We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.

Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.

There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.

I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.

It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐

Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.

Strolls nervously through room with RX 580…

If you’re ready to take the plunge into mechanical, Keychrons are a solid way to get one that is not absurd if all you want is “one nice keyboard,” but usually has enough customizability to be satisfying if you fall down that particular rabbit hole. For a bog standard board, any of your listed options are fine, as are most of the options on pcpartpicker.com, and even dumb ol’ Walmart will have a couple of logitechs and some rebranded thing stuff no worse than your average pack-in desktop keyboard, and potentially even a couple of mildly satisfying low-end mech boards, once you turn off the godwaful RGB.

If you shop the actual electronics at Amazon, I’d recommend “sold by Amazon” or at a minimum fulfilled by them. If you do Prime, limit to Prime listings. Your includion of BestBuy implies you’re in the US, in which case I might avoid vendors that ship from China, at least until the tariff situation stabilizes.

Rober’s always seemed a little off to me, like one of those who enjoys being famous more than the stuff that made him famous in the first place. Seems like he’s gotten worse, though. For instance, this video declares it “was not sponsored [by Zipline] in anyway nor did they pay for any of my travel or accommodations,” despite extolling their virtues over and over again by name, and lingering lovingly on their drones and logos like Michael Bay with a car company’s badge.

Smarter Everyday is also rather polished, and he’s even more in bed with the military industrial complex, but (as of a few months ago anyway) he comes off like he’s still actually enjoying the projects themselves and the information he’s sharing. It’s hard to exactly articulate the point where a content creator loses me, but I can feel it in my nerd-bones.