You’re misunderstanding my position.

Right now, schools are not learning institutions that are trying but struggling to enrich kids. They’re a penal institution, punishing kids for being non-productive members of society, funneling many of them directly into military or prison, and actively making their lives worse than if they were sitting at home or hanging out with friends outside.

Every kid thinks that when they’re in school, but in most places they’re not correct; here they often are.

I think you can draw a pretty direct and causal line from the prison-ification of schools and increasing school shootings, NCLB being the instigating national change, but Republican anti-education policies in general being heavy contributors (and Red states are far worse than Blue states in this).

Bear in mind this is not some “school is bad” stance: there are actually a lot of schools numerically which are wonderful places of learning. Expensive private schools and high-income-neighborhood-servicing public schools don’t allow that kind of disruptive policing and aren’t looking for every opportunity to punish children as a show of dominance and teaching forced-submission. But numerically high does not equate to high percentage, and they’re a minuscule percent of the overall count of schools in America (115,000+).

So this is not a “don’t fix small problem until we fix big problem” issue. This is a “don’t pretend that these are students and not prisoners, and take away one of the few remaining joys most of them have”.

Taking away phones isn’t fixing a small problem, it’s making the bigger problem worse.

Addiction usually forms around something that is used for escaping one’s problems. True here as well.

And yes, most people are unhappy in life, right now especially.

Hating work is not why adults look at their phones nor is it hating [commuting]

Um, ya sure about that?

Yes, phones are distracting, but distraction is entirely about competing levels of interest, and phones are more interesting than most people’s work or commute, and certainly than modern classrooms.

I didn’t realize you’re in Canada, and I fully admit I know nothing about Canadian schools or the education system there.

In the US, we have military recruiters in schools, armed officers patrolling halls, metal detectors and backpack checks (for the schools that don’t require transparent backpacks), and random locker searches. And this was all from before Trump.

Edit: oh, I forgot my (least) favorite new rule: no talking in the hallway between classes, though it seems like the UK leaned into that more heavily than the US has.

It’s a cage for kids, not a place to learn, and it is significantly different than when I was very young. 9/11 happened when I was in middle school, and even in the subsequent 6 years until I graduated high school, it had gone downhill fast.

My partner is a teacher, as well.

it is 100% impossible to teach someone when they have a phone in their hand

Yes, but this is a symptom of structural problems with our school system. Looking at phones didn’t make kids hate school. Hating school made kids want to look at their phones.

Schools have been shifting from places of learning, which requires exploration, to places of compliance and regurgitation. And it’s not just about the shift towards obedience-based, rote memorization in service of standardized testing (or how schools care about attendance only for funding reasons), we’ve even shifted the literal architectural design philosophy behind how we construct school buildings to be more prison-like.

The pandemic lockdown was horrible for kids, but the rush to reopen schools wasn’t about the negative impact it was having on their social development, it was about serving business interests who wanted their parent-employees back at work. They wanted the childrens’ holding cells reopened.

When we actually start shifting schools back towards environments of learning, at a structural level, I will have sympathy for the mission of education over sympathy for the disinterested inmates students.

I’d rather make a benign Linux distro feel like a windows version I like, than papering over a hostile Win11.

This should have been obvious. Why would you only be able to bully someone digitally in the time you’re in the school building? I was in high school when cell phones were first coming out, so I remember school before and during phones, and kids always could and would ignore class if they wanted to. This feels like an attempt to divert blame from school systems not being reactive to generational learning differences and needs. There are reasons to ban phones in schools, but if you think that doing so is going to prevent bullying or ignoring class, methinks you don’t remember pre-phone school.

I’ve been playing since Ice Age. I remember this same argument back when Kamigawa first came out, because it was obvious pandering to anime fans, but frankly the early Kamigawa series were great sets, and that really changed my view on expanding the lore of magic. Do I wish you still saw Kavu decks? Yeah, sometimes that nostalgia is there, but I also enjoy a random Bilbo Baggins popping up.

Isn’t local machine learning better than shipping your data off to some cloud provider?

They’re absolutely shipping all your local data up to their cloud.

Besides, as far as I’m concerned, strong anti-AI sentiment does actually help temper the harms of the tech and its owners.

My worry is that much like gun control legislation, I see our neoliberal fear-based media pushing AI use by individuals as the “real danger”, and will only end up funneling anti-AI sentiment into 1) limiting actual open AI access (e.g. open-weight, FOSS models) by individuals, and 2) legitimizing governmental and corporate use of AI as the only “safe” and “legitimate” AI usage.

The ratio of “government-controlled AI is literally being used to kill people right now” awareness out there, versus e.g. awareness of deepfakes, is astoundingly unbalanced. Both are real dangers, but only one is getting legislation passed on it, and once again it’s not the one that would put limits on corporations and government.

Stoking fear is not useful if your opponents are the ones who will actually utilize that fear to their own ends successfully.

I think that “stop being mad the hammer exists, start being mad at the group of people who are beating your face in” is a very important message. Getting rid of AI (which isn’t even something we can do; you can’t put the genie back in the bottle with this) won’t fix the issue, they’ll just make another hammer. The hammer is both a weapon in this case, and a distraction.

AI is non-deterministic, sure

This is incorrect. They are in fact completely deterministic. Studies have proven that when all inputs, weights, and precision values like temperature are static, they produce the exact same token sequences (outputs). The appearance of non-determinism is a result of pseudo-randomized (another thing which is deterministic but appears otherwise) values and user ignorance (in the technical sense, not the value-judgement sense). In fact, the process of ‘tuning’ LLMs is heavily focused on adjusting input values to surface preferred outputs, which would not work in a non-deterministic system.

When I type “ls” I’m pretty fucking sure I’m not going to get “rm” style results.

Yes, but we don’t trust humans not to rm what they shouldn’t either, which is why the --no-preserve-root flag exists. ls is not supposed to perform write actions. Agentic LLMs are. And just like you wouldn’t build and test on your production server in case the code you execute has an unexpected adverse effect, you shouldn’t be running LLM agents in a location or way that the actions it performs has an unexpected adverse effect either. The genre of jokes about a new employee bringing down Prod or deleting source code is older than most people (which to be fair, given that the median age is 31, is true for a lot of things).

LLMs are just a class of software. They’re not good or bad any more than a hammer is good or bad (and can also be used to build or to destroy).

The problem isn’t LLMs, it’s the entities who control the most powerful ones (corporations and governments), and what those entities are doing with them; using them as weapons against us, rather than as tools to aid us.

As usual, politicians trying to use children and fear as a wedge to get people to accept government surveillance and control.

This was a great read.

I think this also explains a lot of Trump’s appeal to a lot of disconnected voters; he’s promising to handle all the things that they (have been conditioned by Fox News to) dislike, without them needing to actually understand those issues, and without ever asking them for their input or requiring them to think about effects or harm or morality. If thinking about politics and economics and inequality sounds exhausting to someone, he’s not just promising to fix things, he’s promising to handle the cognitive load for them. I’ve met so many Trump voters who don’t even know what he’s doing, not because they only follow news that masks his actions, but because they just don’t follow news at all, and just “trust he’s taking care of things”. It’s relief from participation in the everyday political economy.

Also, Revealed Preference Theory is such junk science. Samuelson was just applying what people throughout history have observed about people not always understanding their own preferences, or not wanting to state them openly. It wasn’t supposed to be a way to use individual actions to assert predictive certainty of future actions.

It makes me depressed to think about how much damage has been caused by people who got into a field for the money but who had no aptitude for or understanding of the work, and just ended up wrecking shit. And I’ve met too many c-suite executives to think this is not an endemic issue in our current society. If there’s a better argument for jobs requiring some public proof of proficiency than our current crop of billionaires, business executives, and politicians, I can’t think of it.

Because it’s one of the only functional monopolies that got there by attracting users rather than M&As to quash competitors and regulatory capture. Monopolies shouldn’t just intrinsically make you angry, they just are usually bad because they will have done anticompetitive things in order to become a monopoly.

As the article concludes:

Valve Corporation didn’t win by locking people in. It won by making sure they never really wanted to leave.

itch.io is okay, but they used to be much better back when they first emerged right after Desura collapsed in 2013, and everyone moved their indie titles there, and before Steam had GreenLight and now Early Access. Now they’ve fallen into a weird space where half of their games’ installers aren’t even hosted on their site and you get redirected to the game’s own website. Humble Bundle has really crappy download speeds, so it’s hard to justify using them over Steam for anything larger than a VN, and half the games you buy on HB they actually just give you Steam keys to redeem anyways.

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It’s more that compositors (picom, xcompmgr) and window managers are extremely complex, and adding that feature in could have much larger impacts than just the functionality itself, e.g. security context implications, task scheduling, rendering pipeline issues, etc. Wayland actually combines the compositor and WM, so it’s more readily extensible than X11.

State-level bills have heretofore only required OSes to ask a user if they are of majority age. A federal bill is likely (based on the groups backing and who proposed it) to require OSes to validate (i.e. have users prove, not just assert) their ages.

Depending on what mechanisms are mandated, and who they target punishment at, it could lock 99% of users (who are not willing or capable to use means to bypass this) into tying all their actions online to a government-run database.

It’s not enough that means to bypass it exist; the government shouldn’t be able to mandate this kind of control, and shouldn’t be propagating the expectation that this behavior and level of control is normal or acceptable.

“Power isn’t given, it’s taken.” - Malcolm xAI

This is something I see my partner’s high school students having to deal with now: the suspicion that competence or intelligence must indicate AI use. It feels like when dumb film writers or directors make non-MC character unbelievably dumb to make the MC look smart (cough BBC Sherlock cough), but applied to real life.