Financial Times reported that Anthropic is telling investors “gross margins are above 80% before revenue it shares with distribution partners and before the cost of training models.”

This is like saying, “I got $500 at the casino, but don’t ask me how much I spent on the slot machines”. All the AI corpos are in the same boat, so this “fear of danger” is likely a smokescreen for, “we’re hemorrhaging cash”.

The British claiming tikka masala is like NYC claiming pizza.

This conversation is not actually a new topic; this is simply the latest edition of “How do we get students to stop cheating?” AI is the latest technique of cheating available to students, but we have actually known the answer for quite a long time. The way you get students to stop cheating is to get them to value their education.

People generally use AI in areas they are ignorant in or to do scut work. Personally, I really enjoy playing the video game Monster Hunter, in which creating armor sets can be very complicated. I once asked ChatGPT to make an armor set and it gave me a pile of garbage. I was only able to recognize it as garbage because of my deep understanding of the game. I have attached great value to learning the deeper mechanics of this hobby and so, I have no desire to offload that labor to a chatbot.

In the USA, education is assigned very little value. School is mostly seen as a way to get a job, not as a way to acquire more knowledge to better yourself. You need to do well in school so you can go to a good college so you can get a well paying job. You should study computer science because it pays a lot. You should become a doctor because it pays a lot. The entirety of education is a means to an end, something you gotta get out of the way to live your life. Education is seen as scut work.

A typical high school student takes an AP exam not because they want to prove they have a higher level mastery of a subject, but because a good score is worth college credits. A college student chooses their major thinking about job opportunities a degree will provide them. We tell children not to study what they love because that is how you become a starving artist.

Our society does not value education. Children are responding appropriately by relegating it to scut work. It’s not that the children of today are uniquely incapable, they are simply the distillation of decades of education devaluation. Ask a football student to do math and they might be hesitant, but ask them to analyze their favorite team’s average field goal success rates and they’ll pull out detailed spreadsheets of percentages at different yard lengths.

If we want students to stop cheating, we have to give them a reason to value their education. While I support a ban on AI usage in the classroom, this is ultimately treating a symptom without addressing the source.

The NYTimes says this measure is being lead by the city’s Dept of Education.

The reason we can’t just leave it up to individual teachers is because AI is not being rolled out by individuals. Our government from a federal level is pushing mass AI adoption primarily because the people in positions of power finacially benefit from more widespread AI usage. To defend from federal government overreach, you need power at least on the level of local government action. Educators in NYC have gotten together with their unions to reccommend a course of action to their Dept of Ed who is now working with the mayor’s office to enact that course of action. So in a way, educators are imposing these restrictions themselves, they are just doing so by working through the chain of command.

Other articles about this topic seem to imply that NYC educators want this measure to go even further, but are happy that things are at least moving in the direction of AI restrictions.

Educators are already asking for restrictions on AI in the classroom. The problem is that AI is systemically being imposed upon them by the tech oligarchs seeking to get some kind of return on their bad investment. This requires a systemic level of response unavailable to a teacher, but available to a government.

There is no evidence that Mayor Mamdani is simply imposing his will upon the NYC educational board. From all the reporting, it sounds like the mayor’s office is working closely with educators, parents, and students on how to best incorporate technology in the classroom.

The latest Chinese propaganda has been posting pictures of their aircraft carrier meals.

Hasan Piker is a distraction. Stop paying attention to the jingling keys.

I am trying to explain that you are wasting your time trying to untie the two. Hasan Piker is not a significant weight holding down Abdul El-Sayed. The Establishment Democrats and the entire Republican Party are where you should focus your ire. The Republicans because they are doing evil shit and the Establishment Democrats because they are focusing on attacking Abdul El-Sayed using Hasan Piker instead of fighting the evil shit.

There is nothing Abdul El-Sayed could do to make Establishment Democrats or the Republicans party stop attacking him. All the things you like El-Sayed for are the exact reasons he is being smeared by Fox News and CNN. Disavowing a streamer will not help because the DNC and RNC do not actually care about Hasan Piker; they are just using him as a tool to attack progressive ideas. There will always, always be something else to attack Abdul over.

Jesse Watters has said and done way more horrible things than Hasan Piker, yet it would be absurd to claim that Abdul El-Sayed should apologize for going on Fox News and should disavow Jesse Watters. That Abdul is going to lose his left wing voters for guilt-by-association with Watters.

I cannot speak for what other people have told you, but I do not think you need to fall on the sword for Hasan Piker. You do need to stop falling for conservative propaganda though. The GOP’s official plan is to try and use Hasan Piker as a distraction away from the actual harm they are inflicting upon US citizens. Fox News talked about Hasan Piker over 300 times since April not because they think Piker and Adbul are close friends, but to try and manufacture outrage against a twitch streamer while gas and eggs are absurdly expensive. You are angry at Hasan for the idea that Hasan and Abdul are closely tied together. Fox News is the one tying the knots. CNN and MSNBC are providing the string.

Any time spent upset about Hasan Piker is a distraction from the actual harmful people in this country who have access to the levers of power.

You could just go to therapy instead of advertising your mental issues publicly.

The better part of a decade, all the resources in the world, and you expect me to be impressed with something that can’t perfectly do an entry level programming project? With that kind of resource usage, I expect a moon landing at the very least.

There is no use case for chat boxes. Uber was losing money, but it was driving people to places. Amazon was losing money, but it was delivering books to people. Chat boxes don’t do shit.

Uber would have failed if their cars just drove in circles. Amazon would have failed if they didn’t deliver anything. There is no real use case for this tech, just like with scam coins or monkey pictures, this is tech searching for a problem to solve.

The most foundational aspect of business is that you gotta do something to get money. What exactly have these chat boxes produced? Shitty porn and incorrect advice. If that’s the best they’ve got after consuming the entirety of human knowledge and guzzling an ocean of freshwater, this shit ain’t going nowhere.

Mickey wants you to fight nihilism.