they fully control the federal government, doing exactly what they said they would do by flooding courts and firing appointees who are insufficiently loyal. they don't think they will need to ever deal with free elections ever again, and they think we're too stupid to do anything about it (bonus: decades and decades of underfunding public education means they might be right).
Deeply unsurprising. My work machine was upgraded to 11, and using it in that context makes me certain that I am going to ride 10 into the ground (or a potential future steamOS release).
The machine now takes longer on startup to get to an operational state, the changes to the right click context menu are ridiculous and asinine, and the corners are now rounded on all the windows. Dear microsoft: take a look at windows IRL. ask yourself: are these rectangles, or squircles?
What is there for me to gain as an end user? Seems like Microsoft just gets more user data and is able to sell more ads while i have to use shittier software.
From a usability perspective, the difference is that Vista and 7 drew rounded borders around the window contents, while 11 doesn’t have any borders and instead cuts out pixels from the window contents to make the window rounded. The real problem isn’t the windows being rounded, it’s that they’re hiding parts of the window contents for purely stylistic reasons.
The potential for issues there depends on the radius of the curve, which is fairly mild in W11’s case. macOS has had similarly rounded corners since version 10.7 (2011) and has never caused any problems.
The extreme corner radii found in newer designs like M3 Expressive and Liquid Glass on the other hand are flirting with danger with the extent to which they cut into window content.
I've had issues with stuff on status bars getting cut off for programs written before status bars fell out of fashion. This is less of a problem on Mac because backwards compatibility isn't much of a concern there, so nobody expects to be able to run a program written more than a few years ago.
early on in the bush (ii) administration, they passed a bill called "no child left behind" that would cut funding from schools that couldn't achieve desired standardized test scores.
while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.
the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.
teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.
The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015.
Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.
NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math.
Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.
Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.
> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
At least around me, it's pretty easy to get into one due to enrollment not being very full in most if not all. They will of course give automatic enrollment for anyone in the parish, but I can't really argue with that since these schools are usually subsidized by the parish and local dioces.
You need to test to an academic standard of course, as they definitely want to keep the bar rather high. So they won't take all comers. But if you are either just starting out or come with an academic track record/high percentile test scores you shouldn't have much of a problem at all. When I went even 30 years ago there were plenty of low income kids who were not academic superstars. The only real metric that was universal across the board was the requirement for involved parents.
I'm sure other areas are different, but Catholic schools in my region have really suffered in recent years with a lot of them closing down.
The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency).
How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?
Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.
I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen.
There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.
Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people the way LLM-powered bots already have. Generative AI is also starting to change the way people think, or perhaps not think, as people begin to offload critical thinking and writing tasks to agentic ai.
> Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people
May I introduce you to the magic of "KPI" and "Bonus tied to performance"?
You'd be surprised how much good and bad in the world has come out of some spreadsheet showing a number to a group of promotion chasing type-a otherwise completely normal people.
social media ruined our brains long before LLMs. Not sure if the LLM-upgrade is is all that newsworthy... Well, for AI fake videos maybe - but it could also be that soon no one believes any video they see online which would have the adverse effect and could arguably even be considered good in our current times (difficult question!).
Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information it's taking in along with a learned model of you and your communication patterns, so it can accurately predict what you intend for it to do.
If you need an interface for something (e.g. viewing data, some manual process that needs your input), the agent will essentially "vibe code" whatever interface you need for what you want to do in the moment.
So basically, the "ideal" state of a human is to be 100% active driving agents to vibe code whatever you need, based on every movement, every thought? Can our brains even handle having every thought being intentional and interpreted as such without collapsing (nervous breakdown)?
I guess I've always been more of a "work to live" type.
Alexa is trash. If you have to basically hold an agent's hand through something or it either fails or does something catastrophic nobody's going to use or trust it.
REST is actually a huge enabler for agents for sure, I think agents are going to drive everyone to have at least an API, if not a MCP, because if I can't use your app via my agent and I have to manually screw around in your UI, and your competitor lets my agent do work so I can just delegate via voice commands, who do you think is getting my business?
The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel
From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.
I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click
> From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.
It does not do that tho. Like, reliably doing a repeatable set of steps is a thing it is not doing.
> I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click
I imagine people eventually would switch on some simple programming and/or language for this, and world would be way more efficient compared to spreadsheet mess
It's a nice theory, but that hasn't been borne out in reality. Activision theater allows people to convince themselves that they don't need to do the actual work to protect their communities or disassemble abhorrent systems. It raises the profile of the app developer at the expense of the community.
It is funny, because the amount of people who convinced themselves that they don't need to do the actual work due to activism theater is strictly smaller then amount of people that ... just do not do anything except complaining about activism theater.
