Tar_Alcaran

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html

Yep

The recent PISA data confirms that students who use AI a lot are about a year behind everyone else. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html

There’s absolutely no doubt that AI democratizes many capabilities that people otherwise would not possess,

There is so much wrong with that.

For starters, you don’t possess it. You still can’t do it because you haven’t learned.

Second, it’s not something you have inherent access too. LLMs are completely unaffordable to anyone using them, which is why the companies are running insane losses. Your use of LLMs depends entirely and fully on the availability of venture capital to burn.

Third, it was always within your ability to learn. The information to acquire the skills has been available for free.

Fourth, thanks to LLMs (and enshittification) it is becoming more and more difficult to find and access that free information.

People aren’t talking about alphafold when they’re talking about “AI” in 2026. They’re talking about chatgpt, claude and copilot.

“Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not

I would hard disagree. It absolutely applies for super narrow applications like alphafold, but in general, LLMs aren’t remotely close to being worth it. You don’t need to look beyond how hugely unprofitable AI companies are. The only companies who aren’t completely shoveling money into the furnace are the ones selling hardware to the companies that do.

We also see that the consequences of AI use are pretty harsh. Students who use a lot of AI are a full year behind their counterparts that don’t, according the the latest PISA data.

So what we have is something that is unaffordably expensive, with dubious benefit and immense second order effects.

Let’s assume the reverse: using AI makes you dumber and slower. Actually, let’s not assume, since we have evidence: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html

Students who use LLMs a lot are overall much worse off then their regular counterparts. Now, whether that means slower students use LLM more (without it having any real effect) or that LLM use is degrading their ability is unknown, but it’s pretty clear and extremely damning.

Juries shouldn’t make decisions period.

Morons can easily be convinced that their lives are at risk for racist and xenofobic reasons.

This is why we can’t let the “moderate” right ruin education, it leads to shit like this.

TIL I’m Russian.

You carry them upside down because flowers are heavy and catch wind. If you let them dangle, they’ll sway instead of snap.

So the other 99% of the energy that doesn’t push push against the craft body just goes away?

You’re missing the insane energy density of a nuclear reaction. The first nuke used in war weighed 4700kg and produced about 88 terajoules of energy. That’s about 19 giga joule per kilo

1 kg of rocketfuel + oxidizer produces 13 megajoule.

So even at 1% energy conversion for a nuke and 100% conversion for rocketfuel, the nuke is still 15 times more energydense.

And if you don’t use nukes from the 40s, a modern thermonuclear bomb packs 2000TJ into 200 kilos, for a convenient 10TJ per kilo, or 7700 times more power per kilo than liquid rocket fuel.

It’s super oxidative, AND corrosive. When you pour a normal oxidizer on metal, you get a thin layer of oxidized metal, and the reaction stops.

But CIF3 will dissolve that oxide, and keep going. And keep going fast enough that stuff catches on fire.

It’s a chemical used to clean vapor deposition chambers, in tiny little ampules. The idea of using it rocket-sized volumes should make every sane person run for the hills.

Whenever someone is doing, or is about to do, something stupid, simply say out loud what they’re doing, and ask what they want to happen.

Sure, but the expectations of most launches is that they work. SpaceX is the only one which repeatedly expects to fail doing the same thing.

people following such things might remember the huge amount of explosions Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies starting rocket projects –privat or otherwise– tend to produce in the beginning

They generally don’t. SpaceX is pretty much the only company blowing up rockets on the regular. Everyone else actually does testing.

The peak of 2007 was reached again in 2013. Not exactly the next day, but also not disastrously long.

That’s true for any country

Yes, but Russia is the only one who has shown they’re extremely likely to do so.

Yet do we have to worry as much and pay as much for defence as our politicians tell us to do?

Well if I could predict the future, I would be really stinking rich, and many poor people would be less poor. Unfortunately, here we are.

Air superiority relies on having sufficient ammo. And if the recent war in Europe has shown us anything, it’s that having just a couple of really good weapons doesn’t really work unless you also have a shitload of other stuff.

While Russia can barely maintain a front against Ukraine, they are more than capable of killing people far behind the front lines.

Like I said, Russia won’t win, they probably wouldn’t hurt us as much as we would hurt them. But they WOULD hurt us.

All I can say is that I can do it with every type of potato I’ve tried it with.

My half-dmsized bread maker, hands down.

I just chuck in the Ingredients, turn it on every other night before bed, and there’s fresh bread in the morning (or 1 day old bread the other days).

It costs basically nothing to use if you buy giant bags of flour, and its super easy. And if you want, you can get creative, but you don’t have to.

Homemade bread is so much tastier and cheaper than bought bread. It stores rather poorly though.

Edit: technically I use my bread-slicer 4 times as often.

If only it came with some kind of device for holding the food you’re slicing!