Play-Doh's Symposium feat. Brian Merchant

It may be addressed later in the episode, but I think it may have finally happened: they used a startup a second time without realizing it.

Degenerate-AI

Even when districts don’t buy these platforms, they’re still building these systems. We use a Google forms sign-out system to track kids but also police adults on how many passes are being given. Ugh.

Re: Lake Tahoe. A lot of people who live there full time are pretty poor or lower middle class. The people who come up to ski in the winter or have holiday homes there are pretty wealthy, but most local people work in hospitality or related fields that are fairly seasonal.

School administrators in the US, a cohort made up of some of the world's dumbest rubes, absolutely have cop brain and love wasting district money on pointless surveillance tech.

Riley, you were so close - the next Dubai isn’t Chicago, it’s Belle Island in Detroit! 😭😭 https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/detroit/news/metro-detroit-developer-unveils-bold-vision-build-city-belle-isle/

They kind of inadvertently hit on the lifecycle of these things: I've several times seen an unlikely org (furniture store and a megachurch) develop a timekeeping-style system in house which included tracking bathroom breaks and then decide to market it externally to make money it on it.

wait what, how am i 30 years old and learning today that children in US schools need a piece of paper to go through the school?! that is absolutely unhinged

Im a librarian and im honored we are making it clear as a field how stupid and dangerous this shit is

Great episode. I’m a statistician at a US university for a center providing clinical research support. Our dumbass admins were trying to push an “AI Statistician” on us but luckily the obscure assistant deans for AI are all fucking surgeons and are too stupid to code the thing. Most of our job actually consists of resolving people’s confusion as a result of using AI and when we give seminars we stress a similar point to what you all talked about — an AI will agree with whatever dumb idea you feed it, but a statistician will disagree with you in a productive and ultimately beneficial way. That’s where the learning is! But our “clients” are mostly medical students, the administrators are too dumb to think twice about deskilling medical students, and they get really conflicting messages from educators and the admin on AI. Trash future indeed

i mean if you EXPECT the impregnation ninja what's the point??

I was teaching high school at a place that implemented smart pass (I quit 3 months after they made us all use it). Not only profoundly evil, but also incredibly annoying. I went from just handing a student a hall pass to having to fucking enter info into a stupid app and then having their pass get blocked because some kid they weren't supposed to meet with was pissing on the other side of the school.

Urinetown reference now officially the most obscure pop culture mention on TF

How long will it be before a tech startup named dAIgenes disrupts the Plato teacher industry

I didn't have 'racist vegetable cuckhold porn' on my radar but chuds seem to love fetishing black men in brand new ways. I've seen so many eggplant men and I am ready for the meteors to come

So there is a meme librarian of sorts: the one who used to work at Know Your Meme. Also, as a sellout corporate librarian, part of me dies every time someone tells me "I asked Copilot, but couldn't find what I needed." We have decades of knowledge from prior projects in Sharepoint, but no one can be arsed to check there or any of the expensive databases we subscribe to and aren't searchable by Google.

Where’s Milo been?

Less than 10 minutes in, and I wasn't expecting to hear about an AI generated fruit orgy

Points to Brian for shouting out the working class Tahoe folks who are real and exist! Signed, Very Not Rich in SF

“Digital Hall Pass” sounds like permission my imaginary spouse would give me to fuck a bsky crush

They touch on this a bit but if it interests you, if you go to uni for a teaching degree there's a concept in education you learn that is called "teaching to the test". You create a test that has quite clearly defined criteria for pass/fail ('is the answer to this math problem 8, 5, 6 or 12?', 'which tense is this sentence written in?'), and then you teach the students exactly what it takes to pass that test; here is a tense a sentence can be written in, here is a math problem whose correct result is 5. and because the test will be issued on a piece of paper in a silent room with no teacher interaction, that is also how you teach the lessons -- if not on paper, then on the board or the big projector screen with no student-teacher interaction. What this system is incredibly good at is producing test results that a school administrator (who has no education in the educational sciences and came to work for the school district because they got laid off from doing payroll at the car plant that got shut down 2 decades ago) can take to a state bureaucrat (same) and say, "see, look at these scores, I am doing school good, more budget please". But what this system has not produced at all is students who have learned anything except how to pass a math test, which they will never do again in their entire life after they become adults. it is a cargo cult. they are building landing strips in the jungle in hopes that Mother Bird School District will drop them precious cargo of budget, and any understand of how students actually learn gets in the way of constructing our incredibly elaborate landing strips. we are allowing our education systems to be conquered by cargo cults from the isle of "I got a degree in STEM so if your field of study doesn't make intuitive sense to me then that must mean it's because it has no foundation at all". *actual* learning does not happen when a teacher tells you what the present perfect tense is, or in the classwork afterwards where they ask you to identify sentences using the present perfect, or the homework where they ask you to do the same (though they are important for the process of reaching actual learning), the learning happens at the end of the lesson when the teacher tells students to pair up and take turns making sentences in the present perfect tense, and they interact with eachother socially while using the concept with a direct peer witness. and *that* part of learning -- the REAL learning that will stick with a student forever and make them more fluent or more capable for the rest of their lives, can't be tested. not only can it not be tested; there has never been any reproducible evidence that it ever could be tested, and a forever-mounting reproducible pile of evidence that says (& reinforces) that it couldn't be tested, because human beings -- human culture, human brains, human society -- all of it, is a fluid medium that shifts faster than it can be measured, and *that* is a teacher's job. the job of a teacher is not to recite lessons and grade homework (things a chatbot can do), the *real* job of a *real* teacher is to observe their students and swap out methodologies that aren't working and experiment to see what does work for students. and not only can chatbots not do that, but anybody who thinks it would be better to fire all of the teacher and replace them with a chatbot to save money also could never do. but, none of that matters because the real reason all of this is happening is to smokescreen the fact that the first world country you were born in has decided to become an un-developed nation, and this is part of the process of getting there. we fire all of the teachers to replace them with chatbots that can do their jobs better and cheaper anyhow, then the chatbots turn out not to work & also cost way more and go "well if the chatbots can't do it then I guess we just shut down all of the schools because there's no alternative to the chatbot", and now you live in a hut you build out of stirring dried grasses with your own shit because we collectively decided that education an architect was too much work & doesn't enrich the stupidest and most useless people on the planet enough.

Jump scared by hearing my highschool talked about 😭

Nice to know all AI can do is help out the office perv

Does anyone know which Trashfuture episode was the Alpha School one?

Amp is short for Ampere, not ampoule

at the school I work at we call it potty patrol and there is a duty where a teacher must sit in front of each bathroom and scan in and out each student by id via the student info system. This is in addition to smartpass being used for check out and in of classrooms. They pay around $50k for smartpass

This feels like the natural outcome of regarding children as property. The alphaschool bastards should get sued out of this material plane

I think we should all get together to smash the AI Boris Johnson auto-generator. There's so much documentation culture here too. Every day at work I have to fill in more boxes so that someone can say I've done the thing, so we're going to need an increasingly bigger box-generating machine.

Devastating for November to be off when Riley says the phrase "We're excited to serve this load" to silence

If my job starts asking me to *clock out* to go to the fucking BATHROOM I am bringing an empty soda bottle to my desk and pissing in that, go fuck yourself. No.

I'm just sad that AI was robbing children the joy of working with flash or autodesk animator to make their fucked up funny videos. Glad Sora's death means newgrounds could rise again.

Florida public middle school WAS Mad Max, but not for lack of surveillance 😭

Can't wait for my future kid's school to tell me that the AI Headmaster determined that she is guilty of Hall Pass fraud and deployed an Orbital Drop Hall Monitor to apprehend her and send her to the Isle of Man Detention Centre for Unruly Teens

What is Urinetown? Urinetown's a tool! A means to keep the fools in check and enforce our iron rule

15:15 NV Energy is excited to serve the load. It can't not service the load. It cannot refuse The Load. edit: related to the discussion about society wide mandate of AI being forced into everything: we're all being instructed to never refuse The Load. We are all of us mere bottoms in the tech-feudalist pimped out cumdump.

riley is the master of comic timing when it comes to the word "what" specifically

This sounds like one of those tweets, but my youngest son, aged about 5, lost his shit on discovering "there's a fossiller called Play-Doh"

I need both the Bob’s burgers and SVU takes on this

Soon we'll cut out the middleman and have ai teachers grant hall passes to ai kids, but weirdly that won't work either, as the kid ai was trained on data from teens ripping fat clouds. Perhaps the metrics would improve if we just had ai create a report saying it worked. Give me one hundred billion dollars for my company Lyre where we streamline report generation by leveraging creative ai to reduce the workplace friction of executives and administrators experiencing bad numbers. That's phase one. Phase two is getting rid of the executives and administrators and having ai verify the ai generated reports and text a thumbs up emoji to the Wall Street Journal ai article generator, which triggers the ai agent administrating hedge fund investments. Phase three is getting rid of the reports and the Wall Street Journal parts, and just having ai pass money back and forth. Phase four is getting rid of the money and the ai and just telling each other fanciful stories about our successful companies around the post-apocalyptic fire pit. Phase five is getting rid of the fire and the stories, and then we will have achieved the dream of ultimate efficiency: one man with a stick drawing a line going up in the dirt. (Then, a disruptive innovator comes along and points out you don't really need the stick. Stick futures collapse overnight, wiping out the entire stick-and-dirt-based economy)

Shoutout to that IT Tech that was fired. That’s got to be the easiest wrongful termination suit there has ever been.

University prof here... The exploitation of AI on the part of students is a real thing that is a serious academic problem. What is *much* more serious, though, is the *passionate* embrace of AI by the administration of the university. The new rules being handed down, term by term, for how we are supposed to evaluate "schoolwork" done by students that is transparently done by AI is basically "just let them use it and everything is fine." Any rules pertaining to plagiarism, or academic integrity, of even proper citation are completely gone unless assignments are structured so that such behaviour is impossible (which is what I'm struggling to do, in increasingly baroque ways each semester)..What are students expected to do under such circumstances? Every incentive is there for them to expoit it, and with no real-world incentive to go to....oh, I don't know...a library, or internet archive, etc. The perversity of it, and the absolute rock-hard commitment of admin to backing that perversity, is mind-boggling. I mean, I understand that it's important to have a university degree to get "ahead" in "life," but one would also like to imagine that young people might want to actually use this weirdly still extant medieval institution to learn some stuff.

As a sometime-smut writer, you can't automate me. This shit's artisinal.

This episode made me take up running again. JFC

On phone blockers in the bathroom, yes they do do that.

Hussein: Nobody understands the real value of an attractive but a mean librarian Me: Hussein, buddy, mishpochela, _we know_

My last year of primary school the teachers implemented an alternative currency system to reward/punish students and ostensibly teach us thrift. You had to spend alternative money to use the toilet or get some water during class, but the teachers couldn't say no if you were skint. As a future TF listener my N year old self deduced that I had unlimited credit, provided I only spent it on the toilet, which I did. Hilariously I ended up in the black at year-end due to having a successful business idea.

So I graduated from US high school a couple years ago and they actually had SmartPass set up due to people vaping in the bathrooms constantly. The thing is that everyone outside of the PTA and administration HATED it because it was just a massive headache to deal with for teachers and students. It’s cool to know that I was part of a focus group for child surveillance technology.

when i was in high school in 2017 my principal compared vaping in the bathrooms to the parkland shooting (approximately four days after it happened, at a school where multiple people knew one of the victims) so it’s good to see that we have not gotten Less Insane about kids vaping in the bathrooms

Bathroom cyberjavert

Y'all are underestimating how effective this technology will be at identifying terminators.

my fifth grade math teacher did not like that my bladder filled quickly after lunch she liked me pissing in my desk chair less though so we only had to do that once not that i enjoyed pissing myself in front of twenty some children at a school i was already being bullied at but these days i take a grim satisfaction in knowing nobody had a good time

Riley for climate Stalin

As a Nevadan I'm absolutely pissed at how we get bombarded with weepy PSAs and news articles about how we need to save water, all the while gov Lombardo is fast tracking these data centers (and he's also protecting golf courses)

I’m gonna start passing out vapes to a select group of students to try to inspire a vaping “Sunni awakening”

So is Milo officially gone? Hanging out with Frank Skinner instead now?

I was recently at an airport in the UK and the security X-ray people casually mentioned that AI tells them when to look in people's bags....

I presume Ed Zitron isn't on because he's still belly laughing