setsubyou

Tbh, I’m in my 40ies and I don’t think my education was so much better than what younger generations are getting. I’m a software engineer and most of the skills I need now are not skills I learned in school or even university.

I started learning programming when I was 9 because my father gave me his old Apple II computer to see what I would do. At the time, this was a privilege. Most children did not get that kind of early exposure. It also made me learn some English early.

In high school, we eventually had some basic programming classes. I was the guy the teacher asked when something didn’t work. Or when he forgot where the semicolons go in Pascal. During one year, instead of programming, there was a pilot project where we’d learn about computer aided math using Waterloo Maple that just barely ran on our old 486es. That course was great but after two months the teacher ran out of things to teach us because the math became “too advanced for us”.

And yes the internet existed at the time; I had access to it at home starting 1994. We learned nothing about it in school.

When I first went to university I had an Apple PowerBook that I bought from money I earned myself. Even though I worked for it, this was privilege too; most kids couldn’t afford what was a very expensive laptop then, or any laptop. But the reason I’m bringing it up is that my university’s web site at the time did not work on it. They had managed to implement even simple buttons that could have been links as Java applets that only worked on Windows. Those were the people I was supposed to learn computer science from. Which, by the way, at the time still meant “math with a side of computer science”. My generation literally could not study in an IT related field if we couldn’t understand university major level math (this changed quickly in the following years in my country, but still).

So while I don’t disagree about education having a lot of room for optimization, when it comes to more recent technologies like AI, it also makes me a bit salty when all of the blame is assigned to education. The generations currently in education, at least in developed countries, have access to so much that my generation only had when our parents were rich or at least nerds like my father (he was a teacher, so we were not rich). And yet, sometimes it feels like they just aren’t interested in doing anything with this access. At least compared to what I would have done with it.

At the same time, also keep in mind that when you say things like education doesn’t prepare us for AI or whatever other new thing (it used to be just the internet, or “new media”, before), those who you are expecting the education from are the people of my generation, who did not grow up with any of this, and who were not taught about any of it when we were young. We don’t have those answers either… this stuff is new for everyone. And for the people you expect to teach, it’s way more alien than it is for you. This was true when I went to school too, and I think it’s inevitable in a world moving this fast.

Neither lithium nor cobalt are rare earths, and China isn’t particularly dominating their production either. The leading producers are other countries. These are completely unrelated to the rare earths problem.

With rare earths the situation is that China isn’t only leading in production of the ores, but also in processing capacity, and the technology needed for it. The US already is the second largest producer of rare earth ores, but they still have to send them to China for processing because they can’t do all of it in the US. For the same reason, China produces ~90% of the world’s permanent magnets (these use rare earths like neodymium or samarium). Basically it’s not about developing sources for the ores. Rare earths are not that rare in the first place. It’s about the technology and capacity to do anything with them.

I do agree that the impact might not last long. They’re just forcing the competition to work faster. But maybe the explanation is that they think that making everybody speed up their rare earths development doesn’t change much in the long run anyway, while throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.

The amount of raw ore is not actually the problem. The US is already the second largest producer of rare earths after China. They can’t process all of the ore though so it gets shipped to China for that. The other thing is all of the US rare earths basically come from one mine, which is partially owned by a Chinese company. No amount of blackmailing random countries for mining rights will fix this.

To be fair, connecting some of the hardware I used in the 80ies is not straight-forward. But not impossible.

If I want to use my main bank account with wero I have to link my mobile number to it and can’t use it for wero with my other account anymore, because that’s the only way my bank supports it. Only a small number of banks actually let you use the wero app with multiple sources. Makes it completely useless for me. Paypal isn’t the only one that can do that either. Basically everything not made by companies that primarily want to be banks can do this. E.g. Klarna.

The other thing is that I need something that works outside the EU. That’s where replacing paypal and credit cards is actually difficult. In my own country or in the EU, I have plenty of options.

I recommend this movie version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis%C3%ADstrata

I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody just “suddenly remembered” that we never recognized it as a separate country in the first place.

I’m not sure how much sense it makes to complain that an AI chat bot collects so many categories of data and then highlight “user input”, which it obviously needs to function? Like how is something like DeepSeek the “middle ground” if that’s what the author thinks is the biggest problem with it? When I look at DeepSeek on the app store, it does list at least “coarse location”, so why not highlight that? DeepSeek can’t answer my questions about e.g. “restaurants nearby”, unlike e.g. ChatGPT, which comes up with a map. So that’s what I would be interested in, what DeepSeek uses my location for.

Although just in principle this kind of analysis rarely finds surprises.

If you can enter text or click on things in an online app, obviously it collects user input.

If it can refer back to previous answers, obviously it retains chat history.

If it can process pictures, obviously it collects photos if you upload any.

If it can be interacted with using voice, obviously it collects audio.

If it can answer questions about things near you, obviously it will use location data.

If there are IAPs, it better not forget that you bought those, too.

And so on.

Erinnert mich an Storm von Tim Minchin

"By definition", I begin
"Alternative Medicine", I continue
"Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call "alternative medicine"
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine."