself or because it is being sold as a magical cure all by snake oil salesmen. AI as a magical cure all is snake oil. It has a lot of uses, but this is not one of them.

    Extra credit: Home schooling is fine for some kids, but the vast majority of kids need to share physical space with other children outside their home as part of their development because we are biological creatures. Even in 1000 years the majority of students learning exclusively alone at home from any kind of teachers is a pipe dream.

  • Trump will not prepare for debating Kamala Harris. He believes he’s perfect
  • No, he fails every time but his base pretends he wins and the news has such low expectations and a need to sell advertising for profit so they go along with it.

  • Republicans renominate 14 fake electors who lied that Trump won in 2020
  • They deserve the death penalty for their failed coup.

  • Trump is batshit crazy
  • That he said it?

    Yes.

    Is what he said true?

    No.

  • Unlocked, loaded guns more common among parents who give kids firearm lessons
  • People who fetishize self defense carry will always have loaded and unlocked guns in the house because they are afraid of someone breaking in at any moment and they might need to play John Wick: Home Edition. Those kinds of people also teach gun safety because they think responsible handling of firearms is important.

    They just don't understand that accidents are far more likely than a home invasion, and children are children even if they are taught gun safety.

  • What's your least favourite thing about your smartphone
  • The constant UI changes that fix nothing of importance and make using it less enjoyable.

    A recent update changed the options for navigation from being able to hide the three icons at the bottom and swipe instead to make it like an iphone where you have one swipe up and it does things based on whether you hold or let go immediately and now the sides are go back swipes. They kept the option to show buttons, but apparently keeping the two options and adding this new train wreck as a third option is too hard. So to use my fulll screen real estate I have the joy of accidentally going back a page dozens of times per day, holding or not holding the swipe up the wrong amount of time dozens of times per day, and when I crop photos I constantly catch the stupid edge go back thing and have to cancel. At least it asks first I guess.

    Why couldn't they keep swipe up for three things if they kept the buttons in the same spot anyway? I am still trying to get used to the new stupid thing after a few months because the bottom buttons are such a waste of space.

    That is the worst offender, but changing icons, how notifications work, and several other things are just annoying enough tl not drive me away but feel like change for the sake of change. I know some changes can require a lot of maintenance to have multiple options, but keeping a basic navigation option when adding a third should not jave been a big deal.

  • What's your least favourite thing about your smartphone
  • Be the continuation of a meme you want to see.

  • Deleted
    My local Publix removed the water dispenser
  • It has what plants crave!

  • Burning Up
  • 2 liter bottle.

    Checkmate, athiests.

  • Job application hell
  • This is almost guaranteed to be used to deny minorities a position.

  • Russian soldiers posted a video testing their bulletproof vests. All five bullets penetrated the armor plate completely. "Just f*cking great. Thank you, Ministry of Defense."
  • You are thinking of a flak jacket, which is for shrapnel.

    Bullet proof vests should be bullet proof up to a reasonable impact. They won't stop a .50 cal, but are designed to handle assault rifles like the m-16 or AK at a commmon engagement distance when loaded with standard ammunition.

  • Posting the shopping cart theory because people had questions in a separate thread
  • That sounds like more work than just putting the cart back...

  • Posting the shopping cart theory because people had questions in a separate thread
  • There should be a requirement for cart return spots next to the handicap parking. In places where there is a return 10 feet from the spots I still see a ton of carts in the parking spots.

    I get that it can be hard, but it seems way too frequent that they could do the whole store but just couldn't make that last 10 feet. Like sure, occasionally that is inderstandable.

    So I will judge them while also grabbing the cart and either using it or putting it away because that is the right thing to do.

  • Google is facing another crucial court case in the US – and it could have major consequences for online advertising.
  • That's fine. I will either continue to use adblockers, pay, or stop using the internet outside of what is required to function in society. I already refuse to use anything that has decided to go ad supported without the ability to block ads and has a price I'm not willing to pay.

    If small (or large) businesses require the mass collection of personal information by malicious advertisers to exist, then they don't derserve to exist.

  • TIL about lunch shaming... america are you ok?
  • There wasn’t a debate in congress, there wasn’t any tax increase or funding shortfall. The money was just there because they wanted it.

    And then states like Missouri refused the money because Republicans hate children.

  • True love
  • He didn't say what he made in 18 months. He might just sell Santa themed toilet seat covers during the holidays and isn't aware of how to advertise.

  • Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
  • No, no. The one with the wild and wacky activities!

  • Minecraft creators are already trying to fix the Minecraft movie
  • Sonic had some digital effects in the real world. This looks like they went all in on green screen digital effects. There is zero chance this one will change.

  • main @midwest.social snooggums @midwest.social
    You tube descriptions showing in German(?) on midwest.social

    This is something that I couldn't find an obvious setting for, but someone pointed out that the descriptions are different on different instances.

    This post has a German (?) description on midwest.social, but on programming.dev it's in English.

    In my settings:

    • Interface language is Browser Default.
    • Languages has Undetermined and English selected

    All other descriptions on posts are in English, only youtube seems to be different.

    3
    The planned PSN requirement has been canceled!

    https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929?t=NhwAEm4fGpVJj-UyI1lrXA

    70
    snooggums snooggums @midwest.social
    Posts 3
    Comments 3.8K