There’s a very easy solution to this AI problem: grades can just be based on in-person exams that are either administered on paper or a closed software environment that prohibits AI usage.
If the class demands a formal paper, it shouldn’t ever just be a cold “turn it in” situation. Something like a thesis should be developed with in-person discussions about the state of the research and the student’s progress. Those discussions should be touchpoints for evaluating whether the student is understanding the material and really thinking through. That means that such papers only really work in a small seminar environment.
What is obsolete is the sort of class where students are asked to write a 10-page discussion of a given topic and then the professor just grades that paper cold. I doubt we are ever going to be able to adequately police whether that 10-page analysis of Kantian ethics was written with AI assistance. Likewise, STEM classes with problem sets should only use those problem sets for learning and not for evaluation. If the student wants to use AI on the problem sets they can, but they won’t be able to use AI to help them on the exam.
Virtually all of the top officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have departed the agency or will do so this month, according to an email obtained by Cybersecurity Dive, further widening a growing void in expertise and leadership at the government’s lead cyber defense force at a time when tensions with foreign adversaries are escalating.
Five of CISA’s six operational divisions and six of its 10 regional offices will have lost top leaders by the end of the month, the agency’s new deputy director, Madhu Gottumukkala, informed employees in an email on Thursday. […] The exits of these leaders could undermine the efficiency and strategic clarity of CISA’s partnerships with critical infrastructure operators, private security firms, foreign allies, state governments and local emergency managers, experts say.
Old penny pincher cheeto is spending tens of millions on a birthday parade.
All US cybersecurity tasks have now been outsourced to the KGB.
That’s what all those root accounts that all governement organizations were forced to create by DOGE are for.
I don’t think he has any idea what CISA has, but there evidently is some hostility from people around him due to CISA’s efforts to educate people on online disinformation, and its failure to back up claims of election interference in 2020.
If Donald Trump was actually a Russian asset, what would he do differently?
Is there anything?
Crippling our cybersecurity organization, antagonizing our allies, cutting off support for a democracy that’s being invaded by a tyrant, pardoning people who lied about their contact with said tyrant’s government…
Does anyone recall this is the government agency that refused to declare that fraud had any role in deciding the 2020 election?
In fact, asserted the opposite of that.
And now Trump is in control again. What would you expect?
More than 2% of Americans are taking the blockbuster class of GLP-1 drugs for overweight or obesity, up nearly 600% over six years, according to a report from FAIR Health given to Axios first. The data from FAIR Health’s repository of over 51 billion commercial healthcare claim records shows the explosion in use of the drugs specifically for weight loss — roughly half of all users.
In all, roughly 4% of Americans were taking GLP-1 drugs in 2024 for either overweight, obesity or Type 2 diabetes (their original approved use). The data shows Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic is still by far the most commonly taken GLP-1, followed by Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro. The percentage of adults who were prescribed a GLP-1 drug but did not have bariatric surgery increased from 2.5% in 2019 to 11.2% in 2024 while the the percentage of adult patients who had bariatric surgery decreased 41.8%.
I agree, the policy of shame has done wonder for the obesity problem.
Every problem can be solved that simply also, you just tell people what do to and they go and do it. Never fails. My buddy was playing a game the other night and struggling so I told him “hey, don’t play bad, play good instead” and that’s all it took.
The benefits go beyond weight loss:
Unfortunately, this theory is easily debunked by the fact that India ranks 3rd in the world for obesity rate, while maintaining one of the worlds highest rates of vegetarianism.
I’m not arguing against exercise, but with GLP-1 drugs, you literally do not need to exercise to lose weight.
In my late 20s, I lost about 60 lbs of weight, almost entirely through a small number of dietary changes—zero beverages other than water and unsweetened coffee, zero french fries, zero bagged snack foods, zero going out to eat for lunch. I also practiced intermittent fasting, sporadically, for 24 hours. I didn’t change my exercising at all.
Now, since I lost the weight, I’ve taken up more exercise (bike, jog, lift) and I’ve maintained a steady weight for almost 15 years now.
Bodybuilders say “abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.” They’ve got a point.
Or used to look like, when people ask “we spend so much money on cancer” it’s on base level research like this usually working with hospitals and universities, the CAR-T therapy this expands upon has been funded by NIH and NCI, this is the research that enables pharma companies to develop and trial actual treatments.
Now if you want to say if we fund all this we should own more and have better access to it I would agree but fact is the US leads on a lot of this because we fund it and that leads to a lot of economic growth for everyone and American’s do tend to have access before most other people do (just at an extremely high cost sometimes but that is a related but different problem)
Federal grant helps fund CAR T-cell therapy trial for B-cell malignancies
NIH researchers develop approach that could help supercharge T-cell therapies against solid tumors
“adidas recently became aware that an unauthorized external party obtained certain consumer data through a third-party customer service provider,” the company said. “We immediately took steps to contain the incident and launched a comprehensive investigation, collaborating with leading information security experts.”
Adidas added that the stolen information did not include the affected customers’ payment-related information or passwords, as the threat actors behind the breach only gained access to contact. The company has also notified the relevant authorities regarding this security incident and will alert those affected by the data breach.
Think politics divides? Try mixing competitors with different views on stacking “action” cards, or getting everyone to agree on the true power of the Wild card. And nobody can seem to decide whether staples of the game of their youth — like mandating players yell “Uno!” when they have one card left — are socially acceptable at a bar with strangers.Mattel has responded by actively settling rule debates on social media, definitively stating that stacking Draw 2 cards is prohibited, while simultaneously embracing the game’s divisive nature through marketing campaigns. The company’s “Show ‘Em No Mercy” variant, featuring more aggressive rules, became the second-best-selling card game in the United States last year according to research firm Circana, trailing only classic Uno itself.
… about Uno.
Even though I did get into Board/Tablegaming 18 months ago and attend the local boardgame meetup once or twice a week.
Right now I’m regularly playing Scythe (with extensions) and Roll for the Galaxy (with extensions).
And I’ve got a stack of other premium boardgames waiting to be played intensely.
All of them waaaaay more interesting than Uno.
Well, that’s going to going to cause some confusion. At least for me - I am developing some software that works around Dia (the diagram editor), and now I’ll have to explain to my customers that it’s not using Dia (the AI browser thing).
Tim O’Reilly had a good essay, "Alpha Geeks" that describes how new tech gets adopted.
Arc seemed interesting but how many Alpha Geeks will run a closed-source browser in this decade where vulnerabilities are everywhere and of potentially existential risk?
They’re in a tough spot selling a proprietary browser in a world where they have to depend on uptake first by the people who don’t care if it’s open source or not.
Brave seems to have found a business model that lets them do both. It’s not obvious that the proprietary business model is viable for Internet browsing, but marketing can take up a lot of that slack.
Certainly Safari maintains an important market share so it’s not completely off the table but those users need to be sold to if the Alpha Geeks aren’t interested. I’m not sure if Edge has separate CVE’s from Chromium but in both cases vendor-bundling is the supermajority of user acquisition which is quite difficult to compete with.
Sprinkling on a bit of AI seems like the go-to strategy this year - heck maybe it’ll work at some point. It’s not impossible that somebody will invent a killer-app desktop AI integration. An agent dashboard might be useful when the reliability moves a few more sigmas out.
I tried ARC and thought it was pretty cool - but boy I’m just too busy to learn a new browser. I probably also am not the target market, since I mostly use a browser to, um, browse the web, and dedicated apps for 75% of my productivity work.
Sometimes “good enough” is too hard to replace.
I’m sure the analyst teams have been up late several nights running the numbers and kicking the tyres on their 35% estimate of the price increase needed to make iPhones in the US vs China, but it seems like a wild underestimate to me, mainly because you don’t have the integrated supply chains and workforce skills in the US, and neither of those problems is readily addressable by Apple alone.
But in any event, none of this ought to distract from the most important point: the president is seeking to supplant the decisions of the CEO of one particular business, and most media reporting is treating this as just another part of the tariff story, instead of highlighting that this is another major ratchet in Trump’s arrogation of unchecked whimsical power.
By contrast, Apple could offset a 25% import tariff by raising global iPhone prices just 4-6%
WTF?
Why should the rest of the world pay for Trumps incompetence?
Americans voted for him, let them pay for their mistake.
1. How can we say this without addressing income inequality?
2. Republicans and Americans don’t give a shit about the deficit, we can stop pretending like this matters, the current bill is set to spend more debt.
3. This is a concern but fucking with our allies I would suggest isn’t going to help. I suppose we will see who’s plan comes out better, Biden’s 3 large investment bills (CHIPS, BP Infrastructure, IRA) work better than whatever the current strategy is.
4. IF UE in the US was high then maybe this is a top concern but it’s historically low. Also whoever says anything about cultural preservation or national indentity needs to define what they are in the USA, not just say it and expect the reader to do the work. To me the most important aspects of that are our Constitutional system of rules and order which is currently being run roughshod so to me as an American Trump is actively destroying our identity.
5. See #4.
We elicited over a million stated preference choices over 126 dimensions or “aspects” of well-being from a sample of 3,358 respondents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our surveys also collected self-reported well-being (SWB) questions about respondents’ current levels of the aspects of well-being. From the stated preference data, we estimate relative log marginal utilities per point on our 0-100 response scale for each aspect. We validate these estimates by comparing them to alternative methods for estimating preferences. Our findings provide empirical evidence that both complements and challenges philosophical perspectives on human desires and values. Our results support Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia through family relationships and Maslow’s emphasis on basic security needs, yet also suggest that contemporary theories of well-being may overemphasize abstract concepts such as happiness and life satisfaction, while undervaluing concrete aspects such as family well-being, financial security, and health, that respondents place the highest marginal utilities on. We document substantial heterogeneity in preferences across respondents within (but not between) demographic groups, with current SWB levels explaining a significant portion of the variation.
Academic euphemory for: The shit we peddle doesn’t mean anything to anyone.
Yep. What people want can be described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was first published decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
For an older example of a list of what people want we can look to the Christian bible with their description of the works of mercy, this dates back centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
The paper referenced looks to be quite long and unless there’s someone that can point to something profound and new in there I’m not likely to read it all. The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs compares well with Christian tradition so it’s not like there’s any deep mystery here or something changed in any fundamental way. If I were to dig further into history and other cultures I’d expect to find a similar list of needs, and in much the same order.
The fine summary appears to indicate they found some nuance on how people from differing demographics rate these needs. That likely holds some value for people that study human behavior but does such nuance mean anything in how we should act in society or set government policy? I have my doubts, especially if this means setting different policies based on race or gender as that could raise all kinds of questions on equality under the law.
Amazon Mechanical Turk pays about $2/hour for your time. People who spend time answering questions and doing tasks on MTurk are hardly a representative sample of humankind.
-if not lies about cheap sheit?
I know what Shein, Temu and AliExpress are like and I just got used to it because I know that these sales tactics are pretty normal in parts of Asia. Having said that I’d still rather buy this ‘cheap sheit’ directly from Shein, Temu and AliExpress rather than ‘entrepreneurs’ in the West who add a 1-500% markup on the exact same ‘cheap sheit’ which they buy directly from Chinese factories for even less than Shein, Temu and AliExpress charge. Some of the more brazen Western resellers just source their stuff from the Shein, Temu and AliExpress web sites from the comfort of their home office, sell it to you at a huge markup and don’t even bother to take the item out of the Chinese packaging before forwarding it to you. A lot of western retail these days is basically just an obscenely overpriced personal shopping service so why not just buy from as close to the source as possible and cut out these parasites? Finally, a lot of this ‘cheap sheit’ actually isn’t ‘sheit’. The quality of most of the stuff I get from Shein, Temu and AliExpress is actually quite decent.
Like buying brand labels protects you from cheap garbage.
Some of the more brazen Western resellers just source their stuff from the Shein, Temu and AliExpress web sites from the comfort of their home office, sell it to you at a huge markup and don’t even bother to take the item out of the Chinese packaging before forwarding it to you.
Dropshipping doesn’t involve forwarding parcels.
The parcel never went through the reseller’s hand.
It went straight from the Chinese dispatcher to the buyer.
The western reseller is merely a customized front-end shop.
At best, the Chinese themselves could relying on a parcel forwarding service that can split or joins shipment for various taxation reasons.
(e.g.: stuff bought from AliExpress often transits through the Netherlands here in Europe).
Overpricing isn’t illegal, deception is. Shein isn’t under fire for being cheap or expensive, but for violating specific consumer rights: fake discounts, false urgency, misrepresented return policies, and lack of transparency. If Delhaize or Ahold does something similar, they can and should be investigated too, but the comparison only holds if the violations are legally equivalent.
We call them losers.
If you can’t make it hear, it’s for a lack of trying or a lack of competence. There are lots of opportunities.
The immigrants who come to California work quite hard and often make lots of money.
A lot of retirees leave, of course, cashing in on their houses that have dramatically appreciated.
Yeah, doing some quick math using the numbers from TFS - the population loss without international immigrants would’ve been 50K people. Out of a population of 39.5 million.
Somehow I don’t think LA’s traffic is getting any better…
50+ Venezuelans Imprisoned in El Salvador Came to US Legally, Never Violated Immigration Law
Shortly after the US government illegally and unconstitutionally transported about 240 Venezuelans to be imprisoned
in El Salvador’s horrific “terrorism” prison on March 15, CBS News published their names. A subsequent CBS News
investigation found that 75 percent of the men on that list had no criminal record in the United States or abroad. Less
attention has been paid to the fact that dozens of these men never violated immigration laws either.
https://www.cato.org/blog/50-v…
I suspect that your “preferred news feed” has not been telling you this, because there’s no rational way to describe sending people to a concentration camp as “going after criminals and activists.”
LOL the suckers believed him when Trump said other countries would pay the tariffs. MAGAs are colossal dumbfucks, some of the most gullible people to walk the earth.
Why are so many people here convinced we should no make anything in the country anymore?
I don’t think “should” is the correct term, here: I think “can” is more appropriate. Companies, under the whip of Wall Street, demand monstrous quarterly profits, while American workers demand monstrous paychecks to fund their ever increasing standard of living. I mean, are you really even a man if you don’t have a $100k boosted truck, towing a boat, or an RV - or both - and a mansion to drive home to? Well, generally, you can’t have both monstrous profits and monstrous paychecks. So if you want to bring manufacturing back to America, you have to reduce costs - particularly labor - to justify the effort, or manufacturers won’t bother. Lower labor cost and resulting increased profit is why manufacturing left in the first place, particularly under Reagan. Note that I’m not even touching environmental issues, here: just labor. So, if manufacturing could be done here, it probably would.
LOL the suckers believed him when Trump said other countries would pay the tariffs. MAGAs are colossal dumbfucks, some of the most gullible people to walk the earth.
And lazy. Even a cursory Google search for “tariff” (or “define tariff”) shows it’s a fee (tax) paid by the importer and often (usually) passed on to the consumer. Literally the first sentence of the Wikipedia page says:
A tariff or import tax is a duty imposed by a national government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer.
Idolatry doesn’t have to include willful ignorance and blind loyalty / obedience.
I see so many comments that manufacturing can’t come back to the us. Why are so many people here convinced we should not make anything in the country anymore?
We could, but most things would probably be (much?) more expensive, mainly due to labor and environmental laws. In addition, it takes time and money to build production facilities and domestic supply chains — doesn’t do any good to build domestically, if all the parts and/or raw materials are imported (and tariffed). Production facilities couldn’t be built/ramped up to scale before Trump leaves office; if a Democrat is elected (or even a level-headed Republican), the tariffs will probably go away and foreign goods will again be less expensive than domestically produced versions. Companies don’t want to accept that financial risk.
Also, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted on his April 6th Face the Nation appearance that President Trump’s tariffs will “stay in place” and will result in things like “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones” coming to the US. He acknowledged that “it’s gonna be automated,” which is just one of the reasons more manufacturing may not mean more jobs.
So either millions and millions of U.S. workers will be screwing in tiny iPhone screws (fun!) or those tasks will be automated. Neither of those options sound that great for American workers or that they pay well. Of course this Administration sees most of us a disposable serfs, which explains the attempted rollback of labor and environment protections and health insurance access/affordability.
Kodak actually produced their own sensors for a while - including the full-frame 18-megapixel KAF-18500 used in the Leica M9.
But to go back to that… would only require an updated fab… and then all of the components needed to integrate… Cameras are complicated as is their supply chain, tariffs are unfortunately not very sophisticated…
Hence why Nikon has to raise prices, as they have a lot of complexity just to try to guess what the new price might be.
It looks to me - with these new prices - that the same lens is now considerably cheaper in Sweden than in the US - and I can tell you as a Swedish resident and a grey haired photographer - this is the first time I have ever seen that.
John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public’s right to know.
Before WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, BayFiles, or Transparency Toolkit, there was Cryptome - an open internet archive that inspired them all, helped ignite the first digital crypto war, and even gave Julian Assange his start before falling out with him on principle.
of defending the public’s domain against the corruption of copyright and continue the fight against classism. We desperately need people to ensure the rights we fought for are not swept away by the selfish, insatiable and irresponsible interests of the upper classes; as there’s so little real freedom left. At this rate we and our culture will be owned and controlled by elites; welcome to our plutocracy.
who died in 2018.
I didn’t realize he was born in the 1930’s.
Older than a Boomer, he didn’t need to be a “digital native” to understand how the Internet should work.
Truly a legend in Internet History. RIP.
The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries.
This is not the site you’re looking for…
At least that’s something, right? It could be worse. They could still be running operations where they drug unwitting US citizens with LSD for “research”. Or extrajudicial killings, torture and/or “renditions”. Or flooding US ghettos with crack cocaine to fund nefarious operations abroad. JFK had the right idea for the CIA: “splinter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”.
…than what the Soviet Union or even Britain did. The more I learn about other countries, the more I realize this anti-USA bullshit spewed by self-loathing middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans is ignorant and foolish. Did the CIA do shitty things?…most likely....but nothing compared to what the KGB and FSB did and still do today.
Everything has to be evaluated in context and relative to peers, not in isolation. No country will be perfect, but the USA is better than it’s peers and it’s legacy will state so clearly.
It’s like bitching about Apple…fair…there’s plenty to bitch about if you look at them in isolation…compare them to…who…Microsoft? Google? HP?…then you start to appreciate them.
Would you rather be Gaum under US rule or India under British rule? Haiti under French rule? how about Bulgaria in the Soviet Union?…maybe Ukraine today?....yeah…the CIA sucks…until you compare them to the KGB/FSB, MOIS/VAJA, etc. They’re quite angelic when compared to their peers both today and in history.
Wouldn’t mind if people learn from it