I walk my dog twice a day every day rain or shine. I've picked up his poop 100% of the time - as do most other members of my suburban community. Our parks and sidewalks are mostly dog poop free.
Having said that, I've observed four cases where dog poop is more likely left behind.
1. Small dogs - owners of small dogs seem far more likely to leave dog poop behind. Perhaps because they think the poop is itself small?
2. Older owners (often owners of small dogs, but not always) - seem to care less.
3. Off leash dogs in parks - will often poop at the far edges of parks while their owners chat. Edges of parks and near bushes are minefields.
4. Rainy days - people just want to get home, clean off their dog and be done. So they seem more likely leave poop behind.
Yes - USPS should behave like a layer 3 network: moving mail pieces to destination addresses independent of source & destination.
Where elections probably matter to postal services is that they represent a particular shape of mail volume and network usage that may require management to reorganize pickup/delivery resources to meet delivery commitments.
If you sneak up to a house and peer in the windows, there might be trouble. I haven't looked at court decisions, and those'd be regional/country based, but if a house is 200M away on a hill, and you need a pair of binoculars to see in it, is there 'public nudity' if they walk around without the shades drawn?
I'd say no.
Yet conversely, it's not illegal(criminal) to use binoculars to peer. Still, you can get an injunction(civil) if it's a common thing, because then it moves into harassment. Restraining orders have been given. So then the question is, why is this a thing for your neighbour peering at your house with binoculars some of the day, but not for a camera doing the same 24x7? EG, a Ring camera pointed at your house, with sufficient resolution to act as binoculars?
I really wish 'viewing someone with a camera' remotely, was looked at more from the frame of 'is it the same as using binoculars'. EG, is there a zoom lens on the camera, or just as important, is it of sufficient high resolution that it can act as a zoom lens in software.
I'd like to see a court case push back against that.
I've found with technology, that everyone from judges to lawyers seem incapable, at the start, of considering it with an analog, uh, analogue. Almost all cameras are as binoculars today.
I think this Creepy Robert Scoble Google Glass High School Girls Recording is even creepier than his sharing naked shower selfies, because it involved subjecting teenaged girls to his classic brand of braggadocious self-aggrandizing behavior which he is so well known for, not just his own wet naked grinning body. That he lacks shame and self-awareness and still hasn't taken it down after all these years is just frosting on the cake.
Why Google Glass Will Be A Hit. The High School Girls Love Them.
Really, in Scoble's big head, that's what actually makes creepy surveillance technologies successful and worth all the costs and downsides: that high school girls love them??! They must really love Flock cameras then! Well at least their corrupt cop ex-boyfriends do.
Considering the shower photo, his personality, his entire career of being a shallow vapid yapping technology cheerleader and wanna-be gatekeeper who never accomplished anything himself beyond manufacturing the attention he is so starved for, and his sexual harassment scandal where he plugged his own new "LightPitch" Attention Manufacturing Startup in his horrible non-apology apology (actually a denial and counterattack) after his previous colleague Shel Israel parted ways in disgust, this "The High School Girls Love Them" recording sure didn't age well.
The aging dot-com-era digerati in his old-boys' network still circle the wagons around him, pretending none of this ever happened. (You know who you are!)
Non Apology Apology, Denial, Counterattack, and Gratuitous Startup Plug titled "No, of that I’m innocent.":
LightPitch: Helping startups get attention:
I, Robert Scoble, have a passion for products, and have spent the last 20 years helping others tell the story of their products. Now you can benefit from my experience.
This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good.
"Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all."
"Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement"
Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.
Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.
That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.
It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output.
For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory capture (at least for K-12 in the USA)
K-12 means the public school system in USA & canada. It consists of kindergarten, elementary , middle and high schools, encompassing 12 grades/classes, each taking one year to complete.
Maybe it just requires approaching the problem differently. What about the vulcan study pod things? Have the discussion with the AI itself. Have the AI regularly assess understanding.
So this is an alternative that I actually don't object to at all, but you still need to create mechanisms where you then get at the quality of the mental models formed without the assistance of AI. My (very unpopular) hot take is that some of this will actually usher in a new era of "standardized test"-like things; we will be far more permissive about how/in what ways students/professionals acquire knowledge, and the real task will now shift from that to guaranteeing that there is some competency that was reached with the assurance that it isn't masked by an outside influence.
If you basically assume that everyone can and will cheat at all times, then you can let yourself be far more agnostic about it AS LONG as you are confident in some ability to measure the person's skill without the tools.
The interesting thing is that ai actually helps me learn more effectively than ever before. Each session can become a personalized little seminar that dynamically tests me as it presents ideas and concepts and I attempt to apply and extend them.
I think we need to move past recall as the test itself, and tasks as the gate we judge academic achievement by. These were only ever an approximate measure, which is why we still have things like thesis defenses.
But imagine the final being an interview with an agent that is designed to probe your mastery? From my experience so far it seems we could measure much more directly the educational outcome and also accelerate the learning at the same time. But this assumes those involved want to learn, which widespread cheating suggests is not the case. Maybe the real answer is that we shouldn’t attempt to force curiosity but instead cultivate it where we find it, allowing those who reject it to be redirected until they find something engaging.
I really do worry for our younger students - and I don't envy your job at all.
It seems as if all of teaching and student evaluation needs to be rebuilt from the ground up with AI as a default assumption.
Local high schools have added in class timed, hand written, essays for classes like AP US History.
I particularly like Chicago Law School's policy on AI.
E.g. Law students writing a "Substantial Research Paper" will have to defend it orally: "We will be adding one additional requirement, which is that all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting. This discussion will occur after a complete draft (or final version) of the paper has been submitted to the professor. The discussion could take place one-on-one, or as a class presentation in the style of an academic workshop. Either way, the oral exchange will involve the student answering questions that probe the reasoning of the paper and the implications of its arguments."
I thought the recommendations in section 3 were substantiative. That is move away from time-bound exams and move towards semester length project portfolios.
>"In the era of AI, some traditional learning goals may merit rethinking; for example, do the majority of our students need to be able to write complex programs by hand?"
>"quick, high-stakes evaluations embody the opposite of the signal we want to convey to them right now."
>"We urge instructors to consider forms of assessment that are less vulnerable to AI, and more valuable for learning, such as oral exams, semester portfolios, and out-of-class assignments paired with in-class conversations. This likely means resources such as TAs and class time will become more central to evaluation."
Project-based learning is not a new idea. However, it is precisely the sort of assessment strategy that is being attacked by AI: students can complete many projects fully using AI without learning anything about the underlying material.
In general, project/lab courses are pretty useƒul even iƒ they need some lecture/theory tacked on. Certainly, in school, I found hands-on and other project work, both individually and in groups, some of the better course work I did.
I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:
> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.
I immediately forwarded 3.3 to a colleague (AD of Research). We have a blanket policy document at the institutional level to establish a framework for baselines, but it's absent of any practicable guidance outside of a general approval process and expectations for academic honesty.
All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:
"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."
I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.
These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.
I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.
And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.
Anywhere the nerds or artists go, if they are good, eventually becomes overrun with such types. Just look at the state of Silicon Valley and y combinator, and gentrification in general…
It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
I grew up with PC‘s starting with DOS 1.0. I built a career as a systems engineer, basically by being confronted with thousands of problems that took four hours to figure out because the Windows world was changing so fast there was no documentation to easily find your answer. Those same problems now take me five minutes to figure out by using AI, so I’m able to move onto the next challenge and learn the next thing. That’s one aspect that I think isn’t well recognized in the anti-AI mindset.
That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.
Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...
"The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea."
Why does it work for weather at all? Is there something that the mathematical models are over-simulating? Is weather easier to predict than we thought? Just curious what the intuition is to regarding the success of ML weather modelling...
There is just A LOT of data available- usually an order of magnitude more than in any other related problem.
And general weather forecasts are not that hard - we have semi useful forecasts for more than 50 years. It’s when you want to do something special: long range, nowcasting of convective storm, other extreme weather etc. that is hard. And even then it’s as much a problem of input data accuracy than the models themselves.
Traditional physics based weather models also rely heavily on physical parameterization for sub grid scale processes (think clouds, microphysics of rain sleet snow, etc) so even the deterministic physics models are learned approximations from data.
traditional physics-based weather models also rely heavily on humans looking at the output and the evaluation of the output to discard wacky runs. Let's not pretend that existing physical models of the atmosphere stay on the rails all the time.
When you say runs that is an ensemble model forecast which is different than a deterministic model forecast. Any type of weather model sensitive to initial input state errors will have outlier model runs.
I suspect it's the massively rich, detailed, accurate, multimodal data.
For example, you have satellite images, coupled with real on the ground measurements of windspeed, sunlight, air pressure and precipitation going back decades.
> "The happy suburbanite cares about convenience and quantity above all else, from what I can tell anyway. They don't really have a varied sense of taste, they just want stuff, and they want easy access to that stuff. They like a "haul" that they do once a month, and buy vehicles that will fit it."
This is not reflective of the Costco shoppers I know and the place Costco fits in their lives.
Bi-Rite and Erewhon or Citarella and Eataly are not Costco competitors.
To understand the appeal of Costco to suburban families, you have to understand their caloric needs. Costco is the best solution if you need to buy 48 eggs and 4 gallons of milk a week along with 8lbs of chicken, 4lbs of turkey, and pounds of broccoli, green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes, onions accompanied with apples, peaches, mangos, avocados, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.
> To understand the appeal of Costco to suburban families, you have to understand their caloric needs. Costco is the best solution if you need to buy 48 eggs and 4 gallons of milk a week along with 8lbs of chicken, 4lbs of turkey, and pounds of broccoli, green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes, onions accompanied with apples, peaches, mangos, avocados, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.
Isn't this effectively what I said? Admittedly I could have gone a bit far in suggesting they don't have a varied sense of taste, but what I meant was that it's not important to them to apply it to groceries, if they're a Costco member.
From families I know: food is the reason. Athletic teenagers consume a lot of calories. Proteins, fruits, and vegetables along with milk, eggs, cheeses and snacks are easy to buy in bulk at Costco. These items are replenished weekly.
1. Boring Orwell: Continuous surveillance is already present in the form of cameras in streets, shops, schools, cars, buses, homes, etc. AI can and absolutely will be used to continuously monitor these feeds.
"Telecommunications" would have to, by any reasonable standard, include Telephonic Communications and the vast switching networks for voice.
Clearly that's a domain that has been automating at the very least since the human operated plug and board switching centres with human operators that answered phones and hand routed calls left the network centres.
You'll need to compare how many job postings there are as well to get the full picture, especially for junior roles. That's one of the most contentious effects and has an outsized impact on society.
Not much layoffs and they're probably due to the Trump #1 tax hikes on engineering anyway. But you can't say that without getting tariffed. Saying you're using AI is a much safer bet
Having said that, I've observed four cases where dog poop is more likely left behind.
1. Small dogs - owners of small dogs seem far more likely to leave dog poop behind. Perhaps because they think the poop is itself small?
2. Older owners (often owners of small dogs, but not always) - seem to care less.
3. Off leash dogs in parks - will often poop at the far edges of parks while their owners chat. Edges of parks and near bushes are minefields.
4. Rainy days - people just want to get home, clean off their dog and be done. So they seem more likely leave poop behind.
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