> People are more powerful in life on the basis of their literacy

sometimes I feel it works the opposite way: I feel recently (in the last 5 to 10 years), the people who know less clamour forcefully for simplistic solutions, and end up being liked more, and being more successful. They can sometimes appear stronger and more genuine than people who know more, and therefore have more doubts (the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know...)

Thanks a lot for the recommendations, that's useful, I will definitely have a look at that.

Yeah, that's fair.

Thanks for your thoughts. I am curious to hear more about how AI did not help in your math project, if you are happy to share. Also curious to why you think in some cases it seems to help[1], and others it does not (your case).

I also definitely notice how the value of capital keeps increasing, while the value of labour stagnates. I think your advice about making money now is absolutely fair. I strongly dislike that this is the case (it feels like it's leading to a world with little meritocracy, and little improvements), but I guess, yeah, we have to accept the reality as it is.

Regarding why I am home-schooling, there are a lot of small reasons. I guess in a short summary, there was no school where my kid was happy within a 30 minutes drive radius, where I live. I am not against school at all (I have other kids at school), but we tried several in his case and that was a strong failure.

[1]: https://officechai.com/ai/gpt-5-2-and-harmonic-appear-to-hav...

Yes, that makes sense. I am trying to think about what the alternative is, but I also don't see it.

Fair enough, but I fear the necessary foundational knowledge becomes smaller and smaller as LLMs get better.

I don't think this is true. For math, even with an LLM, you need to know how to ask the question properly to get a good answer. If you don't know the basics you'll end up talking in circles to describe what should be a pretty basic problem.

Instead of 120/6, you'd end up writing, "I'm on lunch with a few friends, we got the bill and it was $120. There are 6 of us here. How much should each of us pay if we want to split the bill?"

Now imagine how complicated the prompt would get with a problem that's actually difficult and how easy it could be to state the question in a way that provided the wrong context. When this happens, without a foundation, you won't have any idea of the answer is way off or not.

Back when I was in school we'd have answers given to us and had to determine if they made sense without doing the exact calculation. This is very useful. With the 120/6 example. If the LLM said to pay $0.05 each, it should trigger something in a person to think that's not right and to examine the question that was asked. This may be an extreme example, but this stuff happens all the time.

There are also quick calculations that are useful, but where asking an LLM every time isn't practical. Price comparisons in a store, measuring stuff in your home to make sure a piece of furniture fits. Without any math foundation would they be able to read and understand a tape measure enough to actually measure and enter in the right stuff? Do you want them to need to consult an LLM to know that a wall that is 5 1/4" long will accommodate a cabinet that is 5 1/16" wide? These are things some people can't figure out today, and they had math class.

I can't imagine how helpless someone would feel if they had to reach for a phone with billions of dollars worth of infrastructure behind it just to answer basic questions that everyone around them can figure out in their head.

The foundation should always be there. It's more a question of how high do you go with it. But if the kid likes it and is good at it, why take that away from them? Also, remember that you're cherry picking exceptional examples of where it worked. There are a lot of examples where the LLMs have been embarrassingly bad at math (counting the number of "r" in "strawberry"). Math is built on rules, and LLMs are a text prediction engine... they don't necessarily know the rules or have real logic. LLMs also tend to look smart to someone who doesn't know the subject, and kind of dumb to the experts in a field.

As an aside, my high school had some kind of new math program that failed to go into depth on each topic of mathematics that people normally learn. I had been really good at math, but this screwed me over in college and now, 25 years later, I'm still upset that a solid foundation in math is taken from me. I could self-study, but it's harder to prioritize that when there are so many things competing for attention. When the kids are young is the time to do it.

That's fair, thanks for your thoughts.

I hope indeed that AI stays at the shallow end. I dread a world where that's not the case, because then I think it will be a little harder to find purpose.

Fair enough. I have often the same feeling with chess though: the fact that computers are so much better than any human removes a little something to me.

Yes, I did it in the same day.

But I am surprised that they are technically able to do that. My impression was that Apple had locked down this kind of things. Clearly not.

Any random ideas as to how they can technically fingerprint the device, and therefore how I could avoid it?

Great heads-up.

This whole ego-inflated saga is mind-blowing to me. It feels like something is seriously wrong with our system.

Maybe this is the right idea : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36403974 Correlating profits to the Common Good... Definitely makes sense to me.

Ok, thanks. And it should be very secure, even if I never update it, right? Github pages automatically updates gems for you?

It’s a static page, what kind of securities are you worried about ?

Well, I am under the impression that even a static page can have security flow, because of this article : https://medium.com/cyberdefendersprogram/making-your-jekyll-...

I think it might not concern a website hosted on github pages, but I wanted to confirm that with people more knowledgeable than me on the matter.

You can as well build the site locally (e.g., on your computer) first and commit the .html files in your page repo. GitHub pages will then serve your .html files directly without having to build your site using Jekyll. This is what I used to do when hosting my site on github pages:

- locally install jekyll

- write my .md files

- run jekyll locally to see how my site looks like

- commit .md and .html files

- let github pages know what you are pushing the static files yourself

In such a case it is a good idea to add a .nojekyll file to keep Jekyll from still trying to build your site when you prebuild it.

Also, if you are locally generating the HTML files, you can use other SSG tools beyond Jekyll (if for instance you want to avoid Ruby on Windows).

I don't think so- I think it makes a pull request with updated gems that you have to approve.

My understanding is that:

- The version of Jekyll that builds your site at deployment time (say at CI integration) is managed by Github including security updates

- If you install Jekyll into the repo (which you don't need to) for local testing you will add a bundler bundle file

- If you have a bundler bundle file in a public repo you will get automated Dependabot pull requests to suggest to update the file as security notices happen

- These updates affect your development environment version as specified in the repo, not the version managed in the build process

Up until recently the whole process was somewhat opaque, but it looks like the "Jekyll build process" is slowly migrating into Github Actions (with everything else) and there's a lot more visibility into its workflow than ever before. In a recent repository it seemed even more clearer than before that the Jekyll version in the "Github Action workflow" was Github-managed wasn't directly the Jekyll version specified in the code repository.