If you’re not worried about all the highest-end bells and whistles, I can recommend Sceptre as a good budget option. They’re relatively cheap and have no “smart” features, which is important for me. The picture quality is “good enough”; it’s not the best, but it’s far from the worst I’ve seen. Though a soundbar/speakers will be a required separate purchase, as these TVs all seem to come equipped with 20 year old laptop speakers. They won’t give you a home theater experience, but if you just need something for watching TV or playing games, they’re decent.

I’ve had mine for about 5 years now, and have had no real problems with it. The only minor issue is that the LED for the power indicator doesn’t work consistently, but it’s not exactly hard to tell when the TV is turned off or on so it’s not even a concern for me.

For what it’s worth, most AI tools being used in corporate environments aren’t generative AI like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion. I very much doubt it will create new material, as much as control how the pre-written material is given to the students.

I went to a charter high school as a kid, and all our classes were done on computers. The teacher was in the room if you had questions that the software couldn’t answer, but otherwise everything was completely self-paced. I imagine the AI being used in this school is going to be similar, where all the materials are already vetted, and the algorithm determines how and when a student proceeds through the class. The article refers to the classrooms having “learning coaches”, who seem to serve the same purpose the teachers in my school did, as well.

But I think the worst part of this is that certain kids still need individual attention even if they aren’t special needs and there is no way the AI will be able to pick up on that or act on it.

Teachers already miss special needs students all the time. If anything, an AI’s pattern recognition will likely be more able to detect areas a student struggles in, because it can analyze a student’s individual performance in a sandbox. Teachers have dozens of students to keep track of at any given time, and it’s impossible for them to catch everything because we feeble humans have limited mental/emotional bandwidth, unlike our perfect silicon gods.

The truth is that this will actually do a lot of things better than real teachers. It’ll also do a lot of things worse. It’ll be interesting to see how the trade-off plays out and to see which elements of the project are successful enough to incorporate into traditional learning environments.

What an awful person for putting kids through this garbage.

I wouldn’t blame the principal, I’d blame the parents. This is a private school, they’re making a conscientious choice to enroll their kid there.

Tell me you never read the article without saying you never read the article.

I’m not going to say it’s reasonable. But my faith allows me to live with that

“I don’t care that I’m wrong.”

Yeah, that lawsuit from last week is also why I started pirating 20 years ago.

I’m not convinced this game’s development cycle wasn’t all just a giant money laundering operation. There’s no way they could spend that much time and that much money only to put out something so universally panned, and not be intentional. All those millions of dollars, and they never hired a single consultant that looked at the project and said “Literally nobody wants this”? I don’t believe it.

How about the article you’re commenting on?

Oh? Who is forcing the use of school issued equipment?

The schools. Many assignments are given 100% digitally now, with no option for a pencil-and-paper version outside of special needs situations, which not every student qualifies for.

Last time I checked

“was clearly a long time ago” is how that sentence should’ve ended.

You’re missing the point. Either way, the use of this invasive software is required in order to attend public school.

I cannot take any argument seriously that ignores this.

Not really, though. In both scenarios, somebody attending a public school is required to have invasive spyware running on their devices.

This isn’t isolated to school-issued equipment. While this article is mostly talking about high school students, this same situation plagues upper education, as well. My roommate was recently taking some college courses from home, and the proctoring software they require installs rootkit-level spyware on his computer and tried monitoring our entire network activity.

“Heather” also tested out Snapchat’s search tool, finding that “even though she used no sexually explicit language, the algorithm must have determined that she was looking for CSAM” when she searched for other teen users.

But literally in just the previous paragraph:

Posing as “Sexy14Heather,” the investigator swapped messages with adult accounts, including users who "sent inappropriate messages and explicit photos.

Gee, I wonder how the algorithm could’ve possibly suggested these users. What a mystery.

I’m not defending Snapchat here - they’re a scumbag company with a scumbag product and they should be held responsible for enabling the sharing of CSAM on their platform - but it doesn’t just match you with random predators out of thin air. They went in with specific keywords in their username and a pattern of account engagement.

My layman’s understanding (so please correct me if I’m wrong) is that BT audio works by taking the audio stream from your playing device, and breaks up pieces of that stream into small packets. These packets get sent individually to your speaker, which then plays them all seamlessly in order as they flow in. But because these packets have to be cut out from the main stream in the first place before they can be sent, you’re always hearing something from just a few moments ago, as you can’t start playing a packet until it’s finished playing and transferring from the main device, first.

So by breaking these packets up into smaller pieces, you’re reducing how far back your speaker is, chronologically-speaking. So let’s just say that the current version of BT breaks up audio into 0.5-second increments (it doesn’t, this is just an example). This means that every 0.5 seconds, your device snips a half-second of audio into a packet and sends it to your speaker, which then plays that packet. But the transfer takes time, too, so let’s say 0.25 seconds to send (again, just made-up numbers for the sake of explaining the concept). So everything your speaker would be playing in this situation would be, at minimum, 0.75 seconds behind. Not a huge deal for listening to music, but it quickly gets out of sync with video content.

So pretend the new BT version instead breaks up the original audio into 0.1-second increments. So instead of generating 2 packets every second, it’s generating 10. Even if we keep the same transfer rate of 0.25 seconds in mind, this reduces the delay from 0.75 seconds to 0.35, which puts the audio much closer into sync with video content.

I think part of the reason for this is that you have a lot of these dipshit parents who see headlines like this and think “the LiBeRaLs are going to use this week’s school shooting as justification for taking our guns; I’ll show them, I’ll give my children guns and be the proof that guns aren’t the problem”. At least, with how often I see the sentiment of “well my kids have guns and haven’t killed anybody” across social media, that’s my assumption.

They all think they’re responsible gun owners. And maybe some of them are. Hell, maybe most of them are. But a non-zero amount aren’t, and we need to have safeguards in place instead of “nothing we can do but pray for stronger doors on the schools”.

This gives me a great idea for a new startup! I’m going to put a giant mirror in space, and you’ll need to pay me to turn OFF the sunlight at night.

Piracy refers to the taking, not the giving.

What happened?

Well I’m no expert, but I think a truck hit the sign.

After seeing them ignore Putin the other day, I don’t think Netanyahu is worrying about the ICC anymore. Toothless cowards.