> Automatic creation of an initial billboard: Upon starting the program, a predefined list of movies currently showing must be automatically generated, including their details (title, genre, duration, and showtimes).
I would say that these results might be relevant for a university CS program setting, but I would make the distinction between this and actually learning to program.
The context of this task is definitely a very contrived "Let's learn OOP" assignment that, for example, just tires to cram in class inheritance without really justifying it's use in the software that's being built. It's a lazy kind of curriculum building that doesn't actually tell the students about OOP.
In that sense it's no wonder that AI is not that helpful in the context of the assignment and learning.
I wouldn't chalk this up to "AI doesn't help you learn". I would put this in the category of, in an overly academic assignment with contrived goals, AI doesn't help the student accomplish the goals of the course. That conclusion could be equally applied to French literature 102.
And that's very different from whether or not an AI coding assistant can help you learn to code or not. (I'm actually not sure if it can, but I think this study doesn't say anything new).
It's too bad, because AI could be a new way of buying things.
It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it.
I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads.
I actually am fairly bullish on this, because in the competitive landscape of AI it seems like there will be a company out there willing to make an ad-free model that's good enough for reasons other than serving me an ad.
Just like Apple makes hardware that's ad-free and pro-privacy enough, just because it's a product differentiator. (I'm not under any illusion that Apple wouldn't sell my data if it was in their own interests).
They sort of already have this (IIRC Perplexity also has it), there's a "shopping" specific mode which presumably adds affiliate links. But even GPT-5.1 hallucinates a bit too much to be trusted buying anything without me as a human-in-the-loop. I tried to have it help me find climbing shoes for my cuboid feet and it went from making up specifications to telling me to buy shoes that don't fit and cutting them up with tools which wouldn't work.
EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved.
And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the city mayor/governor always becomes a major national political figure.
Indonesia is actually a plurality of distinct island cultures, but with Jakarta, Java and Javanese culture sits at the top of the national political hierarchy. (Not to mention a sort of internal Javanese colonialism similar to the USSR).
The new capital could be part of dismantling some of the legacy internal Javanese power structures.
(To add a further detail re. Java vs. Indonesia, because of the mercator projection it's hard to see how big Indonesia is. It would stretch from Maine, past California almost to Anchorage).
New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.
From what I understand chemicals were analogous to computer internet technology at that time. A lot of rapid development of new things that went on to fundamentally change society- the modern world relies on synthetic chemicals and no one really remarks on their existence these days.
Also that Benzene led to the creation of the field of organic chemistry.
Now that Nvidia is the most valuable company, all this talk of actual AGI will be washed away by the huge amount of dollars driving the hype train.
Most of these companies value is built on the idea of AGI being achievable in the near future.
AGI being too close or too far away affects the value of these companies- too close and it'll seem too likely that the current leaders will win. Too far away and the level of spending will seem unsustainable.
> Most of these companies value is built on the idea of AGI being achievable in the near future.
Is it? Or is it based on the idea a load of white collar workers will have their jobs automated, and companies will happily spend mid four figures for tech that replaces a worker earning mid five figures?
I think companies that expect to use AI to cut their salary overhead making the same products they were before are going to get clobbered by companies that use AI to grow. A few people may have to retrain into a different line of work but I don't really see AI putting people out of work en masse.
From what I've seen, the most-compelling thesis involves robotics. We're seeing evidence that LLMs tokenising physical inputs can operate robots better than previous methods. If that's pans out, the investment thesis is secured. No AGI needed.
That is for a governing body to look out for. NOT private companies. Governments have a job to run massive programs for socioeconomic welfare without carrying about profit.
that is doubtful? sure it provides a lot of value but current levels are dotcom top level. Everyone knew internet had value but stocks push it too high
I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to marketing and business influencers.
Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked" enough to look real.
Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from your traffic being fake?
You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely)
You pay other publishing networks (maybe adsense?) and the website owners profit from sending fake traffic (maybe true? if the article were really trying to make a case for this, just name them?)
Or, you work inside a company and just want to make your department look good?
I'm not sure I know what the point of this article is besides a click bait title.
Just tell me exactly what the mechanism is for this fake traffic- don't hint at some kind of conspiracy.
It would take a lot more investigative journalism to track down the bot networks and figure out the why and who, which I agree is the more interesting information. It’s not surprising that nobody seems to be willing to be quoted by name as a source. The whole industry seems fake and shady.
Despite the “LinkedIn influencer” writing style of the article, the results don’t seem that shocking or unexpected.
It is the website owners that commit click fraud. It has been that way for the last 25 years. I mean the first thing I did as a kid was checking what will happen if I keep clicking on ad on my newly created homepage.
> just name them
Does Adsense even gives you information where exactly your ad is getting published?
I can see doing it just to verify that the ads being shown on my site are not leading to anything I don't want to be associated with, e.g. porn, shock/tabloid content, politics, etc.
The distinction is between Google looking the other way if AdSense publishers are making them money, and Google generating their own fake traffic on their own search intent inventory.
I'd say it's unlikely they are generating fake clicks on search ads.
Mainly because they just don't need to in order to make money. They can still just charge you for impressions on searches that aren't the most well matched. No need to create fake traffic like this blog post conspiracy says.
If they know it is a bot, it is fraudulent. They know it is a bot when it is time to pay from their Adsense arm. It is insane that the same click that isn't paid to the publishers still goes to google's pockets.
This is cool because a lot of the current tools are a bit old and I feel a bit like they suffer from NIH (not invented here) syndrome, where what is actually needed is for things to just be in javascript.
This wasn’t possible as much when the last gen of tools came out (sonic pi etc) but I think the time is right.
The next iteration that would be cool is a true two-way interface between the visualizations and the code. Right now the slider is a really awesome element, for example. I think Bret Victor would be proud.
The dev is asking on the site for people to support the development with subscriptions, but they say here they have basically zero subscribers. So 11k daily users hasn't translated to something that people want to actually pay to support. That could change.
I would say that these results might be relevant for a university CS program setting, but I would make the distinction between this and actually learning to program.
The context of this task is definitely a very contrived "Let's learn OOP" assignment that, for example, just tires to cram in class inheritance without really justifying it's use in the software that's being built. It's a lazy kind of curriculum building that doesn't actually tell the students about OOP.
In that sense it's no wonder that AI is not that helpful in the context of the assignment and learning.
I wouldn't chalk this up to "AI doesn't help you learn". I would put this in the category of, in an overly academic assignment with contrived goals, AI doesn't help the student accomplish the goals of the course. That conclusion could be equally applied to French literature 102.
And that's very different from whether or not an AI coding assistant can help you learn to code or not. (I'm actually not sure if it can, but I think this study doesn't say anything new).
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