Another anecdote. I have a friend who manages his families (started by his father and grandfather) private market investment company. The family is worth nine figures.
He pulled his people back into the office because he said he "felt" like they were not working. Despite graduating from Harvard and from Harvard Business School he could not offer any qualitative or quantitative data to back up his "feelings." He lets his people WFH on Friday's but says he schedules video calls on that day to make sure they are working.
He said, "When they are working from home, I do not know if they are walking their dog for an hour but if they are in the office, I know they aren't."
What made this conversation laughable was that he and I were at a country club having lunch and bullshitting for half the day, on a weekday, while our kids (who had the day off from school) were playing a sport together. He stepped away more than once for "meetings" that he took from his cell phone.
Microsoft, like other tech companies, over hired during COVID. This is their way of fixing that glitch while lessening the financial burden of severance packages handed out during layoffs.
It's a standard McKinsey & Co. playbook that is going around the various tech companies as a way to reduce headcount.
And, productivity is going to tank. If you force me to RTO, I will show up exactly at 8am, take my 1 hour lunch away from the office, and leave exactly at 5pm. And, when I do leave the office at 5pm, my work phone gets turned off and I will not do anything work related until 8am the next morning.
You would think these tech companies would do something innovative. A f*cking monkey can cut costs by firing people. How about you stop over hiring? How about you stop leasing building space and use the products you create that enable remote collaboration?
I am not sure why this is news. Classic economic warfare.
Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools.
Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.
Well, it's put in a bit of a disrespectful tone, but I think you are right. Unrestricted access to a smartphone will lead to 6 hours + a day screen time. And it's all addictive junk. That can't be good.
One also sees the "educational" difference. Here a study was published concluding that poorer areas have twice the number of snackbars compared to areas with "higher educated" people. Bad food is also very cheap. It's also very easy to never read about the effects of screens on childeren and I see people with kids of ~1 sitting on the back of a bike with a smartphone blaring... Why not let the kid enjoy and learn from the surroundings? My kids loved riding a bike with me.
You should anthropomorphize LLMs more. Anthropomorphizing LLMs is at least directionally correct 9 times out of 10.
LLMs, in a very real way, have "conscientiousness". As in: it's a property that can be measured and affected by training, and also the kind of abstract concept that an LLM can recognize and operate off.
If you can just train an LLM to be "more evil", you can almost certainly train an LLM to be "more conscientious" or "less conscientious".
> This was never about addressing ... national security
You have no idea what you are talking about.