In 1962 Phillip K Dick put out a book called “Man in the High Castle.” In it there was a scene that stuck out to me, and seems more and more relevant as this AI wave continues.

In it a man has two identical lighters. Each made in the same year by the same manufacturer. But one was priceless and one was worthless.

The priceless one was owned by Abraham Lincoln and was in his pocket on the night he was assassinated. He had a letter of certification as such, and could trace the ownership all the way back to that night.

And he takes them both and mixes them up and asks which is the one with value. If you can no longer discern the one with “historicity,” then where is it’s value?

And every time I see an article like this I can’t help but think about that. If I tell you about the life and hardship of an artist, and then present you two poems, one that he wrote and one that was spit out by an LLM, and you cannot determine which has the true hardship and emotion tied to it, then which has value? What if I killed the artist before he could reveal which one was the “true” poem? How do you know which is a powerful expression of the artist’s oppression, and which is worthless, randomly generated swill?

I loved FFSend. When it died, I ended up standing up a GOKAPI server, as it was the closest alternative I could find at the time: https://github.com/Forceu/Gokapi

Definitely not as nice as FFSend though. I may have to give that fork a try instead.

I mean, he’s also going to win the popular vote as well. This isn’t a land outvoting people thing. He just won out-and-out.

All the gerrymandering and EC fixes in the world wouldn’t have changed the outcome if he just got more votes.

I do think it depends on where you live. In about half of states, your vote for president is meaningless. Mississippi isn’t going blue and Massachusetts isn’t going red. In those cases, voting third party has the chance to effect future federal election funding.

But yeah, if you’re in a state with literally any chance at all of being a toss up, don’t vote 3rd party.

It doesn’t have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.

That is what we’re debating, yes.

If it could be conclusively proven that a system like this has saved a child’s life, would that benefit outweigh the misuse?

If not, how many children’s lives would it need to save for it to outweigh the misuse?

Sure, maybe, but I’d also say you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Yes, we should absolutely have better mental healthcare safety nets. Yes, false positives are probably a pretty common prank.

But this isn’t a zero sum game. This can work on tandem with a therapist/counsellor to try and identify someone before they shoot up a school and get them help. This might let the staff know a kid is struggling with suicidal ideation before they find the kid OD’d on moms sleeping pills.

In an ideal world would this be unnecessary? Absolutely. But we don’t live in that ideal world.

That argument could be expanded to any tool though.

People run people over with cars or drive drunk. Ban cars?

People use computers to distribute CP. Ban computers?

People use baseball bats to bludgeon people to death. Ban baseball?

The question of if a tool should be banned is driven by if its utility is outweighed by the negative externalities of use by bad actors.

The answer is wildly more nuanced than “if it can hurt someone it must be banned.”

You say “the last time this happened” as if this wasn’t a generalized trend across all schooling for the past decade or so.

Out of the tens of thousands of schools implementing systems like this, I’m not surprised that one had some letch who was spying on kids via webcam.

And I’m all for having increased forms of oversight and protection to prevent that kind of abuse.

But this argument is just as much of a “won’t someone think of the children” as the opposite. Just cause one school out of thousands did a bad thing, doesn’t mean the tech is worthless or bad.

The word I would contest is “inoperable.”

The system is more than just a retrospective yes or no after 10 years. You have to work with the DoEd to submit paperwork from your employer to make sure they qualify. You have to work with the DoEd to make sure the type of payments or deferments you’re doing are qualified. Etc.

There have been government employees actively working with people on this for the whole of the 17 years. This is a program that has, in fact, “been around for a long time” in a meaningful way.

Yes, the Trump Administration did a good awful job in trying to intentionally eff it up. But people were in fact able to get through it.

Right now, I know several people who are just a few payments away from being able to qualify, but can’t due to payment freezes with the Mohela cutover and all the legal stuff going on with it. Which, to be clear, I’m not blaming on the Biden administration. But it isn’t like the program has made much meaningful headway in the past 4 years either.

And it seems like this is the easier battle to win than general student loan forgiveness. Expand PSLF. Reduce the term to 5 years and reduce the administrative burdens and overhead. Allow a wider range of zero-cost-payment deferments to count as “qualified payments” towards the total payment number needed.

These would be expansions on policy that have been unchallenged for the past 17 years. That passed through both houses of Congress. This is an easy win that would help ease the burden of millions of Americans. Especially teachers who are cripplingly underpaid and often require a masters degree.

This article feels pretty disingenuous to me.

It glosses over the fact that this is surveillance on computers that the school owns. This isn’t them spying on kids personal laptops or phones. This is them exercising reasonable and appropriate oversight of school equipment.

This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.

The article also makes the point that, while the companies claim they’ve stopped many school shootings before they’ve happened, you can’t prove they would have happened without intervention.

And sure. That’s technically true. But the article then goes on to treat that assertion as if it’s proof that the product is worthless and has never prevented a school shooting, and that’s just bad logic.

It’s like saying that your alarm clock has woken you up 100 days in a row, and then being like, “well, there’s no proof that you wouldn’t have woken up on time anyway, even if the alarm wasn’t there.” Yeah, sure. You can’t prove a negative. Maybe I would usually wake up without it. I’ve got a pretty good sleep schedule after all. But the idea that all 100 are false positives seems a little asinine, no? We don’t think it was effective even once?

To be fair, it’s a little disingenuous to start counting from the time the first person became eligible, as all the rules had to be in place for over a decade prior to that.

You’re framing it as a program that’s been around for 7 years, when the reality is that it’s been 17.

Don’t disagree with most of your points, but the program itself has been around for quite a while.

I feel like we’re abusing “historical” here. Is this something of particular note that’s going to be taught to future generations?

Does the African American community know which president was the first to nominate twelve judges of color? Do women know which president was the first to nominate twelve women?

This is a good thing, but like, it’s a good fun fact at best. I think saying it’s “making history” is overstating. It’d be like saying the person who has the Guinness World Record for longest handstand is “making history.”

I feel like “making history” implies that they did something that’s gonna make it into the history books and be taught to future generations.

And like, maybe strictly, but like, which president appointed the twelfth black judge during their term? The twelfth female judge?

The first of anything, yeah, that’s in the history books. Everything past that, maybe a footnote.

A good thing for sure, but “making history”? The language feels strong to me.

This is great and all, but does the 12th time you do something count as “making history”?

You’d think after two or three you’d just stop counting.

Oh, I just failed at reading comprehension.

My first read was something like, Lindsey G says “I love gay people,” or something he’s equally unlikely to say. MTG says, “That’s not something you hear often from LG,” to which he responds, “she’s right, I don’t say that a lot.”

The obviously more accurate read is him saying “she’s right,” and following that comment up with “huh, not something I often say about her.”

Ambiguity. The Devil’s volleyball.

What is this in reference to? It never establishes MTG saying anything about Graham in the article that I saw.

No, I think that’s actually the beauty of this. The OP meme is a right wing meme. A national civil service is a right wing position.

I think there’s a way to craft this program in a hugely bipartisan way. You get all the “patriotism, one nation, farms and country” stuff the right wants, and all the “infrastructure improvements, social safety nets, free college” stuff the left wants.

I think there’s a real potential to get some solid bipartisanism here.

Fair. I get that. I do think it could be something great, but agree it would be better structured as voluntary with heavy incentives for participating.

That said, to your original point, I doubt the intent was to have mandatory service for recent college graduates. Most systems like this require service immediately after high school. So you wouldn’t have a bunch of debt or anything at that point.

Would you feel differently if people who choose to serve have student debt forgiveness? Like, if the GI Bill covered participants?