I think there's conflating of problems here (at for the moment let's talk about primary school K-12 rather than university level).

There is a fundamental problem with a good percentage of public schools right now, where the previous expectations of child behavior, learning ability, and classroom teaching outcome has been broken. And instead of coming up with ways to fix that, lots of people are trying to patch the holes at the output side.

Unfortunately, public schools have to serve everyone, including:

-- kids who have learning disabilities, which seems to be disturbingly an increasing fraction of the population, which costs lots and lots of extra money to pay for

-- kids who don't behave properly in school, which is a degradation of the expectations and frankly, reflection of the standards of families at home

-- "phone-it-in"ism of unfortunately a large enough portion of public school teachers, who are a combination of not the best trained, and honestly, not allowed to enforce discipline any more due to "equity" and liability rules that govern this now.

And instead of being able to fix these problems, concerned people try to look at the easier thing to "fix" which is to rig the outcome to "look right". Until it blatantly and obviously fails. And disserves a generation of kids in the meantime with their hypothesis about how it was going to work.

That's why you have dumbing down of entrance standards, as well as avoiding standardized tests (whether for the claimed reason of being "inequitable" or the worse lazy reason of "it's so stressful for the kids").

In the meantime, those with the means take their kids out of public school because no parent wants to conduct the experiment on their own kid.

And you then watch as our society generally falls behind other countries that are not yet so rich that they can afford to have kids failing and still somehow end up somewhat ok in life.

This actually a legit question under the surface.

The problem, in my opinion, is that MZ/CC/AA-D, are feeling that they have to be releasing models of some flavor every month to stay competitive.

And when you have the rest of the company planning to throw you a on-stage party to announce whatever next model, and the venue and guests are paid for, you're gonna have the show whether the content is good or not.

Llama program right now is "we must go faster." But without a clear product direction or niche that they're trying to build towards. Very little is said no to. Just be the best at everything. And they started from behind, how can you think you're gonna catch up to 1-2 year head start, just with more people? The line they want to believe is "the best LLM, not just the best OSS LLM".

Because of the constant pressure to release something every month (nearly, but not a huge exaggeration), and the product direction coming from MZ himself, the team is not really great at anything. There is a huge apparatus of people working on it, yet half of it or more, I believe, is baggage required because of what Meta is.

I guess we'll see how long this can be maintained.

This is pretty much the first half of the article (until the archive.is link starts working):

"Google is eliminating its goal of hiring more employees from historically underrepresented groups and reviewing some diversity, equity and inclusion programs, joining other tech giants rethinking their approach to DEI.

In an email to employees Wednesday, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.

In 2020, amid calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.

Parent company Alphabet’s GOOGL -7.69%decrease; red down pointing triangle annual report released Wednesday omitted a sentence stating the company was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” The sentence was in its reports from 2021 through 2024.

Google also said it was reviewing recent court decisions and executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and federal contractors. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” the email said...

“We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S.—and in many countries globally—but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said... "

"but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals"

Except making more money with US government and military contracts.

James Damore must be rolling in his grave

He reached some kind of settlement with Google. I have no idea how much Google paid, but my suspicion is that James had the last laugh.

I remember reading his memo and agreed with many things he said. I think the public overreacted. He was right that DEI ignore the hard questions and discriminates another group.

I'm no Trump lover. However, I do think DEI was the wrong approach.

Many here work in tech. I'm sure some or many of us here have silently experienced unfair DEI hiring and promotion practices at least once. I've seen some truly incompetent people get hired and promoted purely to meet a certain DEI goal. It reminds me of Affirmative Action but for the work place.

This is coming from someone who absolutely hates the tech bro culture and hates that there aren't enough women in tech. No male tech worker likes environments where there are 10 guys to 1 girl and the insane gender imbalance in tech heavy cities that make dating impossible for a large portion of the population. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and turn the tech industry into 10 women for every 1 man. Believe me.

Damore’s letter was extremely balanced and had all the appropriate caveats about being applied to individuals. But what we’re seeing as the countervailing force to “woke” and “DEI” is unfortunately not like this. It’s as reactionary as the most egregious DEI programs.

We live on times of the great pendulum swings. It's hard to have nuanced conversations.

Do not blame the pendulum for swinging back. Blame the person who pushed the pendulum in the first place.

grave?

it's a joke

Since you seem relatively open minded and objective about it let me ask you this:

How much did you get paid for doing all those consulting gigs on DEI topics?

Just to point out, even as you highlight the hollowness of the trend passing through, you were a part of the industry it created and a beneficiary of people's sudden interest in the symbolism of it even if it achieved little. Tons of people who could justify some kind of vague contribution/expertise were glad to make money off of the political need to pursue this, and be seen doing it.

It sounds like you were one of the more respectable contributors. Others were hangers-on, making money or careers off people's fear of being accused of not toeing the new party line, regardless of how hollow it was. VPs/deans/executive directors of diversity and inclusion at whatever institutions they could sell their services to.

Whether it was good or not at its core, some people had a vested interest in it continuing. It happens equally with every new trend that is hard to set real goals against. (or achievable ones, until it's found out to be empty).

I had my day job. This was something I did just to help. I did not request any payment for the work I did. The DEI teams where in house while I was an outside consultant.

Here in California (and generally in the US, as well as other places where the cost of enforcing laws seems to be growing too costly/unpalatable), we seem increasingly interested in documenting and retroactively following up the aftermath of crimes. Rather than preventing them when / before they're happening. I'm surprised the police even care to watch video afterwards.

(aside from the serious crime stuff like in the article)

A company wants to enforce its copyright, etc., fine. That's their right to do so. Although I beg to differ with our copyright laws.

No, what I find objectionable about the NYT games team, such as their spelling bee puzzle, is that they selectively deem certain words not valid responses. Not curse words or words with no redeeming value, but words that are perceived to be derogatory against disadvantaged groups or "offensive". It's like an extension of the hyper sensitive liberal newsroom.

Fine, it's a private organization and their choice. But it reflects in my mind a hijacking of the language by people oversensitized to the point of ridiculousness.

> words that are perceived to be derogatory against disadvantaged groups

The _game_ won't accept responses of such a nature? That doesn't sound too bad.

Good thing you're not sensitive.

Oh, come on.

These word games are for casual fun and enjoyment.

It's really not a big deal whether a particular word is included or not in the dictionary for a particular game. For Spelling Bee, the levels appear to be calculated based on the word list, so while it may be a little frustrating that a particular real (albeit off-colored, so to speak) word isn't accepted, rest assured that that doesn't doesn't affect the puzzle's difficulty. So no harm done. IMO, if some particular word removes more fun than it adds, good riddance.

Personally, I was most offended when "ichor" was not accepted, though I'm happy to say their reporting mechanism seemed to work, because it seems to be accepted now at least in the pangram game.

I guess if a core part of your belief system is that an unexplainable deity speaks through only certain people who you need to trust without good reason to, small problems like this sometimes happen! Oh well, acceptable losses, right?