The read was very interesting, and I think you're right, mathematicians are still very much needed, in some sense now more than ever.
But the effect is the same across other professions. We need mathematicians, we need professional grounding but we only "need" experts.
Every step AI takes feels like it slices people off the bottom of a profession, making them less relevant, while simultaneously increasing demand for the top.
the vicious cycle I see is it will "Eat the middle", you need people with juuust enough acumen in a subject to drive the AI, to set a goal and nudge to a direction, and you need a real expert to look at the results with a critical eye but you don't need the middle of the curve. I think over time this will depress hiring and wages of new people, and stunt their progress towards expertise by destroying the middle ground. Then when our current experts retire we'll be left in a lurch.
> Computing has historically been a field of wizardry.
Counter argument, "historically" is not last year but closer to 2 decades ago.
modern computing has sat atop a mountain of sorcery for ages. You may be able to squint and call a good compiler a "tool of power" more than sorcery but there are plenty of other tech stacks that simply sit upon one opaque box after another.
And it's not unusual for sorcery to produce crap, even if it's production worth crap. Dreamweaver had a WYSIWYG editor ages ago and as someone who was hand crafting HTML in that era it's code was typically a mess.
Now that's the norm, almost nobody makes HTML by hand, some js framework does. And it's often shit, I've seen entire sources of nothing but <div> nested ad-nauseam, conjured up from the depths of "I-don't-care-as-long-as-it-works"
Isn't there an SMS option? buy a new phone and have them send you an OTP via SMS.
> once you're phone is gone, you are completely over with society?
yes, I'm waiting for the Black-Mirror episode where someone drops their phone and basically dies, can't contact anyone, can't unlock or start their car, can't get an uber, can't pay for anything, can't navigate without gps, can't log into anything etc.
Something I learned the hard way: it's a bad time if you are a Google Fi customer and your Android phone with an eSim becomes inoperable while traveling :)
just in general, it's difficult if your phone with an esim dies/lost/stolen (ie no access) to move the esim over. It's especially annoying if it just died, because instead of just popping the sim over you end up in a maze with the carrier (unless you are lucky enough to other lines on the account you have access to)
As an old curmudgeon I recoil at any service I can't interact with sans-phone. I hardly use mine for anything.
Just be glad your phone number is tied to your account, if you lose the number itself you are royally screwed, and basically anyone who gets your old number owns all your accounts now.
Same, it is kind of strange. Back in 2005 I was one of the first to carry the full internet on my phone and now I am leading the charge to avoid having to carry the internet in my pocket.
If your product or service requires a phone, I just don't do business with you. I know I sound archaic recommending this, but we (as a society) need to push back on your phone being the key to your life.
My phone is no more special than my laptop, however this requires an incredible amount of inconvenience for most people along with the constant social pressure to carry a cellphone. As you can imagine, I do not have many friends these days.
> It sounds like you solved the problem of losing access to society by losing access to society.
Perhaps, but frankly I have been more on the lookout for people like me. Natural filter for compatibility?
> Have you considered having backups instead? Carry a physical credit card, make sure you have a backup phone uncharged at home ready for a swap?
I mean, I carry a wallet. Most vendors and society still take cash or card. Where the real friction comes in is staying connected to a community. Everyone wants to keep social connections virtual for some odd reason. As a remote worker I definitely get the virtues of remote interaction, but sometimes meeting people in person has benefits. It does not have to be all-or-nothing and it feels like we are moving to an all-or-nothing digital way of life.
When I dropped my landline after more than 40 years, I transferred the number to a flip phone. This number is also used my family members as a backup phone number for 2FA and voice. Everyone has access to voice mail and can leave messages for others if a phone is lost, broken or stolen.
My wife recently had this happen to a work acquaintance. They are a recent immigrant who has only lived in New York since moving here, who was sent out to the Midwest where there is no public transportation and driving is mandatory, and is staying at a hotel. She lost her phone, and thus could not get anywhere or communicate with anyone, and couldn't pay for anything due to her phone being where all her money is stored (no physical credit cards or anything). Luckily, my wife was able to get her around and help her out until they eventually discovered it was in a lost and found. If she had been alone, I don't know what she would have done.
Imagine being on vacation and you lose your phone, or it breaks. You offloaded your payments to digital and have no cards or cash, you can't get in your hotel room because you used a digital key like hotels all want you to, maybe you brought a car but oops it's a Tesla and you're depending on your phone as the key because it's less stuff to carry!
I recently switched to a Minimal Phone with an e-ink screen, and it sucks (which is the point, obviously). One of the things that sucks is NFC. The payment terminals constantly have a hard time grabbing it, and when they do, they often throw a bizaare "multiple cards detected" error, which is extra strange, since I only have one card stored.
I have a separate sleeve wallet, which I can attach to the back of the phone magnetically that contains my physical debit card + drivers license. If I lost the phone, there's probably about a 50/50 chance that I'd still have the wallet sleeve in my pocket, so I'd at least have my ID and a way to pay for things...but if I lost them both, I'd be pretty screwed.
Convenience is nice, but switching to a shitty phone made me realise I can live without a lot of convenient things, and it's safer not to keep all your eggs in one black rectangle.
We need to better educate non-technical users about making multiple local backups of things like password managers, TOTP seeds, etc.
Yes, even writing the most important ones on a piece of paper and keeping it somewhere safe (like a safe in your house) is an option, as long as you have a low threat model, of course.
Isn't this basically the WebMD effect migrating to other domains?
feels like the same lament doctors have had for ages after anyone could google their symptoms then self-diagnose.
While AI is driving it the foundational cause feels like people having easy access to data/opinion that they trust but don't fully comprehend (or have bias towards). People do this in meat-space too, will confidently regurgitate garbage if they were told it from a person they trust as an expert.
meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration.
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
Looks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time.
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
dug up the story to read myself, nothing like labeling something "taboo" to make it more compelling.
The story itself is, meh. It's a pretty straightforward Day-in-the-life-of jaunt involving a rather dysfunctional teacher. Doesn't really start anywhere go anywhere or end anywhere. The narrator is pretty candid about that dysfunction and does reference sex and drugs but honestly it's pretty tame I think with a couple small edits it would be solidly PG-13.
Overall I wouldn't ever recommend this story to anyone I know. But I can absolutely see why it was used in the class. It's rife with conversation starters, and often feels purpose built for the type of pick-it-apart analysis that you would find in school. It has just enough shock value to wake up sleepy students, features both bad teachers and institutions as well as bad students which humanizes the meta-context in the real classroom.
I wouldn't recommend it in middle school, High school would be a big maybe for later years. As college curriculum, being taught to literal legal adults, that it was controversial at all seems bonkers, honestly it's categorization as "difficult material" by the author I find rather sad. In the end I'm not even sure what's "political" about it.
Seems the most telling real reason was from the president “I don’t ever want to see this story again, I wouldn’t want my daughter reading this,”. He's apparently too busy raising a snowflake to handle a story that simply states that "things exist" that he may find unsavory.
I support her dismissal, teaching positions require a pretty decent level of skill, and her ability to "read the room" has been called into question by her delivery of what I presume to be dodgy, offensive material. Her lack of judgement and her filthy mind has been made clear, at least to me.
"She was one of two girlfriends I had. We talked and talked. I told her that you couldn’t get fat from being ejaculated into."
Yeah president has a point, downvotes are fine, but she moved to florida and failed to test the wind direction down there lol
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