I like my coworkers. They’re cool. I just went to acro yoga with one, and go bouldering with another. We show up, talk shit, and get the job done - sometimes it’s a good time. Sometimes we get our asses kicked. But that builds camradrie, too.

I will say, this is blue collar stuff. When I worked as a software dev, I definitely didn’t care about spending much time with my coworkers.

You’ve clearly never tried to use Wikipedia to help with your math homework

Yeah, tech firms that are trying to hype their AI products as the next big thing are trying to spin the narrative that they are suffering economically. As someone who was a junior sw dev in the past, I can tell you that AI written code is 100% not good enough to do that job. It might be utilized to do that work faster - but then any sensible business wouldn’t lay off their juniors, but instead would simply have them produce more output in order to sell more product and make more money.

I mean, I honestly don’t have a problem with a notification telling me I need to top off my oil, or telling me I’ve driven enough that it is time for the scheduled maintenance. I just also want to be able to manually check the oil level with a dip stick.

Wait, what? At least on every car I’ve owned, the recommended interval for a transmission fluid change was about 100k mi. Are most people buying a new car after less than 100k of use? That seems ridiculous! My Corolla is almost at 250k now, I’ve had it since 2015, and I’m expecting her to hit 1m mi before I put her out to pasture.

You would think an engineer would understand this… I assume this is a decision from management.

Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

Okay - I’m sorry your nerd muscles were so weak you couldn’t even hold a pencil.

But regardless of your personal shortcomings, these classes exist because they teach useful things, and if we want to tell others who did and did not learn those useful things in this class, we need a way to test that knowledge.

Now, it seems like your point of view is that all the knowledge and experience of a university education is useless anyway. This is a point of view I have some sympathy towards, but on the whole I don’t think it is right. However, if you do, then why the fuck arent you filthy rich yet? If you know so well what people need to know to be successful and well educated for the next 30 years, and you think you know how they should learn, and you know how you can evaluate their abilities after receiving an education - then why aren’t you doing that and raking in the billions of dollars that go into university education right now?

So go do that. Tell me when you make your first million. But until then, I’m gonna assume that the foundational western liberal education has value, seeing as it has persisted for quite a while. LLMs on the other hand, may very well turn out to be a fad of the summer.

Those are all very nice ideas, and we’ll see if they pan out in the future. But universities need ways to stop (or, fine, reduce) cheating that can be implemented right now. A class in English literature and composition should test how well you can read and interpret the source material to then express something about it in your own words in a coherent way. This is a useful life skill to have, and students should learn to do it without AI assistance. Giving them a pen and paper and a quiet room to work in has been a good enough method of assessment for at least the last 50 years which is reasonably cost effective.

Yes, there are problems with standardized testing. Yes, you can cheat on a paper test. But the way to improve the evaluation process is to first establish a stable baseline, and then try new things that might work better to see if they actually work better. Not to throw out everything we knew before and haphazardly try every random idea that pops into someone’s head in a panic.

I like this idea, but I also think that we should keep in mind that the time of university staff is expensive, and with the already outlandish cost of education we need to strike a balance

perfect not being the enemy of the good and all that

But there was no necessity to move much of large scale manufacturing over […] rampant consumerism

I mean, I’m not fan of rampant consumerism either, but a lot of manufactured goods legitimately improve quality of life. For example, iPhones are manufactured in China, and the low cost of manufacturing there allows the product to be sold to consumers for a relatively low price (I should also add that a lot of the components in an iPhone are actually manufactured in America because they require a skill that America has a competitive advantage in). If we insisted on keeping these manufacturing jobs in the US, iPhones would be much more expensive and fewer people would be able to afford one, and likely a foreign manufacturer would step in to fill the niche left.

Sure, no country “needs” to offshore jobs - no country really “needs” to do anything. But if America wanted to remain economically competitive while providing a good quality of life to it’s citizens, then those low-skill auto manufacturing jobs that everyone is so whistful about 100% needed to go to lower skill markets.

Most goods are not reasonable to spend government money on as well. That works great for medical goods and food, but not much else.

Those are the goods I would suggest it is important to keep domestic manufacturing capacity for. Also military equipment, but we already do that… too well.

Eeeeeeh… China was rapidly industrializing, and the low skill manufacturing jobs they took were going to leave the US anyway. While ensuring the rights of foreign workers is definitely something I support, it still wouldn’t have stymied the tidal shift in low skill labor to lcol nations.

Ensuring a domestic supply of some goods is definitely important. But tariffs aren’t the answer here - instead, the answer is to support local industries by giving them government contracts to produce their goods, which the government can then use and/or stockpile when we aren’t in a time of crisis.

And anyway, while a great amount of manufacturing labor went overseas in the last century, American has been reclaiming ground recently… with robots.

Basically no matter how you split it, those high paying, low skill manufacturing jobs were never going to stick around for long. That’s just the forward march of technological progress.

Or, ya’know, they could just have students take tests on paper in a lecture hall.

As an Airbnb host…

fuuuuuuuuuck

Dreaming Spanish, if you are trying to learn Spanish. I seriously think it is the future of language learning, bar none.

Yeah, like, I think this is a bad move for Duolingo as a company, since their code quality will rapidly go downhill with the current state of AI generated code.

But also, if you are a contract employee, you should be prepared to be let go at any moment. That’s sort of the whole point of being a contract employee - you are only employed for the contract. It isn’t unethical in anyway for a company to not rehire employees who knew up front that they might not be rehired.

Yeah, I mean, there is a solution. Liberalized zoning and Georgist tax policies. The problem is rarely that there is a lack of space to live - it is that that space is poorly utilized. And this is true because (1) it is illegal to build what people want where they want it in many places and (2) investors and homeowners speculate on land value without providing value to anyone else.

No, because women can get their sexual needs more or less without trouble. A male sex robot owned by a woman would make me feel the same way though, similar to the man’s-arm-shaped pillows. It is sad, because they can’t get a their emotional needs for intimacy fulfilled and are resorting to hollow physical proxies

No. But you are an extreme minority, and your existence won’t change overall cultural views of sex robots.

Sounds like a pretty big cope. Sex isn’t about cumming. It’s about emotional connection with another human being. Being unable to get fulfillment of this basic human need is sad and lonely. This is why fleshlights have a stigma that beating your bishop the old fashioned way doesn’t - every healthy teenaged boy spanks it on the reg. But actually purchasing a device speaks to a level of hopelessness at obtaining actual sex that is sad, which implies a failure to be attractive, which is itself unattractive.