Any Long Covid patient can tell you its damaged their nerves, they can feel it. Nerve pain all over and various weird zaps and shakes etc, the nervous system is clearly damaged/being damaged across the entire body.
This is I believe one of the markers for small fiber neuropathy which is now increasingly being found in association with long covid and related syndromes.
* An AI tutor is a net positive in learning for the subject matter it covers.
* An AI tutor does not cause other harms.
* An AI tutor is going to be cheap enough that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.
I'm mostly willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the first point, but the third point seems unlikely, and history has given us no shortage of reasons to distrust tech companies on the second point, even if we assume this company can be trusted now.
The second one feels like a subset of the first. If it’s net positive, the other harms are worth it.
And I don’t think you’re really engaging with what they said, which is that it might be better than nothing, which is what is realistically available to many kids. Do you really think something like this is worse than nothing?
I limited the first point to specifically deal with learning the subject matter, but I added the second point to account for any negative externalities which may fall outside that.
A small (contrived) example: a child uses an AI tutor because they're falling behind in mathematics. The tutor does an excellent job at getting the child back up to speed and improving his/her grades in math, but the child then starts becoming dependent on AI tutors for all subjects because they've either lost interest or capability for self-learning.
We've already seen a study or two indicate extended use of AI coding agents causes some people to lose their own coding ability over time, making them dependent upon the agents. It doesn't seem far-fetched that children could become dependent upon AI tutors in a similar fashion.
That's not to mention that AI tutors require children to have computer access, which would ultimately cement in place school laptop programs I was under the impression were neutral to net negative in and of themselves.
So yes, in short, I think AI tutors have the potential to be worse than nothing. I'm not asserting they are, but I'd like to see some studies done on the topic before rolling them out for children en masse.
* An AI tutor is a net negative in learning for the subject matter it covers.
* An AI tutor does cause other harms.
* An AI tutor is going to be more expensive that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.
Seriously, my first reaction to reading this headline was a knee jerk "are you insane", but this whole thread is just people arguing out of their arse while claiming authority. As of today, it was never attempted. It is also possible that the kids gain an advantage by learning to use llms to teach themselves things, which would be positive for their future.
I don't think it's going to happen, but that's just my opinion based on essentially prejudice, not a fact
Yeah tell them to change things.. why didn't we think of that? Provide opportunities to make parenting less stressful like here so that they can involve more.. this reflexive anti AI luddite attitude isn't productive as it's just less signal and more noise..
> We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.
Nope. Any nation that thinks like this will be outcompeted by more tech-positive nations in the long-term. It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
>It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
Here's one study from last year (1000 students) [1]. They showed that improved outcomes with AI are short term, and likely a result of AI doing the work for the student. Their methodology involved a test without the use of AI at a later date, and one of the groups who used AI tested much worse than the control group who did not use AI during learning.
Moreover, a tertiary group that used a specially trained AI for tutoring showed no improvement in testing outcomes over the control group.
[1] Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakçı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). "Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics." PNAS, 122. PNAS
In many ways electricity is bad for society. In this particular case I think the benefits outweigh the costs. I do not the think the benefits of AI outweigh the costs.
That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?
>Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology
Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits unable to recognize that AI's performance on the Putnam, IMO and bar exam makes it far smarter than they are by almost every metric that was traditionally used to measure intelligence.
To make my earlier critique of your argument clearer, some applications of AI might be bad for society, but it does not follow that the tutoring application is also bad for society.
Nobody has tried to systematically apply AI tutoring for adults. AI tutoring for children is easier because there are more people who understand the domains that need to be taught to children and can evaluate if the children have grasped the concepts appropriately.
It is clear that a personal human tutor can achieve incredible results, and almost everybody who has revolutionized any field you might think of is a product of such a system. Scaling that would be immensely valuable to society.
We should do it because of the huge benefits to society. The fact that it is easier than doing something with marginal benefit is why we should do it first.
The aforementioned people who revolutionized their fields are the demonstrated benefits. If we're going to stop a technology that could multiply that before it even gets to testing, it shouldn't be done on vibes.
It does not follow that anything produced by an electronic computational device is bad for children or society. I've personally seen computers teach children barely two years old to read.
Anecdote < Data. Studies consistently show declines in every trackable metric associated with education when computational devices are introduced to the process. Until actual data is presented that contradicts these findings there's no grounds for rational debate.
> Studies consistently show declines in every trackable metric associated with education when computational devices are introduced to the process.
They're doing it wrong, just as the incentives in the classroom are wrong (to increase a number showing how many children meet some artificially low standard of competency). The rational debate comes from the hundreds of people who are doing it right on their own. These days, all the top chess players practice with an engine. All the top mathletes use AoPS tools. It's the same across every academic field, and the level at which the top is performing is far beyond what it was before computers were introduced. The amount of effort it would take to teach a barely two year old to read is far beyond what most parents have to give, but with an electronic device patiently saying letter sounds whenever an infant interacts with letters, it's trivial.
I look forward to your nomination for Secretary of Education since you appear to have a handle on something trained professionals on two continents backed by billion dollar industries have failed to master.
I already told you that their incentives are wrong. Meanwhile, the people training the elite in any field use computers extensively and have been doing so for years.
The industry hype mill and it's attendant horde of touts are working overtime to make sure the dude that mows my lawn is up to date on AI, so I'm not sure how you're going to advance the argument that anyone routinely posting to the epicenter of the AI hype typhoon is some how poorly informed on the topic.
I'm a big fan of sqlite-utils, but I really don't like how Python (particularly 3.12+) changes how sqlite's transactions work -- the native behavior explained in the sqlite docs is much better IMO. I understand why Python had to change it (to be compatible with other databases) but I don't think it's a good model for sqlite.
Therefore, I created apsw-utils, a port of sqlite-utils to the amazingly-awesome apsw lib -- which is a really idiomatic sqlite lib for python. It's here: https://answerdotai.github.io/apswutils/
I've used it in lots of projects including in significant production stuff, and it's always worked great for me. IMO if you're serious about doing sqlite in python, at some point you'll probably want to check out apsw.
They're probably talking about the addition of the autocommit flag, which hides more fine-grained transaction control in favor of more uniform behavior across multiple databases:
> False: Select PEP 249-compliant transaction behaviour, implying that sqlite3 ensures a transaction is always open.
This means you don't get to control the isolation level of the transaction, because [1]:
> sqlite3 uses BEGIN DEFERRED statements when opening transactions.
If you want to use `IMMEDIATE` or `EXCLUSIVE` isolation level[2] for your sqlite transaction using the new flag, you have to set `autocommit=True` to be able to open the transaction yourself with `.execute("BEGIN IMMEDIATE")`.
However, with `autocommit=True`, the connection's `.commit()` and `.rollback()` methods will *silently do nothing* and you have to execute the respective raw SQL yourself to commit or abort your manually-opened transaction. This also concerns the context-manager behavior of the connection object, which will not commit or abort manual transactions on context exit in this case.
So, the autocommit flag becomes a little complicated and foot-gunny if you want more precise control over when exactly other readers or writers should get blocked by sqlite.
The link had some of the details, but not the intelligent thought linking them into a narrative, much appreciated! This is something super important I would have been foot-gunned on at some point.
SQLite behavior is here: https://sqlite.org/lang_transaction.html . The regular implicit transactions there plus explicit where needed aren’t supported in any python mode.
> The regular implicit transactions there plus explicit where needed aren’t supported in any python mode
Specific examples would be extremely useful. You've done some work learning and deducing this stuff, others could learn if you would share and explain it.
It's both an illogical question and comes from a place of ignorance about a topic which one would expect folks nowadays to have some basic competence in.
First, the illogical part: the statement was about "inequality" to which you asked about wealth generation. These are two separate issues, and inequality is not, logically, necessarily tied to wealth generation. So "How does creating wealth hurt others?" is, at best, a non sequitur.
The ignorance part: there is a lot of empirical research over many decades showing the negative impact of wealth inequality on societies. With Google and AI there's really no good reason to ask such ignorant questions when in a moment you could educate yourself, and then ask an informed and thoughtful question instead.
You seem to have a rather limited understanding of what kinds of concurrency exist and how those needs are best met. Whether something is a server or not is not very relevant to this discussion.
SQLite is an excellent production db for many real world workloads, as has been widely documented. It is very different to Postgres, so requires learning a whole new skill set.
One way to think about it is that SQLite can work well for the parts of your system where there is naturally strong partitioning.
You can do big data in SQLite. Concurrent writes, sure, I'd recommend something else.
If you think the majority of systems require massively concurrent writes, I think you need to look a bit harder. SQLite is, after all, the most widely deployed database system, ever.
We recently just partitioned the data into many SQLite databases and got away with it. It's telemetry data from IoT devices: one device, one database. Backups are an easy rsync job now instead of streaming a multi gigabyte database with compression that take hours. Reporting will just open each database and aggregate multi device data into another database (Duckdb, SQLite or something else, we'll see). Duckdb is not readable when locked so it's probably also going to be SQLite. Even it it's going to spit out JSON it will go into SQLite rows instead of many files.
I saw that but it's a bit too much friction. We'd rather attach a SQLite database and copy the results into that. Also no worries about version changes and compatibility, the types are not too restrictive. But we'll see.
Yes, which goes in line with the argument that claiming that it's "the most deployed" as proof of superiority or suitability for any use case is equivalent to claiming the same for Internet Explorer. It's the most deployed because it's bundled in a lot of systems, not because people are purposefully using it as a DBMS.
But it doesn't, because none of those systems are presenting SQLite to the user as something they should be using; they don't even make SQLite available to the user at all. Those systems all use SQLite internally to manage data.
It’s widely deployed as a local DB for local apps like phones, desktops, and web browsers. But it’s not the most used for distributed, concurrent web apps, which db servers were designed for. Maybe people are talking past each other, but that’s the debate I see.
I couldn't find a CPAP mask that worked for me, even after 6 months of trying across 4 different masks.
Then I read studies showing oropharyngeal exercises can help treat sleep apnea. Originally I used https://snoregym.com/ for that, but then I switched to simply chewing gum once a day (being careful to chew on both sides of my mouth roughly equally), and also chewing my food a bit longer.
I was fully prepared to have to go through the entire gamut of masks to find one that worked, because I snore so surely I would need a mask that covers my mouth at least, right?
But even while sleeping, my brain is keeping my mouth shut so the simplest, nose-only mask works perfectly, with very little leakage.
q and ch both exist in pinyin, and have different sounds. The q sound requires placing the tip of the tongue on the teeth, and isn’t an initial consonant we have in English, so we don’t have a way to spell it.
Source: I founded FastMail.