Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.
If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.
The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.
Most teachers have strong union protections. It’s nearly impossible to fire one. Many districts now have a temporary period where they can be removed much easier. Once they have tenure it’s really difficult.
Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.
I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.
The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
I suppose we won't need to take pictures of ourselves together then either. Just let the AI remember it for us wholesale.
No, I reject that. If there are to be pictures and shirts, let them be real, or let us forego them. If it's acceptable to offload something like this to AI, maybe it wasn't really that important anyway.
People are so accustomed to their community and purpose coming from their job that AI doing work on our behalf threatens not just our income, but our entire social identity.
The boundary on this is kind of fuzzy. You obviously wouldn't donate if 100% of it was stolen, but also if you wait until the world is in a perfected state before helping anyone you'll never help anyone.
Yeah there has been a weird belief here for a long time that if something bad happens to us then extremely generous welfare benefits will materialize.
Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.
No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.
American voters are way too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance; UBI will NEVER get approved here.
Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility. There is a widespread false narrative that any sort of government help is leftist socialism and communism.
People on HN throw out UBI like a viable option... lol please. We can't even fund social security, SNAP or paid parental leave. UBI is a non-starter.
Without knowing more about their methodology, it seems like a lot of the recent improvements have involved the AI itself taking time to complete the task.
At first the models turned a 5 minute task into a 5 second task (by 5 seconds I mean a very short amount of time, not precisely 5 seconds). Then they turned a 15 minute task into a 5 second task.
Opus 4.6 completes 8 hour tasks all the time but (at least in my experience) it isn't spitting the answer out in 5 seconds anymore. It's using chain of thought and tools and the time to completion is measured in minutes or maybe hours.
In my experiments with local LLMs, a substantial part of the gap between frontier and local (for everyday use) is in tooling and infrastructure.
That is why I am sympathetic to the idea we are leveling off. But to bring in the air speed example from the article, I don't think we've reached the equivalent of the ramjet yet. I suspect in the coming years there will be new architectures, new hardware, and new ways to get even more capable models.
It measures ability to complete (with a given success rate) a task with a known human benchmark time to complete. I.e., they set the task to human volunteers and timed how long they took the complete that task.
It's also by far the best in my experience at a request like "it's 3:55 and I need a few slides on the topic of the Gettysburg Address for a 4PM meeting."
I wish it was more integrated into PowerPoint but it's still the best slide generator I've used.
I've lost access to plenty of Claude stuff without canceling anything. I am careful not to leave anything important in there and back up regularly.
It's funny because sometimes it will remember stuff that is lost and not be able to reference stuff that is clearly visible.
One area where I find ChatGPT superior (and this is just my own experience) is not losing things and also respecting project boundaries. Claude projects just seem to be a way to lose things faster, the model seems to be entirely unaware of projects as a concept.
I think it's possible that this idea would work as a communication/branding strategy for senior developers, though I don't think it's strictly true.
I am really skeptical of arguments based around "I can do things the model can't" because that space of things is not very large and is getting smaller every day.
The opportunity to not merely cling on to what we have another year but to grow is to say "together, the model can manage so much more complexity than before that we can do things that were not previously possible."
We haven't identified too many of those things yet, but I am certain they are coming.
By and large, everyone knows.
Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.
If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.
The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.
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