@James

AI is impacting higher education. What historical frames of reference are useful for imagining the contours of the consequences? This blog post builds on the accumulation of my postings in the last 4 years on the meanings and consequences of gen AI, right from a note on the significance of ChatGPT when it was released in 2022. I am interested in a broad question — namely, the impact and consequences of AI on higher ed. This blog post is a short side quest, where I first establish whether AI can be compared to previous tech shocks that impacted higher ed, and how so. Because if AI is “just like MOOCs: vast expectations but limited impact”, then we have learned something interesting: AI is not much to bother about. But that’s not the conclusion I’ll reach ;-) Before AI, 3 notable tech shocks to higher education Since 2000, higher ed has had its fair share of shocks that called for urgent adaptation: The Internet and the web The web brought digital content production to independent individuals — everyone got a voice and access to a potential worldwide audience. With YouTube, everyone could record a lecture and broadcast it. Learning habits diversified with shorter attention spans, screen-first and mobile-first habits. One question at the time was: would these changes sideline higher education organizations, since knowledge had become available for free, easily and from anywhere? Big data and data science Big data and data science opened up the prospect that personalized learning could replace standardized teaching at the group level. Through the analysis of vast quantities of personal data, individual learning paths could be identified. Algorithmically, or through machine learning, the adequate pedagogical resources could be identified to fit each student’s needs, progress rate and aspirations. MOOCs MOOCs promised to leverage the first two items (the web and big data) to transform education. The web offers online teaching to a limitless audience, while big data and data science allow learning paths to be individualized, keeping individuals and a tailored pedagogical experience at the center despite massification. A few companies tried to flesh out the promise: Coursera, edX, Udemy, Udacity, Khan Academy, … The question at the time was: would universities be able to survive if online equivalents existed, available 24/7 and delivering certificates from Ivy League institutions at a fraction of the price and cost of a brick-and-mortar university? Consequences of these technological shocks: much ado about nothing I am deliberately painting it in broad strokes: The Internet and the web left the core of the pedagogical experience surprisingly untouched When compared to the direct, destructive effects the web continues to have on cultural organizations (the news media, the movie industry, bookstores, …), we can be surprised that higher education remains quite stable and unscathed by the web and the digital economy. The core experience in higher education remains offline: courses taught by a professor in a classroom to a group of students. Said differently: schools and universities have been transformed by web-era technologies (email, learning management systems, video conferencing, online recruitment systems, etc.), but these have transformed operations more than the basic classroom format. Even touch-enabled smartboards (when present in a classroom) are used with moderation, in my experience. In sum, the web has been “absorbed” as yet another topic to be dissected in the classroom — rather than transforming the classroom. Big data and data science have led to the creation of specialized courses and programs From around 2015 onward, most schools started developing programs offering a crossover between [name a traditional domain] x [big data / data science / analytics], just as they had introduced classes in [digital] x [name a traditional domain] a few years before. This is a consequential change for sure; however, it did not modify the core missions or functions of higher education organizations. This is quite “normal” and underwhelming compared to expectations about the transformative potential of big data: the promise was that it would make schools capable of designing individual learning paths thanks to data analytics on student data. This promise has not been delivered at the scale once imagined. Learning analytics and adaptive tools exist, but they have not replaced the basic group-based structure of higher education. MOOC platforms still exist, but schools and universities are fine Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, edX and Khan Academy are still around, after many difficulties and restructurings. They did not displace higher education organizations by any means, but instead address new, different, or overlapping but not fully coextensive segments of students. Distance learning is a central feature of MOOCs and is indeed important, even vital, to higher ed, but that was revealed by the COVID pandemic (2020-2022) more than by MOOCs. Traditional higher education organizations adapted to the pandemic swiftly by accelerating their investments in digital services (with Zoom having had its IPO in 2019 — lucky timing). I experienced the shock of the emergence of the web in higher ed as a student, and I was an active participant in the two other shocks as a professor and program manager at emlyon business school from 2014 onward, initially under the leadership of Bernard Belletante. Belletante is a visionary who anticipated these shocks and made sure they were translated into the programs and support services of the school. The launch of new programs in data science, the creation of a Makers Lab, a new LMS, the de-siloing of academic departments, the recruitment of professors with new profiles, the adaptation of classrooms for hybrid learning, etc.: the school served students well by making all these changes in advance rather than in reaction to the shocks. Among these three shocks, the development of the Internet and the web remains the one I would personally be most tempted to compare with AI, given the transformative effect the Internet and the web had on society in general. AI is set to have an impact at least as big. And so, given the relatively weak impact the web has had on the core experience of learning and teaching (as discussed just above), a comparison between AI and the web could be illuminating. Maybe AI will turn out to be as important as the web at the societal level, but with similarly “weaker than trumpeted” transformative effects on higher education itself? Focus on the web as a historical frame of reference: is AI the same kind of shock to higher education? Let’s state what I consider to be indisputable facts. The impact of AI is: profound: On a growing number of benchmarked cognitive tasks, frontier AI systems now meet or exceed human baselines. broad: usage is widespread at school, in the workplace, in our personal lives, in governments and administrations, in arts and culture, in science, medicine and technology, in the conduct of war, etc. systemic: AI is creating or intensifying environmental, geopolitical and societal imbalances. rapid: it is July 2026 and ChatGPT was released in November 2022. So it all happened in less than four years, and the rate of development is accelerating, not slowing down. Let’s compare AI and the web: how do they compare in terms of the four dimensions laid out above? Profound shock: web and AI alike? The Internet and the web were definitely “profound” in nature, because they opened a space where new content and experiences could be created with low barriers in terms of cost, distance or authority. This created an explosion of digital services and transformed the offline world. But AI is a layer deeper. It does not merely expand the space where humans can express and develop their creativity, as the web did: it expands creativity itself. Let’s develop this idea by coming back to higher education: the web has offered students access to new kinds of resources for learning, which made it easier for them to develop the corresponding skill. AI goes much deeper: AI can readily generate in a few minutes what a skilled student would have created in a few hours or days. This is not about offering more space for expression, or connecting spaces. It is about fundamentally changing the meaning of “expressing oneself”. One can then legitimately wonder: what is the value, for a student, of learning and acquiring the skill? This question was not opened up in such a radical way by the emergence of the web. Broad shock: web and AI alike? The web can be said to be a very “broad” technology: it touches everything, in particular since we pack so much of our personal and professional lives into the smartphones we carry all day long. But there again, AI is broad at a more fundamental level. LLMs have the capacity to emulate everything we ask them to be. Just as there is a conceptual gap between digital devices and analog mechanisms, LLMs introduce a new gap that sets them apart from “traditional” digital devices. LLMs are still software, of course. But the service they provide is not akin to software that simply follows a predefined series of instructions (the argument is developed there). Instead, they can be used for any purpose we set for them at the point of use: explaining a concept from any domain to undergrad students or to PhDs, for instance; helping a professor create the content of a class; or helping program officers review entire curricula. AI is a “broader” shock than the web in this sense: the web had a broad impact, but AI is broader because it is a kind of nearly omnipotent thinking device. Systemic shock: web and AI alike? The development of the Internet and the web at scale has had profound environmental, geopolitical and societal consequences (e.g., a, b, c). Yet it seems that AI has even more consequential effects. Developing and running AI models necessitates data centers tha…

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Hey guys. A couple months back I asked this sub for some reality checks on using a 30:1 metal cycloidal to replace 3D printed joints for QDD. The first batch of CNC parts finally showed up. I was honestly expecting the tight machining tolerances to make it bind up, but turning the output flange by hand... the back-drivability is wild. Just for context: we were getting super annoyed with stripping the 3D-printed plastic gears on open-source rigs like the Berkeley Lite and ALOHA. They are awesome projects, but the plastic joints are fragile and a nightmare to maintain. So we designed this as a drop-in replacement (calling it the Starfruit Actuator). Instead of printing two different plastic joint types, we wanted a single unified metal design to simplify the BOM and actually survive dynamic loads. Specs we're rolling with for the final drop: 30:1 ratio (30 teeth, 31 pins) Dual absolute encoders (supports FOC & MIT modes) Fully ODrive-compatible Target price: ~$149 Next up is integrating the motor and driver board, then throwing it on the test bench to see if it survives a 76 Nm torque test without exploding. Fingers crossed lol. Let me know what you think of the machining! All the STEP files, ROS2 nodes, and configs are going to be 100% open source. I'll drop the project link in the comments if anyone wants to track the testing or grab the files when they go live. submitted by /u/External_Wasabi9131 [link] [Kommentare]

We've reconstructed the AI economy from the bottom up

Author validation schemas in TypeScript, compile them to a portable JSON IR, and run the exact same rules in TypeScript and Rust. 60+ domain validators, cross-field rules, transforms, and full type inference.

How we built spindle's new QEMU-based microVM engine

Three brothers and their scandalous father circle questions of faith, desire, guilt, freedom, and murder in Dostoevsky's final and largest novel.

Loko Scheme 0.13.0 is now available from: https://scheme.fail/releases/loko-0.13.0.tar.gz https://scheme.fail/releases/loko-0.13.0.tar.gz.sig A bootable disk image for 64-bit PCs is available from: https://scheme.fail/releases/disk-images/loko-hdd-0.13.0.img.gz https://scheme.fail/releases/disk-images/loko-hdd-0.13.0.img.gz.sig The signatures are made with the GnuPG key 0xDD839B748F10AD4D. Loko Scheme 0.13.0 fixes bugs, improves performance and adds features. See NEWS.md in the distribution for a more detailed summary of changes. Loko Scheme is an optimizing Scheme compiler that builds statically linked binaries for bare metal, Linux and NetBSD/amd64. It supports the R6RS Scheme and R7RS Scheme standards. Loko Scheme’s web site is https://scheme.fail, where you can find the release tarballs and the manual. There is also a mailing list at https://lists.scheme.fail. Loko Scheme is licensed under the EUPL v. 1.2 or later.

Building an interactive LED world map for my office wall and displaying live data from Netlify CDN traffic.

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Very few people have deep conviction in technology, or really even understand technology in vivo. stagnation In 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released to theaters. It was a microcosm of a cultural infatuation we had with the future. Technology had reinvented our lives many times over, and there was this cosmic hunger for what would come next. We had split the atom, gone to space, and it felt like some MIT professor was on the cusp of traveling through time.

Hey everyone, I'm looking for a few people who enjoy robotics and might be interested in collaborating on an open-source robot project. I'm mainly looking for help with things like: PCB design 3D printable chassis Firmware/code Electronics planning I'll be sourcing the parts and assembling it myself. The goal is to create a low-cost robot that anyone can build and improve. This isn't a paid project, just something for fun and to learn together. If you've been wanting to work on a community robotics project or have ideas you'd like to contribute, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to comment or send me a DM if you're interested. submitted by /u/Worried-You-7003 [link] [Kommentare]

Credit: Oscar alexander CC-BY-SA-3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Consider this past question from an "ethical hacking" certification posted on itexamanswers.net 1 : Which threat actor term describes a well-funded and motivated group that will use the latest attack techniques for financial gain? hacktivist state-sponsored attacker organized crime insider threat The question describes the threat actor as follows: The threat actor is a group of, presumably, people They're well-funded They're motivated They use the latest attack techniques They desire financial gain A hacktivist, a horrible portmanteau of hack and activism, in the examiners head is likely underfunded and doesn't desire financial gain. 2 Never mind that the term activism intends to delegitimize people's political when someone selectively calls a person activist when they don't agree with that person's opinion. Let's rule out hacktivist then. A state-sponsored attacker can seek financial gain. This can happen directly or indirectly. State-sponsored groups performing espionage can create financial gain for a country when they steal trade secrets. The sponsoring state likely compensates them well for their work: a direct financial gain. Let's call this a yes then. What about organized crime? If they manage their finances right, they may be well-funded. They need more finances, so they desire financial gain. It's questionable whether they use the latest attack techniques. If the examiner thinks that the OWASP Top 10 classify as latest attack techniques, then organized crime are a yes for this question. Lastly, consider an insider threat. They may be well-funded and are perhaps receiving money from an outside group. Who's to say that they're not using the latest attack techniques? They may desire financial gain for all we know. Let's call this a yes for this question, too. Too bad that this question isn't a multiple-choice question. Here's the "correct" answer: organized crime The author on itexamanswers.net explains: Several years ago, the cybercrime industry took over the number-one spot for the most profitable illegal industry, attracting a new type of cyber-criminal. Organized crime goes where the money is. It consists of very well-funded and motivated groups that will typically use any of the latest attack techniques to gain access to information systems. Perhaps the author wants to evoke the image of wealthy ransomware gangs in your mind6. At the same time, state-sponsored attacks provide a steady income to North Korea. The U.S. Department of the Treasury alleges that North Korea-affiliated attackers stole over 3 billion USD in mostly cryptocurrency between 2022 and 2025.3 I find little value in cybersecurity education if it merely teaches you outdated trivia that never leaves room for nuance. I doubt that the companies trying to fill their 750,000 cybersecurity roles 4 need workers armed with boring information morsels. Then again, I doubt that these 750,000 roles exist in the first place or that these companies offer salaries high enough to motivate workers to fill these roles. You're likely to attain more worthwhile knowledge by purchasing a second-hand wireless router, dumping the firmware, and finding a null-pointer dereference bug.5 Which threat actor term describes a well-funded and motivated group that will use the latest attack techniques for financial gain? on itexamanswers.net from Oct 11, 2023 ↩ You'd think someone being underfunded means that they're interested in having more finances to do their activism ↩ Treasury Sanctions DPRK Bankers and Institutions Involved in Laundering Cybercrime Proceeds and IT Worker Funds home.treasury.gov. Nov 4, 2025 ↩ Cybersecurity Workforce Shortage: A Comprehensive 2025 Study acsmi.org ↩ Which I've done: Security Advisory on Null pointer Dereference Vulnerability on TP-Link TL-WR841N (CVE-2025-9014) from Jan 15, 2026 ↩ Or perhaps I've listened to too much Darknet Diaries last year. ↩