skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on How New York keeps its unfiltered water safe: spending millions on land in ~enviro
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How New York keeps its unfiltered water safe: spending millions on land
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One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants
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Comment on What are your predictions for 2026? in ~talk
skybrian (edited )LinkNot a full repeal, but some kind of tariff rollback drama after the upcoming US Supreme Court ruling. As often happens, the opposition party gains in the US midterms. In NYC, Mamdani faces...Not a full repeal, but some kind of tariff rollback drama after the upcoming US Supreme Court ruling.
As often happens, the opposition party gains in the US midterms.
In NYC, Mamdani faces opposition to his more radical ideas, disappointing some. Maybe he turns out to be a fairly normal mayor, though?
More of a hope than a prediction, but maybe Waymo will start operating in the San Francisco East Bay?
AI improves significantly for another year. AI continues to be misused. Some new companies do a good job at putting it to work, others fail.
AI-assisted cyberattacks become common and cause some major disruptions.
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Comment on What are your predictions for 2026? in ~talk
skybrian Link ParentI’m very biased, but I think Google will be ok. Unpopular Google products will get cancelled or consolidated as often happens, but they’ll still make money on the ones people use. Apple seems...I’m very biased, but I think Google will be ok. Unpopular Google products will get cancelled or consolidated as often happens, but they’ll still make money on the ones people use. Apple seems similar. The stock market seems to think Oracle has overreached and is vulnerable.
There are apparently big IPO’s in the works for Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. No guesses on whether they actually happen and what the result is.
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
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Comment on AI might not be coming for lawyers’ jobs anytime soon in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYes, that’s why benchmarks keep getting replaced by harder benchmarks. I think they do show progress of a sort, but maybe not as much as some might think, and not as well as writing custom...Yes, that’s why benchmarks keep getting replaced by harder benchmarks. I think they do show progress of a sort, but maybe not as much as some might think, and not as well as writing custom benchmarks for whatever a business really cares about.
There are also more subtle ways benchmarks can be beaten, not by the exact question leaking into the test data, but by adding a bunch of questions somewhat like what’s on the test. LLM’s do generalize somewhat, so that’s often enough.
We’ve had at least 40 years of ordinary software engineering being used to automate routine office work. Sometimes jobs disappear, but more often it changes the nature of the work. I see LLM’s continuing that trend at a somewhat faster pace.
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIs more of Google's headcount outside the US now than there used to be? That's an interesting hypothesis, but how do we prove it? They don't publish this information. I did the simple thing and...Is more of Google's headcount outside the US now than there used to be? That's an interesting hypothesis, but how do we prove it? They don't publish this information.
I did the simple thing and asked ChatGPT but it didn't find anything good.
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentContractors aren't included in headcount. That's in addition to employees. But employees aren't all in the US either; Google has offices all over the world.Contractors aren't included in headcount. That's in addition to employees. But employees aren't all in the US either; Google has offices all over the world.
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
skybrian (edited )LinkI just finished reading I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, which has a plot like an action movie (including car crashes) but is very much about Reddit and social media. The setup...I just finished reading I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, which has a plot like an action movie (including car crashes) but is very much about Reddit and social media. The setup is that a mysterious, sketchy girl somehow convinces a Lyft driver to drive from California to Washington DC, to transport a mystery box, by July 4, in return for a lot of money. The condition of her employer is not to look in the box.
The Lyft driver is a streamer and tells them he's going to be away for a few days. People on Reddit do research and come up with increasingly bizarre theories about what's in the box. It's funny. I recommend it to all excessively online people.
Before that I read the Steerswomen fantasy series. The Steerswomen are a guild of explorer-scientists who have vowed to answer all questions truthfully, but in return, you have to answer all their questions, or you'll be shunned. (This sounds a little gimmicky, but the story makes it work.) They're up against the wizards, who are powerful and secretive, keeping their magic to themselves. This series is about discovery - the known world gradually gets bigger over time, both literally (more of the maps get filled in) and conceptually.
Sadly only four of the six books in the series are written, but I'm okay with that; the ones I read were quite good and have satisfying endings.
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Comment on AI might not be coming for lawyers’ jobs anytime soon in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkDespite the headline making a hedged prediction, this article seems to be more about the present than the future: ... Looks like there is a leaderboard for that benchmark here. Note that there are...Despite the headline making a hedged prediction, this article seems to be more about the present than the future:
[L]awyers say that LLMs are a long way from reasoning well enough to replace them. Lucas Hale, a junior associate at McDermott Will & Schulte, has been embracing AI for many routine chores. He uses Relativity to sift through long documents and Microsoft Copilot for drafting legal citations. But when he turns to ChatGPT with a complex legal question, he finds the chatbot spewing hallucinations, rambling off topic, or drawing a blank.
“In the case where we have a very narrow question or a question of first impression for the court,” he says, referring to a novel legal question that a court has never decided before, “that’s the kind of thinking that the tool can’t do.”
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[N]ew benchmarks are aiming to better measure the models’ ability to do legal work in the real world. The Professional Reasoning Benchmark, published by ScaleAI in November, evaluated leading LLMs on legal and financial tasks designed by professionals in the field. The study found that the models have critical gaps in their reliability for professional adoption, with the best-performing model scoring only 37% on the most difficult legal problems, meaning it met just over a third of possible points on the evaluation criteria. The models frequently made inaccurate legal judgments, and if they did reach correct conclusions, they did so through incomplete or opaque reasoning processes.
Looks like there is a leaderboard for that benchmark here. Note that there are two datasets. GPT-5-Pro got 37% on the "hard subset" and almost 50% on the full dataset (shown on the right side).
Defining a new, tougher benchmark is certainly useful. But AI labs sometimes saturate benchmarks in a year or two, so we'll see.
If this benchmark turns out to be too easy to capture what lawyers do, I assume there will be more benchmarks.
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AI might not be coming for lawyers’ jobs anytime soon
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIt's weird since as far as I can tell, everyone in the tech industry thinks Oracle is overpriced and evil. Isn't Postgres what people go with nowadays? Maybe I'm overly biased from reading Hacker...It's weird since as far as I can tell, everyone in the tech industry thinks Oracle is overpriced and evil. Isn't Postgres what people go with nowadays?
Maybe I'm overly biased from reading Hacker News.
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentTech companies laid people off in 2023-2024 (including friends of mine), but their headcount is growing again, based on charts for Alphabet, Apple, and Meta. They aren't hiring like in previous... -
Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentThis seems like more of a "corporate stupidity" issue than an AI issue. The people designing the system are out of touch with how it's used. It's hardly new to AI; enterprise software purchasing...This seems like more of a "corporate stupidity" issue than an AI issue. The people designing the system are out of touch with how it's used. It's hardly new to AI; enterprise software purchasing can be pretty dysfunctional.
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian LinkThat one study from MIT gets repeated a lot! I’m not sure people vibing about it understand its limitations.That one study from MIT gets repeated a lot! I’m not sure people vibing about it understand its limitations.
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Comment on AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is. in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentWhy does your company buy terrible OCR software when there are better products out there?Why does your company buy terrible OCR software when there are better products out there?
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Comment on Hobson v. Hansen and the decline of DC schools in ~humanities.history
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Comment on Hobson v. Hansen and the decline of DC schools in ~humanities.history
skybrian Link ParentIt seems like a very well-researched article. I don’t trust the accusations of his enemies. Anti-rationalists say all sorts of things.It seems like a very well-researched article. I don’t trust the accusations of his enemies. Anti-rationalists say all sorts of things.
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Comment on Hobson v. Hansen and the decline of DC schools in ~humanities.history
skybrian (edited )LinkBackground: the author is better known on the Internet by his alias, Tracing Woodgrains. Here's his post about co-founding Center for Educational Progress. From the article: ... ... ... ... ......Background: the author is better known on the Internet by his alias, Tracing Woodgrains. Here's his post about co-founding Center for Educational Progress.
From the article:
The Washington school system [Dr. Hansen] was headed for was very different from the Omaha system he left: a southern school system, strictly segregated since its creation and managed not by the local city but by a school board appointed by the federal judges (part-time non-specialist volunteers, in charge of setting the overall direction for the school system), a board-appointed superintendent (in charge of carrying out the day-to-day operations of the district in line with the board’s directions), and Congress itself (in charge of funding and apportionment). All clashed repeatedly over questions of control and direction. Since 1906, the Board had been mandated by law to contain a mix of six men and three women; by tradition from that point forward, two of the men and one of the women were black. The superintendent position was usually stable, with Hobart Corning—the superintendent when Dr. Hansen joined—serving for twelve years from 1946 to 1958 and his longest-serving predecessor Frank Ballou serving from 1920 through his retirement in 1943.
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The District’s population was transforming by the time Hansen arrived. Its white enrollment had peaked at 59,500 in 1935, when the system had only 33,500 black students. By 1945, the white student population had declined to 50,000, while the black population had grown to 39,000. This led to repeated tensions in the system, particularly around assignment to schools: as white student populations shrunk and black populations grew, administrators would periodically close white schools and reopen them as black schools, as white students protested the loss of their schools while the black community protested the receipt of white hand-me-downs. By 1947, 45 percent of the district’s population was black, and 72 percent of its construction budget was going towards black schools, with numbers only increasing from there.
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[T]he white and black schools tended to use various schemes to group students by ability. Most notable within the black system was its decision to run a single academic high school, Dunbar High, for the most academically driven black students from around the District, while sorting those who were less academically inclined into one of the District’s two other black high schools. The decision bore fruit, with the school drawing a highly educated faculty, preparing generations of black leaders, and standing as a national model for black excellence.
Into this system came Hansen, a committed liberal institutionalist who believed in the public schools as America’s most important social institution, a “traditional” educator at a time when traditionalism was already out of fashion, an integrationist and believer in colorblindness in a segregated world. Hansen believed that professional educators should be firmly in charge of schools with outside forces staying out. He championed basic, skills-focused education, ability grouping, and phonics for reading—something he noted had fallen out of favor in the 1920s as having become too highly technical and an end in itself before “revolutionists” rejected it instead of reforming it. When he was later made director of elementary schools, he immediately set about bringing phonics to the white schools that scorned it.
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In what became known as the Corning Plan, the D.C. school district made several decisions: All schools would be desegregated as quickly and completely as possible, each one with new boundaries and the option for students to stay in their currently enrolled schools, school personnel would be appointed and promoted on the basis of merit, and the transition would be accomplished by natural and orderly means. In September 1954, D.C. students walked into integrated schools for the first time, with a smooth and uneventful first day.
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The clearest tragedy during the early desegregation process was the administration’s decision to turn Dunbar High School, like the rest of the newly integrated high schools, into a local neighborhood school instead of the magnet school it had been. Dunbar teachers faced an uptick in learning and disciplinary problems in their classes, dwindling enrollments in advanced classes and a newfound need for remedial ones. As the Board debated its 1954 plan, it did not spare a thought for what would happen to Dunbar. The idea of preserving some of what made the school special went unmentioned and unconsidered, and so the school went from producing the highest number of black PhDs of any school in the country to being just another neighborhood school.
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In 1960, Hansen saw the opportunity to put his elementary school ideals into action with the construction of a new school at the heart of a Southwest Washington urban development project. The Amidon School was to be his “put-up or shut-up operation,” a magnet school that would implement his ideal elementary school approach while inviting applications from around D.C. The focus of the Amidon was on teacher-directed, subject-matter-oriented instruction with demanding content, direct instruction, and difficult materials introduced early. Its reading instruction started young and kept phonics as its core, against the prevailing philosophy of education schools of its day. If his ideas fail when put to use, he said, he would abandon them. If they were effective, his staff would be willing to implement them more broadly.
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During this timeframe, the greatest complication the administration faced was the rapidly shifting racial composition and rapidly growing population within the city and its schools. [...] School populations would turn over almost completely, with a few schools (like the District’s Eastern High School) going from 100 percent white to more than 90 percent black within a five-year span. Hansen noted that the tipping point seemed to be around 30 percent black, after which white flight almost always became rapid and near-complete.
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Overall, the atmosphere between 1954 and 1962 was one of guarded optimism: real challenges, a top-to-bottom transformation of the District’s student body, but a general determination to make things work and in Hansen’s case an eagerness to implement his vision.
But towards the end of 1962, everything began to come crashing down.
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By 1966, Hansen’s formerly iron-strong hold on the District’s school board collapsed with the appointment of three new board members who explicitly opposed him. Most notable was the appointment of John A. Sessions, a former Cornell English professor and an education specialist for the AFL-CIO union, whose interest in “education parks” and distaste for Hansen set the stage for the destruction of the Amidon School.
The argument went as follows: The Amidon School is high-performing and attracts some well-off students to its student body. Nearby Bowen and Syphax Elementary Schools are not. Therefore, we should combine them and make students from all three schools attend two years in each school, so that the well-off parents are inspired to help the other schools. Hansen proposed letting the schools decide; the Board shot him down.
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Writing in 1970, the Washington Post’s prizewinning black journalist William Raspberry, considering the Tri-School Plan, called it an example of “hostage theory” in action. “The well-to-do parents would see to it that their children got a good education. All the poor parents had to do was see to it that their children were in the same classrooms. That was the theory. […] Now instead of one good and two bad schools, Southwest Washington has three bad ones.”
“We moved from Virginia into Washington to get our children into the Amidon,” one mother said. “The handful of agitators that proposed combining the Amidon with the two other elementary schools hit below the belt. One of them said on television that the people who objected didn’t want their children to go to school with Negroes. We came to southwest Washington to put our children in an integrated school. We came back to Washington because we wanted our kids to go to school with Negroes—and poor kids.” They left the school.
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[In Hobson v. Hansen], Judge Wright concludes that while Hansen was “motivated by a desire to respond - according to his own philosophy - to an educational crisis in the District school system” rather than intended racial discrimination, the district’s ability grouping served as “a denial of equal educational opportunity to the poor and a majority of the Negroes79 attending school in the nation’s capital.” In other words, he asserts that while Hansen did not apparently intend to discriminate, the system’s disparate impact made it unconstitutional.80
Much of Judge Wright’s decision rests on his objections to tests, which he treats as intended to uncover “the maximum educational potential” of students. “One of the fundamental purposes of track theory,” he claims, “is that students’ potential can be determined.”81 He condemns the use of aptitude tests on low income black children, because “the impoverished circumstances that characterize the disadvantaged child” make it “virtually impossible to tell whether the test score reflects lack of ability—or simply lack of opportunity.”
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As a result of all of this, he concludes that the effect of the track system is to unconstitutionally “deny a majority of District students their right to equal educational opportunity” and that it “simply must be abolished,” as must any system which “fails in fact to bring the great majority of children into the mainstream of public education.”
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The Wright decision, then, stepped into an active and contentious dispute in the social sciences, misrepresenting the consensus of the fields while condemning as unconstitutional a pedagogical decision made on the basis of that same body of research without evidence of racial malice. As his core piece of evidence against the merit of testing and ability grouping, he used a study that used evidence of adults being tested, then learning well inside ability-grouped classrooms.
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In the wake of the abolition of the track system, former basic track students (of which many were clinically mentally disabled) were simply placed in regular classes. The chairman of Parents United to Help the D.C. Mentally Retarded reached out first to Superintendent Manning, then to Julius Hobson, asking for help. He estimated 10,000 mentally disabled students in the district who had more intense needs than mere slow learners, with the district’s replacement for ability grouping, a pullout program for math and reading, being woefully insufficient. He warned that when those students try to compete in normal classroom situations, they “undergo ridicule, become frustrated and more withdrawn, develop severe emotional problems from being unable to compete, lose all confidence in themselves, and instead of making progress, recede in their learning ability.” Those children, he noted, “have been in effect abandoned for the next 1-5 years.” A mother, crying, told a reporter, “My daughter was doing well in her basic class last year. Now she comes home from school crying every day because she can’t keep up with the other children. I just don’t know what to do.”
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Another blow hit District schools in 1970 with the toppling of Sidney Zevin, principal of the District’s last meaningfully integrated public high school. The first boycott Zevin faced was in September, 1954, when white students walked out of the junior high he taught at on the first day of desegregation. But in February 1970, it was no longer white segregationists boycotting him, but black militants. Chaos at the school had escalated—a biracial group of 35 radical teachers out of the 85-member faculty engaging in a prolonged power struggle with him, visits from the Black Panthers and Black United Front, an auditorium break-in with speeches calling for “revolution … by any means necessary,” daily false fire alarms, small fires set around the building, an unlit molotov cocktail in a second-floor classroom.
The school’s well-motivated black middle class had all but disappeared, with those who chose to come to Western from its open enrollment zone no longer allowed after Judge Wright’s decree. Classrooms contained students “from a third-grade reading level to the first year of college,” with pressure from critical teachers leading to near-total abandonment of ability grouping. The teacher who led the power struggle was a history teacher who spent his class periods showing Black Panther movies and, when the department head suggested some balance, a speech by the leader of the National Socialist White People’s Party. White parents at the school, when interviewed, said they wanted their kids to go to an integrated school, but not one where they felt resented and unwelcome.
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What of the system as a whole by the 1990s? Even the thought of caring about student performance had become almost anachronistic by the ‘90s. Its student population peaked in 1970 before entering a precipitious decline, leaving it with far more schools than it needed after a massive building program. By the 1980s, the District spent more money per student than in every other major school system. By the time they were considering closing Banneker, the city’s student population had dropped 50,000 from its peak while central office positions doubled and the District’s per-student budget swelled, with the superintendent at the time unsure even how many employees he had. Ever since Hansen’s time as superintendent, nobody else has led DC schools for as long, and very few for more than a few years.
There is no happy ending here. The system broke and it never, ever recovered.
We live in the shadow of the 1960s.
https://archive.is/iKAof