Teachers can weaponize CPS reports and absolutely cause legal problems. I know someone who dealt with that. Their kid's doctor put the kid on an ADHD medicine, he had a bad reaction to it, and then the doctor told the mother to immediately discontinue it.

The teacher was annoyed the kid was kind of disruptive and so filed a report that the mom had committed "medical neglect" for not giving her son the meds.

She had to take off work and deal with random CPS visits until they were satisfied.

This is a kid with good grades who can read multiple grade levels higher and who is most likely bored in class. I think he was in the first grade at the time

I don't know what the consequences of that are or could have been but it raised my eyebrows

Yeah, that's a great point, thanks for sharing. One time a teacher cut in line in front of me at the grocery store, so it seems like the real problem here is teachers having too much power.

I agree with this. I've been writing a new internal framework at work and migrating consumers of the old framework to the new one.

I had strong principles at the outset of the project and migrated a few consumers by hand, which gave me confidence that it would work. The overall migration is large and expensive enough that it has been deferred for nearly a decade. Bringing down the cost of that migration made me turn to AI to accelerate it.

I found that it was OK at the more mechanical and straightforward cases, which are 80% of the use cases, to be fair. The remaining 20% need changes to the framework. Most of them need very small changes, such as an extra field in an API, but one or two require a partial conceptual redesign.

To over simplify the problem, the backend for one system can generate certain data in 99% of cases. In a few critical cases, it logically cannot, and that data must be reported to it. Some important optimizations were made with the assumption that this would be impossible.

The AI tooling didn't (yet) detect this scenario and happily added migration logic assuming it would work properly.

Now, because of how this is being rolled out, this wasn't a production bug or anything (yet). However, asking the right questions to partner teams revealed it and unearthed that some others were going to need it as well.

Ultimately, it isn't a big problem to solve in a way that will mostly satisfy everyone, but it would have been a big problem without a human deeper in the weeds.

Over time, this may change. Validation tooling I built may make a future migration of this kind easier to vibe code even if AI functionality doesn't continue to improve. Smarter models with more context will eventually learn these problems in more and more cases.

The code it generates still oscilates between beautiful and broken (or both!) so for now my artistic sensibilities make me keep a close eye on it. I think of the depressed robot from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as the intelligence behind it. Maybe one day it'll be trustworthy

As one of those supposedly higher level ICs, I agree entirely with the assessment.

A decade or so ago, the high level ICs I interacted with were much more technical.

They were the kind who would perhaps not invent truly novel things--but plenty did in the right companies--but they had mastered their domains and genuinely solved thorny problems that others struggled with.

Nowadays, they are more political and less involved. I have met many that do not code or barely code. I've been in months of meetings to decide to do something fairly obvious just to ensure "alignment" even though no parties actually disagreed, just wanted to nitpick minor details that could just be a comment on a PR.

Sounds like Google.

I had a Southern accent and had to train it out because my northern colleagues kept making fun of it. I noticed that I was perceived as "smarter" without it. My story is not exactly uncommon and there are a bunch of famous people (e.g. Stephen Colbert) who did the same thing.

The technology discussed here is reinforcing that stereotype

It has less to do with reinforcing stereotypes and more with fooling customers into thinking the company they're trying to get support from isn't so fucking cheap that they won't spring for tech support workers in a first world country.

Wait until they find out that Huntsville, AL is basically an enclave for rocket scientists.

Some of them rocket scientists double down on the accent in Hunts-vuhl.

Sadly, the You Must Be Ignorant lot is as ignorant of that conclave of cosmic capsule constructors as it is of the proper pronunciation of y'all

Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.

I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.

Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.

Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).

At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.

It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.

I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.

Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.

Can't do that in cracks in a sidewalk, between pavers, on a wall, etc. where plant growth can damage them.

Weed whacker and edger? You'll have them out anyway.

Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd rather not have a dog and children covered in those.

Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.

It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.

Even then, spraying cancer causing chemicals into the land is beyond stupid. Killing yourself and the humans around your land for having a bit less work, one can't be more antisocial.

The problem with that "decipherment", from what I've been told by others who are far more educated than I am, is that it does the equivalent of deciphering Anglo-Saxon runnic texts by using modern slang like "yo" in order for it to work out.

As a non-linguist, non-Sankrit speaker I can't evaluate those claims, but considering that this script declines as the Indus Valley Civilization fades away, along with the arrival of Indo-European speakers who would be more likely to speak the ancestor language of Sanskrit, I'd be highly skeptical of these claims.

If the script is a full writing system, and I were forced to guess what a future decipherment might find, it wouldn't surprise me to see that the language is related to the Dravidian languages.

Hopefully more examples of the writing will be found so that we may one day know for sure.

I learned Sanskrit as a kid and I’m familiar with Dravidian languages as well. They’ve heavily influenced and assimilated each other’s features. Although there are no attestations of Dravidian languages before 5th C BCE, we never know what future discoveries might tell about its connection to IVC, if any.

If we can decipher letters from burnt, rolled up scrolls, I’m sure eventually we’ll figure out what IVCs writings meant.

There have been attempts to recreate (vulgar) Latin from modern day Romance languages, as well as using older forms of these languages to reconstrct what's known as Proto-Romance.

My recollection is that the complexity went the other way; Latin was more complex than the reconstructed languages, especially if the reconstruction didn't include Romanian, because the modern Romance languages became simpler over time in similar ways.

It's clear that the result is useful for understanding features of the ancestral language, but it's not perfect, and never will be.

On the other hand, comparative linguistics came long before genetics, and it is this field that first noticed a connection between the Indo-European languages.

Archaeological and especially genetic evidence now show the peoples of this language family (mostly) have shared (though distant and diluted) ancestry, so the field was broadly correct in noticing a connection.

>...farming those risks out to institutions seems to be the current way most societies have decided to mitigate those risks

Unfortunately, those institutions --be they governments, insurance companies, UL Labs, banks, venture capitalists, etc.--also need to be vetted.

Even when staffed with impeccably well credentialed and otherwise highly capable people, their conclusions may be drawn using a different risk framework than your own.

The risk that they mitigate may even be the risk that you won't vote for them, give them money, etc.

There is also the risk of having too little risk, a catastrophe no worse than too much risk. The balloon may not pop, but it may never be filled.

I don’t think anyone reasonable is advocating believing institutions on blind faith (possibly with the exception of religious institutions). They need to be transparent and also strive to reflect the values (risk and otherwise) of their constituents.