No one is saying there isn't, but it's objectively a stupid massive oversimplification of how complex things like a human brain and human learning really are.
For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.
School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.
We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn
Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.
The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.
blackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time, especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
To me, AI feels like the morbidity of Star Trek teleportation, where it's actually copying the person at to the other end and zapping the original one out of existence. The original human never benefits from the fast transportation.
Similarly, we're creating tools to improve knowledge, but we're progressively zapping the human out of the equation. Knowledge is created for something, but it's unclear if very soon humans will be able to understand it, or really benefit from it, except billionaires, etc.
It's too bad that we're not improving humans nearly as fast as we're replacing ourselves.
Beverse they are benefitting from the financial situation of owning the ai companies that are getting pumped massive amounts of money, not from the debated usefulness of the output of the LLMs.
"leftist subtexts" such as an understanding of capitalist economics in which the people who own everything benefit from the economic activity being done underneath them.
"leftist subtexts" that treat this as a problem, and not as the single largest driver of growth in human history, to which we owe all of the material comfort we now enjoy.
Billionaires are going to benefit from AI at the expense of everyone else. That's not leftist ideology, that's just a fact. That's happened with every technology that's ever been created. It happened with the industrial revolution. Why would it be different this time?
A few years ago i had laser eye surgery and now i can see well. Something that was not possible 50 years ago. Claiming that EVERY new technology comes at the expense of normal people is an absurd statement.
Coming at your expense and benefiting you in some way are not mutually exclusive. For that matter coming at the expense of the average joe and then many years later benefiting the average joe seems to be a common theme.
What do you think of things like the changes to infant mortality or life expectancy between the industrial revolution and present day?
EG, my own oldest child needed a surgery at birth that would have been logistically impossible even 50 years ago. I'd say that she and I have benefited enormously, despite not being billionaires.
edit: I solemnly swear that the sibling comment with the strikingly similar "impossible 50 years ago" claim is a pure coincidence and that I at least am not a bot campaign. Haha.
That's a funny thing to say as time is infinite, and we're at the early stages of every single thing. Reasoning in time dynamics is useful though to be clear
>& now they're still losing all of their users to Claude Code and Codex.
Why pay for Cursor when I can use GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.6, MiniMax M2.7, Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 Pro and Deepseek v4 for cheap and use whatever harness I want, including Claude Code.
It's not like Cursor harness is the best out there.
And even if I want to edit the code, I don't need to run the agent harness in an IDE.
these are in the trillion parameters range, not sure it's actually that cheap to have at a reasonable speed without quality degradation & without like.. your own DGX B200
Cantonese is a language, yes, but mutual intelligibility and similarity to other languages is hardly relevant unless the languages are very similar indeed.
For example, there are spoken varieties of English that are mutually unintelligible, while speakers of different Slavic languages are often capable of having a good conversation by speaking slowly and listening carefully.
In practice the main criterion for being a language as opposed to a continuum of dialects is the degree of standardisation. So an example of something that may or may not be a language might be something like Swiss German (but I'm not an expert so I can't guarantee that's a good example). Another type of borderline case is when you have two standardised languages which differ only slightly, for example US English and GB English, or DE German and AT German.
> For example, there are spoken varieties of English that are mutually unintelligibl
Which? I have travelled to, worked in, or lived in multiple countries with English speaking populations (by which I mean some people speak English as a first language, though it may be a small minority) on five continents and never had a serious problem understanding people. Some slang and idiom and loan words, but thing much.
I have personally been baffled by some Scottish and Indian speakers of English, particularly when I was younger and less experienced. And Singapore English is said to be particularly hard for someone with no previous experience. And I know of a case in which someone from London sat at a table with some in-laws who were speaking a traditional native dialect of southern England to each other and found they understand almost nothing, though that was a few decades ago and the dialect in question is perhaps only spoken by old people today.
When you say you "never had a serious problem understanding people", do you mean you could understand them when you overheard them speaking to each other? Because that, of course, is the real test of how intelligible their language is to you. They may well speak a bit differently when speaking to an outsider. Also, you may be particularly skillful at understanding spoken English. I feel I have got better at understanding British dialects as I got older and gained experience of them. I was terribly confused by some dialects as a child.
With compulsory education almost everyone today has some knowledge of a standard language besides whatever dialects they have learnt. If you want to find someone who only speaks dialect X of language Y you might have to look in places where Y is neither official nor widely taught, or among very old people who never went to school.
I do have the advantage of having grown up speaking two dialects (but they are not THAT different) so I am probably better than average at understanding spoken English. I think the biggest difference is attitude: I am not thrown by hearing an unfamiliar idiom.
I have heard Singaporeans, Indians and others speaking to each other and had no difficulty understanding them.
A problem I have come across in South Asia is people mixing languages. At that point are the speaking English? It can be quite disconcerting when someone changes language mid-conversation.
I have found Geordies and some Scots difficult to understand, but I think "mutually unintelligible" over stating it. There are reasons why Scots is sometimes classified as a different language. Other than that I have had difficulty with any form of British English.
People often say Mandarin and Cantonese are like Spanish and Portuguese, but that undersells how different they are.
Your example of Spanish and French is more accurate -- same language family, but different grammar and vocabulary.
I offer German and Dutch as another example pair -- same language family as well, but different enough that no one will say "oh they're just different dialects". Dutch is an example of what happens when a Germanic language (Low Franconian) gets it's own state.
For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.
School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.
We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn
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