A husband. A father. A senior software engineer. A video gamer. A board gamer.
To those saying “he’s right”…
He’s complacent. He’s a useless troll. He thinks nothing should change because he’s effectively saying “it is what it is”, which is the same bullshit response I see from every single conservative who continues to simply say “thoughts and prayers” after an event like this. There are many ways to try to help prevent such a tragedy, and blanket statement of it being a “fact of life” does literally nothing.
And every day, it keeps happening. And every day, the media keeps shining a spotlight on it. And every day, nothing gets done.
Make no mistake — there are still millions and millions in Trump’s cult. And they will do everything they can to not lose again and again and again. Even when Trump dies, they’ll find some other horrible person to latch onto because they give the cultists permission to be assholes out in the open.
This won’t be over until this kind of uneducated nonsense is bred out. And I mean that from all angles: literal cycle of life, as well as improving the education system in this country.
They didn’t care before because it was in their interest to support him. Now it’s not.
There are a few who truly paid the price of opposing him and I can at least respect that. Kinzinger, Cheney, for examples…not that I would agree with them on much, but they at least stood up to Trump when it mattered.
The right would have to put up a very different candidate with reasonable policy ideas for me to even consider them.
The left could put up a potato against Trump and I’d join the spud revolution.
Trump is objectively horrible for the US. But what’s even more horrible is that nearly half of the country are so invested and embedded into the cult that, short of his departure from this earth, they will never accept another candidate, and even then the next in line is likely to be just as bad or worse. They want to “own the libs” so badly they are willing to destroy the country to do it.
So to answer your question as I see it, the only way we can get out of this mess is to make critical thinking education the top priority of the US — which will take decades. But the people in power do not want that and will fight it with all the entertainment news power they can muster. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll just get their pawns to storm the Capitol again and again.
They may eventually be useful in this space. But for now, they are more work than they’re worth and completely discredited for proper fact-based research. And the teachers my kid has had who used it for testing resulted in completely wrong answers that the teacher didn’t bother to check.
Yes that is the teacher’s fault, but so is using it to generate a test in the first place.
I will die on this hill. LLMs of any kind right now are not something that should be trifled with in a critical thinking-based curriculum. In time, perhaps. But not yet, not when LLMs are so easily manipulated (whether trained on public data or private). The various implementations haven’t earned credible trust despite CEOs drooling over them.
I hear you. But my child will have a cell phone in case of a real emergency when the adults don’t properly act. While I trust teachers rather implicitly, my experience with most school administrators is far less stellar. Also, a student calling 911 when the teacher is having a heart attack or some other life threatening event will save time and possibly their life.
Barring any emergency situations, my child’s phone better be put away.
Agreed on the teachers getting more pay and time.
And I agree that checking for objective fact with respect to teaching and testing is necessary.
But…ChatGPT is not a credible source. So using it in the classroom is not exactly fine (outside of showing it as an example of a source that isn’t credible). It is in its infancy and any educator who uses it in the classroom and relies upon it is doing a considerable disservice to those they educate. That’s like teaching using Wikipedia. I get that it has information, many times accurate, but it should never be used as a source.
As a commentary…Far too often in this modern world people (not you, just a general sense of society) seem to see something that may be 50, or 75 percent accurate and claim it as fact. This is how entertainment news organizations function to get ratings. And if kids are to be taught critical thinking they must be taught how to discern what is or isn’t credible.
Otherwise we’re lost. And perhaps we already are.
I am in full agreement that cell phones should not be out of the backpack or pocket unless there is an emergency or it’s lunch time / outside of class.
But for the love of critical thinking, also please ban the teachers from using ChatGPT to create their tests for them. I was appalled at finding out teachers at my kid’s school are doing that. While I support any tool (and funding!) that can make the lives and jobs of teachers easier, using a tool like ChatGPT is as irresponsible as telling kids to just Google it. And teachers/administrators should damn well know better.
And look at that, AOC turns 35 in October (minimum age for presidency)! If only half of this country wouldn’t see her rise to such a stage as some affront to their white misogynistic identity, we could actually see real progress take shape.
But yeah, Biden should not have ran and should have let someone younger and more cognitively astute in-the-moment take the stage. He’s probably a good person and probably a good family patriarch, but he is past the point of needing to step down.
Everything said in that article makes me very happy to have switched to Firefox.
Google can dress this up all they want, but a happy byproduct of this (for them) is that they can now purposefully ignore rules/filtering for their own sites, such as youtube, since it puts the real control of such filtering with the browser (and the company who created it) instead of the extension. Yes there is a trust concern with extensions. And yes, there is a performance hit with extensions vetting each network call. But that’s the price we, as the user, should continue to have the power to choose to pay, but Google is forcing us to go their way.
Thanks Mozilla, for providing user choice.
I didn’t find it bragging or preachy, btw.
Right now, because I’ve basically said good-bye to Windows, I am wanting a distro that caters to gaming. Nobara, Bazzite (though I’m not yet a fan of the “atomic” style distros), and Garuda all seem to deal with this relatively well. Garuda feels more baked than the others at the moment, but Nobara is by the same person who has created and maintained the proton-ge and wine-ge builds (goes by GloriousEggroll) – so once it is upgraded to Fedora 40 base, I may consider switching, but haven’t fully decided.
I have run Garuda Hyprland and Garuda KDE Dragonized. I loved them both, but I have settled on Garuda KDE Dragonized because it has everything set up out of the box for gaming and I’m more accustomed to that kind of desktop environment. Hyprland was interesting and I enjoyed it mostly, but there were some things that I couldn’t easily get past (mainly, I like to minimize/hide windows, and Hyprland’s method of that is to just shove the window to another desktop, or quit the app, or hope it has a system tray icon for it and can “minimize” to that).
If I didn’t care about gaming, I’d probably go with either Manjaro (Arch based, but uses its own repos to slow down the rolling release of Arch by about month or so), or Ubuntu, just to guarantee a higher degree of stability (Arch can sometimes break things, but it’s not that often, in my experience).
While I know the community and NVIDIA are working to get explicit sync pushed out which will help a lot of the NVIDIA woes running on Wayland, about six weeks ago I decided to not wait anymore on that and went and bought an AMD 7800XT video card to run instead of NVIDIA. Wayland, and gaming, honestly feel much smoother to me now (and I don’t have to mess around with video drivers anymore). The only quirk about Wayland has to do with global mouse key shortcuts (namely, I use a mouse button for Push-To-Talk in Discord and had to set up a quirky solution).
I’m eager for KDE Plasma 6.1 because it’ll have built-in RDP server support which will allow me to remote in easier using an RDP client from my Mac work laptop (I don’t really care for VNC [too slow], Rustbox [too buggy for me], or many of the other remote desktop solutions out there).
That’s awesome! I began my journey while at college in 1999. But I never once fully committed to the Linux desktop on my personal PC until now with all this CoPilot Recall nonsense. I would always have Windows in my back pocket, just in case.
Not anymore. I’m done with Microsoft and certainly done with Adobe (not that I did much with their software). I’m able to play all the games I want in Garuda (KDE Dragonized) and have had no issues beyond minor tweaking.
I agree. The problem is there are too many people who make excuses for switching which wouldn’t exist if they just actually switched. Saying the alternatives suck compared to Adobe products…well if everyone stopped using Adobe products today and all switched to the various other software out there that does run on Linux, I guarantee you within a year, they would be all on par with the Adobe products because they would finally have the financial backing necessary to accomplish that goal.
Adobe still exists simply because they are a behemoth due to existing for 40 years. People have choice, even professionals, even businesses.
The flaw is that journalism and journalists today no longer have any integrity and fidelity to the truth. They only have fidelity to what gets the most clicks and what makes the most money.