My kiddos have had low but positive screen time and knew the alphabet quite a bit earlier.
My personal impression is that while there's deffo stuff kids shouldn't watch, the thing that matters is what the kids do apart from TV. If it's nothing, or insufficient, it will be terrible. If as well as screens kids get plenty of high quality attention, the outcome will be good.
You could argue, and I'd struggle to disagree, that less screen time is always good. But there's tradeoffs in this optimisation. Parental attention and energy are also finite - unless you're super rich, have 3 nannies, a chef and not working. At some level, giving the poor overworked parent a break by sticking the child in front of a screen for a bit might mean the parent has more energy to do something worthwhile with the kiddos afterwards.
There's a nice statistical experiment in it no doubt - child outcome as function of screen time, high quality time and "fend for yourself" time, controlled by how much energy the parents have - will the coefficient on screen time be negative? Merely zero? Maybe even positive, just smaller than the other ones?
But good luck getting the data, never mind randomisation.
US sells a lot of other things to Europe that Europe doesn't have to buy. That includes tech. I'm not looking forward to the ensuing trade war but it's not a one way street by any means.
A fun little effect is that average speed is time-averaged not distance-averaged. So when you go slower, you lose doubly - lower speed to average and over a longer time (higher weight). Hence one of the reasons why putting more energy into the harder bits is actually optimal.
Im amazed how many commenters assume the questions assume a single required answer. Is this how universities work where you studied? By the standard HN demographics, I'll assume that is mostly the US.
Having studied in the UK, clearly the point is to elicit a well-thought through argument. The "answer" almost doesn't matter at all. A boring but "correct" argument is easily beaten by a novel one, even (or especially) if it is controversial, flippant or even somewhat ridiculous.
Of course there is a limit, if you straight-faced start promoting killing people, or worse still, Oxbridge academics, that won't fly. But I'd say that limit is quite far.
There are of course 2nd order effects too, as in "I don't reject this argument because it offends me but because it is poor".
Is the job to produce one essay answering all three questions? (Or rather, two essays with three questions each.)
It would be easier to weave some topics together than others. I'd expect them to get a fair number of papers with identical choices for questions, if that synthesis is part of the grade.
The responses reflect people from engineering backgrounds who are unfamiliar with this type of exam, not an American versus UK thing.
In engineering there isn’t room for creative and controversial answers when you’re asked to solve an exam problem.
It is rather fitting to see some try to turn this into another chance to stereotype Americans rather than realizing the obvious explanation that this is a website with a global audience that is biased toward software and engineering.
> "well-thought through". Imprisonment is even a possibility.
Nonsense. Prison didn't even happen for poorly-thought out national newspaper columns like where Katie Hopkins in The Sun called migrants "cockroaches".
Pretty cool! I have a half baked version of something similar :)
Can you use it also as a lightweight Kafka - persistent message stream? With semantics like, replay all messages (historical+real time) from some timestamp for some topics?
As with pub/sub, you can reproduce this with some polling etc but as you say, that's not optimal.
It's going to happen and at some level I'd rather war casualties were measured in robots rather than people.
My concern is the cottage industry of integrating guns with half baked AI at the lowest cost. And probably vibe coded too.
The companies don't care - a sale is a sale. MoD maybe doesn't care - 90% accuracy and less human casualties on their own side are a win. Governments want to save money and by the time they find out the robots go rogue, it will be too late to do anything about it.
The problem is always the same. It's not just MoD (is it MoW now?) that will have access to this.
YoloV8 + optical flow works fine on an esp32. You want to give a drone rough coordinates for a refinery and hit something in it, like a storage tank? That'll work. This means, give it 5 years, relatively small groups will have access to it. This cannot be stopped.
The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first.
Sadly, building an AI that analyses camera imagery and aims at humans, from scratch, is these days almost an intern project. It's not really something you can control or ban, the way you can control, dunno, uranium enrichment.
Integrating it with a robot and sticking a gun on it, thankfully, requires a bit more know-how.
3) they can see if any countermeasures would be effective
4) they can figure out what to look for and find those weapons before they're fired
cfr. nuclear deterrence, right. There is "nothing" the US can do about other nations enriching uranium and making bombs, other than bombing those countries. The US can't change the laws of physics, follow the right formula and it'll work. However the US can figure out exactly what to look for to either prevent it from happening through intervention or at the very least get some warning before it's used ...
And then it will be just another war crime committed daily conflicts, and nothing will happen because there is no world police ?
Ask Ukrainians, Lebanese, Gazaoui, Somalilanders, or even Iranians for that matters - that may not make a big difference to today...
What I would love to see is a local government suing an arms producer for the efficacy of their weapons. (Or even funnier, the owner of a home destroyed by a drone, suiving the GPS company.)
We all know that the only things people in suits are really afraid of, more than hell, is a bad Q4 report and an expensive lawsuit.
So here's a scenario for how AI takes over: instead of creating hyper intelligence, we are stuck around the current level. The average human stops thinking and reduces themselves to an IQ of 70, relying for everything on their phone.
Then AI takes over the world not out of calculated cruelty but by accident, then messes it up by hallucinating. Humans die out to being too thick. AI bumbles on for a bit but eventually model collapse and rusting electricity infra put an end to it.
As an armchair military hobbyist, I read this with interest.
The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k.
I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly.
At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters.
It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume.
Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry.
I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.
My personal impression is that while there's deffo stuff kids shouldn't watch, the thing that matters is what the kids do apart from TV. If it's nothing, or insufficient, it will be terrible. If as well as screens kids get plenty of high quality attention, the outcome will be good.
You could argue, and I'd struggle to disagree, that less screen time is always good. But there's tradeoffs in this optimisation. Parental attention and energy are also finite - unless you're super rich, have 3 nannies, a chef and not working. At some level, giving the poor overworked parent a break by sticking the child in front of a screen for a bit might mean the parent has more energy to do something worthwhile with the kiddos afterwards.
There's a nice statistical experiment in it no doubt - child outcome as function of screen time, high quality time and "fend for yourself" time, controlled by how much energy the parents have - will the coefficient on screen time be negative? Merely zero? Maybe even positive, just smaller than the other ones?
But good luck getting the data, never mind randomisation.
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