>Back in the good ol' days of the internet, access to the internet in of itself was a decent filter: you had to want to be online, you needed to be somewhat technical, or at least willing to grapple with technical problems, and you needed to actively seek out communities online which aligned with your interests, and there was little financial motivation to do so in bad faith
And it was horrifically expensive to be online until the mid 90s, or late 90s depending on where you were.
This is how it works for things decided by algorithm right now, and it has done absolutely nothing to stymie companies making decisions by algorithm and simply making sure you sign away your right to sue before you interact with them.
This idea was the explicit business proposition of my college scholarship program. It included "summer internships" which turned out to be selling undergrads for $30 an hour while paying us $9 an hour.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how many hours you hire someone who doesn't actually know what they are doing, even though they teach themselves new things sometimes, because writing a few hundred lines of TI-BASIC is not a foundation that you can build a "Turbotax for end of life care planning" service out of.
Unfortunately, I was charismatic and good at meetings and sounding smart and confident, so they loved my work even though I never delivered a single thing other than the barest of mockups.
I can't help but find terrible similarities in AI slop.
I disagree. It seems there is nothing HN likes more than claiming a single tiny mistake, or difference of preference, or possible hang up that will certainly come out in the wash are all valid reasons to reject anything and everything.
Programmers especially need to be constantly reminded that perfect is the enemy of the good, as do people trying to run successful businesses.
In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.
Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.
The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.
The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.
"No child left behind" is a disaster.
I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.
Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.
She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
A good education taught her how to teach. She has a 4 year degree, then some sort of 1-2 year program of being essentially an apprentice, and then you must take several college classes every few years to demonstrate your continued learning, and oddly IMO, the same school that was adopting weird and unproven teaching methods around reading was giving their teachers fairly good yearly workshops about how to teach.
She has a genuine-ness that is palpable, something that I've also inherited. My girlfriend describes it as "You have golden retriever energy" and it gets people engaged with you. She's a very fun teacher.
She treats kids like people, yet the way the interactions go and the way she gets to kids ensures that they still generally respect her. She also used to have an administration that recognized her talent and value, and would stand behind her when a kid was a serious problem. She has helped "bad" kids do better, and helped bullied kids, and has helped needy kids, and this gives her a sort of legendary status. Everyone knows and loves Madame.
She was well experienced dealing with stupid shitheads because she grew up next to my dad's family (lol small towns) and raised three kids that were pains in her ass in diverse ways.
She works her absolute ass off. She habitually showed up to work ten minutes late (ADHD runs in our family quite bad), but the admin ignores that when she is teaching every student in the school and grading assignments until 8pm most nights, and building the curriculum for all the other teachers. I once stayed up with her until early in the morning grading a writing project she had given. Hundreds of students, every year, and she would always know their name and lives and all about them even though she's bad at remembering names otherwise. She was willing to teach kids how grammar worked and how to diagram sentences when they came into her class and didn't know. She was also able because of her education.
She comes from a family tradition that treated education as a total good, something everyone should seek out as much as possible, and something that would lift you up, along with your family, despite ostensibly being a very rural lineage. We have the journal of a woman in our ancestry 200 years back talking about how she learned to read and write because that's just how great education was in general. We aren't nobility or anything that would traditionally do that kind of thing.
A crazy mix of genetics: We are all super neurodivergent and probably super inbred and the latest generation is experiencing crazy illnesses and autoimmune disorders, but my mom's family consistently scores above average on standardized tests and has done so for generations. So she has a good brain to use the things she learned, even though there's tons of "smart" things that isn't so good at. The role of a good educator just happened to really fit well with her mix of beneficial and problematic brain issues.
So, you know, luck. She picked this career path because she was 20 and her marriage failed and she suddenly had to support three kids. Turns out she's really good at it. We aren't ambitious people, but this general theme is the same for my entire extended family.
Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed. I can't find the argument I'm thinking of but it referenced how the police can sit outside your house and surveil you, but physically cannot do that to everyone all the time, and that is an inherent limit to their ability to conduct surveillance that gives you some freedoms and that limit should be respected. Making a machine that can do exactly that is not something cops are allowed to do.
The actual legal problem is that, the above does not apply to private companies. You have no fourth amendment rights from private companies. The constitution gives you no rights against companies.
So the company does exactly what the police aren't allowed to do, and then sell access to the police. For some reason, this literal circumvention of their restrictions has been explicitly allowed.
This is why Surveillance Capitalism is such a big deal. It is a direct circumvention of your explicit constitutional rights, and it just so happens to accomplish that because of the profit earned in the process. For a lot of assholes, this is the winingest of win-wins.
> Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed.
There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.
The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.
So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.
The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.
Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.
Bonus, no amount of jailbreaking or trickery can get around the fact that if your baseband chip is connected to the network, they have your rough location.
And it was horrifically expensive to be online until the mid 90s, or late 90s depending on where you were.
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