The brains (ai models) are more important than the sensors. Cameras are good enough. Lidar doesn’t keep Waymos from driving into an 18” deep puddle, or driving the wrong way down the street. Lidar doesn’t help predict when a pedestrian is going to try to cross the street. Lidar doesn’t give the car the common sense to slow down because a child just ran behind a parked car and will soon be coming out the other side.
This remind me of [Why Greatness
Cannot Be Planned](https://mythoftheobjective.com). When looking at scientific discovery there many examples of happy accidents. The researchers were not intending to find the breakthrough that they did. It was the willingness to change course and explore a new and interesting thing that they just stumbled onto. Examples: penicillin, superglue, radioactivity, cosmic background radiation etc. I loved the example of Robert Williams who pointed the HST at an empty patch of sky for 10 days. He had his time allocated and no one could stop him but the other astronomers thought it a poor use of resources. It resulted in the famous Hubble Deep Field image.
Counter example is the decades that amyloid cascade hypothesis was the only allowed / funded research of Alzheimer disease.
AI is held to a much higher standard than the existing education techniques.
Even without AI teachers are implementing new techniques without any evidence of their effectiveness. In some cases, there is mountains of evidence that their techniques are not effective. From the prohibition on phonics in reading, learning styles, building thinking classrooms, or just the entire idea of constructivism. These are all worse than the techniques that they replace. AI systems at the very least are measured and have some kind of tracking of what works.
I'm not advocating for AI necessarily, but education is in the pre-scientific phase and it needs to start by implementing evidence based techniques, AI or no.
I am both pro and against this at the same time. I love the idea of tracking it as an aggregate, but I hate the idea that the kid may end up being stuck on some vibe coded idiocy and unable to move on, because of it ( I still shudder at some of the ridiculous math tests in college that could not account for the right answer, but not in the exactly right format that was not disclosed as expected ).
I am not even suggesting in person teaching is the only solution either. I am currently dealing with, apparently, my kids teacher, who, well, kinda checked out, but as much I am happy for her being able to retire soon, I am not sure why my kid has to suffer academically.
What I am saying is, there is room for AI. What I worry about is, people are idiots and anything half-useful will be neutered and kids will have all the drawbacks of heavy surveillance and zero to show for it.
First let's stick to the lower grades (under 5th). The evidence isn't as clean for upper grades.
Constructivist teaching favors things like student-centered discovery, inquiry-based, minimal-guidance, "child-led" or "whole-language" approaches.
This is just a plain bad way to teach the basics, like reading, writing and arithmetic. People didn't just magically invent these ideas. Most of human history is pre-literacy. Why are we expecting a 5yo to spontaneously learn to read?
This has been studied extensively. Have a look at Project Follow Through (1968–1977). It's the largest study of its kind.
This U.S. government-funded study involved ~120,000 disadvantaged K–3 students across 20+ instructional models in multiple sites. It directly compared Direct Instruction (Engelmann’s scripted, explicit basic-skills model, e.g., DISTAR) against constructivist-oriented models (e.g., Bank Street child-directed, Open Education/EDC exploratory-discovery, cognitive-conceptual discovery approaches).
Abt Associates did an independent evaluation in (1977). Their findings
DI produced the highest gains in reading, math, language, and spelling—raising performance to near national averages. It was the only model with consistent positive effects across basic skills, cognitive-conceptual skills, and self-esteem/affective outcomes.
For more recent evidence, have a look at the reforms in Mississippi and the UK. Mississippi has striking gains for under privileged students.
Mississippi Columbus Municipal School District used the "Reading Mastery Signature Edition" DI program.
Demographics: 92% African American, 100% free/reduced-price lunch, 12% special education.
Results as measured by NWEA MAP and Renaissance STAR assessments:
MAP RIT gains: +15.96 points overall
43–45% of students met or exceeded expected growth; top performers gained ~20–28 points.
Similar results in:
Baltimore City Public Schools (1996–2008)
Arthur Academies (Portland, Oregon metro, 2007–2013)
Rimes Elementary, Florida (2011)
Gering Public Schools, Nebraska (2004+)
First of all, thanks for the thorough response, I appreciate it.
And that I agree with you about the others you listed; what happened with the war on phonics is like criminal levels of negligence and willful ignorance. (Anyone reading this, start with the Sold a Story podcast).
I’ll have to take the results at face value since I know almost nothing about the alternatives they’re comparing to.
I am also willing to believe that of all the methods tried, DI works better than constructivism approaches for < grade 5, even if that may not be true for older students.
This was enabled by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), enacted in 1994. Congress made their bed, now they need to lie in. Time to remove the govt mandated backdoors.
This “practicing without a license” tactic has been used before. This case where a city fined someone for making a mathematical model of traffic lights. [ij](https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...)
This will keep happening unless there are consequences for those in government that abuse their authority.
It's a common tactic to gain state enforcement of gate keeping and protectionism. It's extremely useful at both preventing individuals from acting for themselves but also limiting individuals from recourse against the misdeeds of those who are licensed. See also, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217564698-the-licensing-...
Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o)
Goes into great detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least).
TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes sense.
True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.
> If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work.
Ever attempted this before at a large company and had success with it? I think I can count four times so far in ~15 years where people attempted to rewrite something medium/large-scale from scratch around me, was a success once, although scope was drastically cut at the end so almost a stretch to call it a success.
You are of course correct. It's not likely to succeed. "Could work" doesn't mean high chance of success. I was trying to imply the opposite. It's just that Xcode has so much baggage that the previous attempts have been very compromised.
Seen it once - it got done because there was enough will to make it happen but it probably took a decade.
Whether it was successful or not is up for debate. It certainly was nowhere near as performant as the old system but probably 99% of features came across.
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