Yep, this is the "higher taxes will drive new yorkers to florida!" fear-mongering (sometime, sadly, even by people who don't actually know better but automatically shill for companies).
There are so many games (like Hitman: WoA, which I love btw) that "require" online access in order to provide the same functions that previous games by the same devs provided fully offline (e.g. keeping track of your weapon unlocks).
This is just clawing back some of the consumer protections that the "we're not selling you a product, we're selling you a temporary and arbitrary license that we reserve all rights over" BS snuck around.
I think because if their graduation requires them to pass that course (and it's a freshman-level course), the university is basically facing a choice of, "teach them this thing", "change graduation requirements", or "either kick the kids out or willfully let them waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate".
Both the latter 2 are big choices for a university administration to make, so it's much easier to ask the professors to make up the difference. That's why it's the faculty and not the admin demanding this; they know what the admins are asking them to do is impossible.
tl;dr: remedial classes are good and some schools are good at them. Admissions question aside, it's not a bad idea to get good at them.
I attended community college in my hometown, as well as a university elsewhere, and eventually completed my undergraduate education.
While I attended the community college, which openly advertises that it has no admissions requirements at all, I also worked there as a tutor in math. Since it had no entry requirements, the school had decent placement tests and a pretty damn comprehensive suite of remedial math courses. Some of the students I tutored were studying arithmetic (negative numbers, exponentiation), and some were even practicing how to pronounce and write out numbers by name in English and map those to Arabic numerals. There was no amount of ignorance that could make you unteachable there, as far as I could tell; you just had to find the right course.
Their math classes also included stuff you'd normally take at a university: when I was there, I took first-order logic, differential and integral calculus, vector calculus, systems of differential equations, statistics, discrete math, and probably some others I didn't take or forgot about. Some of those courses I had to retake at university anyway because of transfer credit limits and things like that, and in some of those cases, the community college version was actually better anyway (the university ones were fine).
I think it's awesome that the school had really weak admissions and really strong placement, and that it can take an earnest and reasonably intelligent high school dropout from the basics they missed all the way to being ready to dive into upper-division, in-major courses in STEM at a university.
It seems like that's an unspoken possibility for universities, too. Round out the catalogue, beef up placement exam regimes, further partnerships with local community colleges, lean into early exams and pre-tests within courses, and when students prove to be really unprepared, direct them to an appropriate class. It's not a matter of "waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate", it's "okay, it's going to take you longer to graduate because you have to take this detour in this subject area, so here's what your path now looks like". And of course dropping out or trying and failing are still (painful! expensive!) options, as they always were.
I'm not saying this is easy or cheap or a responsibility I expect universities to want. But "teach students the thing" can be a much saner option than the article seems to describe, which is hijacking existing courses that are purportedly focused on something else in order to teach their prerequisites inline.
It's funny how people talk about de-Googling their lives as a struggle, but there are only 2 things I can think of that I use them for anymore, and that's 1) gmail, and 2) google maps.
It's always surprising to me when people mention these google services I've never heard of. What do you mean a Google IDE? Haven't you heard of Vim, bro?
Mostly-jokes aside; don't trust Google! Google is asshole.
I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.
Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.
But are these actually completely different technologies, and if so, where is the dividing line? Firearms certainly have not decreased in significance, and they're the modern version of a bow, which is simply 2 iterations later in propulsion methods: tensioned string -> high-tension cable -> high-pressure gas.
Are LLMs really going to fall off in significance, or will it just be the nth newest incarnation of LLMs?
The function of what an LLM does (generative language) is what people seem to take issue with, but the function is here to stay, even if the next iteration has a different name or method.
The difference is in what other enabling technologies do you need to achieve it. Advanced technologies sit on a pyramid. One can build a bow and an arrow from sticks, string and rock. For reliable firearm we need chemistry and advanced metallurgy.
My view wasn't whether generative language is here to stay or not but rather will it continue to be a significant thing or not.
In the same way that any technology could just magically disappear, sure.
But I hear everyday, non-IT-sector people talking constantly about how they're using it, and that means there's a demand for it, and someone is going to supply it. I think a lot of anti-AI people think it's still equivalent to the PDA, and don't realize it's a smartphone already.
The other side is that "AI" is of course very very broad and isn't new, and e.g. medical vision models are making advancements that are having huge impacts on patient care already, especially around early cancer detection. Those aren't going away (and shouldn't), so there's still going to be a demand for the underlying technology and infrastructure to support it, even if LLMs stop being spammed everywhere.
The other thing which people seem not to understand is that you don't need a whole datacenter to RUN individual LLMs, you need it to train them, or to run them at scale for thousands of customers. A lot of the upper-mid-tier models that exist now can be run on a single (beefy) 4U server in your closet if you've got the GPUs to put in it. And people are running e.g. Deepseek V4 Pro FP4 locally. If you've got an actual server room, like at a university, you can run the full, un-quantized versions with ~2-4 servers.
Technology that is living in peoples' homes and businesses already is not going to just disappear. It's a lot less centralized than the market prevalence of OpenAI and Anthropic would lead you to believe.
On the other hand I spent 25 years selling desktop software and never once had an annual review. I never had to submit an application for time off. I never had to ask permission for a dentist appointment. If the weather was good I could take the day off and go for a bike ride. I didn’t attend any scrum meetings nor did I have to argue about what framework to use with a PM who couldn’t code FizzBuzz.
Honestly, Apple may very well be betting that AI in it's current form is transitional, and might be better off letting others duke it out for now.
We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
There are so many games (like Hitman: WoA, which I love btw) that "require" online access in order to provide the same functions that previous games by the same devs provided fully offline (e.g. keeping track of your weapon unlocks).
This is just clawing back some of the consumer protections that the "we're not selling you a product, we're selling you a temporary and arbitrary license that we reserve all rights over" BS snuck around.
reply