CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸

The phone booth at Wells and Lake.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth.

It communicates with us using a 23-watt transmitter.
Less than a refrigerator light bulb.

The signal takes 22 hours to reach us, traveling at the speed of light.

By the time it arrives, it's 20 billion times weaker than the power of a digital watch battery.

NASA's Deep Space Network picks it up using 70-meter dish antennas cooled to near absolute zero to reduce electronic noise.

The engineering required to hear a 23-watt signal from 24 billion km away is arguably more impressive than the spacecraft itself.

Launched 1977.
Still transmitting.
Still being heard.

We built something that works perfectly, 47 years later, in conditions no one has ever tested in.

That's what engineering for the long term looks like.

[Papii🥤 @ammalusty]

Ben Franklin didn't plow through dozens and dozens of French whores so that you could abide by fireworks ordinances

[Martin Sellner @MartinSellner_]

The utter hypocrisy of German media.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

Local judge says it’s illegal to restrict migration and that America actually belongs to 8 billion foreigners—not you or your family and that no matter who you vote for you will be dispossessed. If SCOTUS doesn’t restrain these judges the people will lose all faith in the courts.

[Handre @Handre]

Marx lived his entire adult life as a dependent. The capitalist system funded his "research" through Engels, whose family wealth came from textile factories. The irony cuts deep: capitalism's profits subsidized its most famous critic.

Marx never held a real job. Never met payroll. Never risked capital or faced bankruptcy. He spent decades theorizing about labor value while avoiding actual labor. His insights into production came from library books, not factory floors.

The parasitic intellectual tradition he spawned continues today. Academic Marxists collect taxpayer-funded salaries while denouncing the market system that creates the wealth they consume.

It's time to get rid of these people.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Hello Mr. Hunter Biden,

You're getting six-digit likes on every post lately. I don't have any hope to ratio you or whatever through traditional "Hello" means.

But for those uninitiated, those who are captivated by your fake-humble persona obviously PR-engineered to capture unsuspecting disaffected Republicans:

You are not some humility, witty guy turning over a new leaf. You are the ultimate proof of nepotism, everything that the so-called "Epstein Class" is supposed to represent.

Let me explain - off the top of my head.

You were a board member of USGLC. U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. The most powerful NGO that nobody's ever heard of. Last year, I documented in several threads, how Liz Schrayer, USGLC lead, took credit for ramming through a 90 billion dollar bill for Ukraine in 2024, even as @mattvanswol demonstrated that Western North Carolina got zero help in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene because FEMA threw up their hands and said they ran out of funds.

USGLC, arguably, is the most powerful NGO that nobody has ever heard of. It includes a bunch of corporations, a bunch of nonprofit leads, and ... for some magical reason, I documented, extensively, linked, that Liz Schrayer started pursuing you in 2012. During the Obama years, when you were Biden's son. Are you a former Secretary of State? No. Are you a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? No. That puts you below the average USGLC board member, by a good tier.

So what DID get you on USGLC? The only reason: that you were the son of a sitting Vice President known for corruption, and you yourself were known for corruption.

You are not "folksy." You are the worst of the worst of the elite. Most of the elite, at least, get their credentials through Georgetown/George Washington/Harvard Kennedy. You got yours purely on nepotism. Any photographs you have of yourself at motels is proof that you are so incompetent that you waste all your money, not that you come from humble beginnings. Because others like @MarcoPolo501c3 have thoroughly documented that you benefited a great deal from your nepotism.

You even tried to bait those in with saying you prefer to keep immigration "legal" - but we all know the trap that keeps illegal immgrants here: outlaw deportations, and make every immigrant case "asylum", and magically, everyone who might've been here illegally a few years ago is legal.

You may get 175K likes on your semi-subverting, PR-designed photographs. But those of us who know, know you're fake.

https://t.co/vMml22uCbu

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

I think we're talking about a lot of different problems that could be more profitably pulled apart to address more effectively.
1. AI and it's discontents ;-)
Yes, this is a huge problem which my friend deals with endlessly. I also had to deal with similar problems before AI was even available and anyone who could use a search engine competently was at a distinct advantage to say the least. I'm personally a proponent of a hybrid teaching scenario wherein the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods are leveraged skillfully for stated outcomes. A more rigorous understanding of incentives across the board will be required to implement effective solutions of what to do in terms of knowledge transfer versus what used to be known as critical thinking skills. I agree that LLMs are not particularly useful for the latter skill at this time, nor do I think they ever will be but that's another huge subject.
The start of an answer here IMO is to teach certain skills using an LLM and to teach others using a classroom, as well as to test certain skills in a sealed environment while others are essentially updated 'open book' tests that are really more about teaching a tool and a method.
IMO AI is being completely over hyped in the same way that all sorts of 'tech solutions' in the 90's were, so we'll have to get much more clever about what it is that we're teaching students and why. The factory worker education structure developed in the late 1800's will simply not work in the future, nor should we expect it to. There are lots of excellent books and commentators on this subject, I'm sure you're aware of them. Unfortunately our University systems have caught this illness as well and we're all suffering as a result.
2. Economics of education
If financial investment is a primary motivator you're teaching the student about incentives... which any good econ class should be doing. I'm not sure this is really the stick we should be using TBH, especially if the work environment they will end up in is very loosely associated with this. (yes, this sounds counter-intuitive but there are literally millions of what amount to day-care jobs even in our supposedly 'capitalist' economic system) I could blather on quite a while as to why economics and education are frequently at cross purposes but I'd like to address a more interesting (to me) part of your reply;
'not everything is a race, it all just depends heavily on the person.'
Couldn't agree more. Current university curricula is set up for a certain timeframe with a certain kind of student... (which is becoming increasingly difficult to find BTW) but is this really optimal for learning or employment? What if there is a student who is really interested in a certain subject but simply doesn't learn calculus as fast or in the same way as his or her peers? Is it better to fail them out and have them work in an area that they're not interested in or competent in... or should we tailor curricula more specifically to students? I'd advocate that we should do the latter, and make higher education less factory-like and more like an ongoing apprenticeship for the entirety of their working lives. To me this is linked to the trajectory that health care is going in, namely what used to be a very much one size fits all system will increasingly be optimized right on down to the individual level in order to achieve more effective and better outcomes.
One aspect that I liked at MS was that we'd attempt to pull SME's from whatever working group that specialized in building a specific piece of software for a certain task, employ them in building curriculum for a while, then send them back to do their hands on job after a while. I see no reason we can't replicate something like this for all sorts of occupations. As you point out and which I agree with, some skills just have to be learned by getting your hands dirty, and some lend themselves to un-harassed circumspection. It used to be that apprenticeship guilds provided this function instead of 'certification-culture' and I think we need to get back to that in some form of updated way.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

@erikthepaladin @PeterDiamandis @elonmusk Sounds great!
Not familiar with Elon's alternative school project, I'll have to inform myself.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

Hybrid classrooms are definitely the future, and there's a huge amount of work to be done to optimize them. I worked at Microsoft for nearly 2 decades in hybrid online/traditional classrooms and there's so much yet to figure out. Instead of all the hand wringing about how traditional structures don't seem to be working the way they ought to we need to be working on how to optimize for the future instead of dreading it.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

"One point of college is to train you on how to self direct and motivate"
I have a friend that I did undergrad Physics with who is a professor who teaches astrophysics to grad students and a general studies class for non-STEM majors. The TLDR version of a great many of our conversations is if the student does not have the kind of self-directed and motivated skills you speak of by the time they get to college they aren't going to have the time to acquire those skills to compete with those who already have them and developed them in grade school where this should have happened in the first place. It's like the students who 'would like to get into STEM' but they're stuck with doing remedial trig they should have done in 9th grade. It is possible to 'catch up' to a certain extent but these people aren't ever going to speak the language of their major as fluently as someone who has been practicing it since the beginning of their education.
I don't disagree with your emphasis on self-direction and motivation, but with where/when those skills are to be gained.
As far as skin in the game and accountability, people who are genuinely interested in and have the aptitude for a subject don't have problems with these aspects of learning generally speaking. It's good to set up testing and accountability structures, no arguments against that, but it's clear that different ones will need to be developed to deal with future online learning methods that are very different than a traditional University education. I worked at Microsoft for nearly two decades specializing in online learning, and putting together accountability structures isn't nearly as problematic as your assertion implies. You definitely don't need a university environment to do this.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

I agree with this wholeheartedly, and could blather for months about how the education system across the board should be revamped to optimize for what machines cannot do better. I speak frequently with a friend I did my physics major with who went on to teach astrophysics to grad students and for a class that non-science majors have to get through to get their general studies credits. Our conversations about what can be done and what is actually being done make my blood pressure go up every time. ;-)

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

@omarslopezarce @PeterDiamandis @elonmusk It isn't 'pork,' it's what a university is supposed to do. It's fine to advocate that certain subjects be taught in trade school for all sorts of reasons, but those trade schools already exist so I'm not sure what you're complaining about.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

@BradleyDIrvin @PeterDiamandis That isn't any different than an LLM telling you to do the same.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

You need to make a distinction between a trade school and what a university is supposed to be. A trade school can do number 1 but this does not constitute the goal of a good grounded education which is the point of a university. Europe has traditionally made this distinction more explicit and so should the US. There's historically a reason it's called a 'university.'
As far as 'of your choice' there are plenty of both applied and theoretical occupations that require education in what have traditionally been apprentice trades, and for a good reason. You can definitely learn about electricity on coursera, but it does not make you an electrician. You can even learn how to do some basic tasks/procedures involving electrical knowledge, but this does not mean that you can practice a trade. If you're talking about doing shade tree surgeon mechanics or everyday tasks (that used to be common knowledge), yes this can be taught over the internet easily.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

LLMs already will give you a syllabus and curriculum if you ask them to. If you ask for feedback about a certain skill transfer (or lack of it) it will suggest methods and sources to address this.
What will end up happening is that certain LLMs will be optimized for teaching, obviously.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

@omarslopezarce @PeterDiamandis @elonmusk What are useless subjects to you?

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

@erikthepaladin @PeterDiamandis Except that 'good classrooms' are so few and far between that it begs the question of what the ROI is for them as the OP points out.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

@BradleyDIrvin @PeterDiamandis You can have an LLM put together a syllabus to teach you skills very easily. It will respond to feedback where if you tell it that exercises are confusing or information isn't transferring it will provide alternate methods.

[CDR Max Peck 🇺🇸 @CdrPeck]

All STEM, arts, and humanities degrees. In other words, the usual classical curriculum which we've replaced with ideological factories as opposed to teaching critical thinking and methods of artistic expression. Also, actual as opposed to fake politicized archeology.

Someone will still be required to provide the data for an LLM AI to use; they do not and will not be capable of creating this for themselves. AGI is another thing entirely and the predictions that it's going to be here next Tuesday are complete nonsense if you look beyond the current hype machine. Humans don't even understand what consciousness is or how it works, and machines which don't have it aren't going to miraculously figure this out anytime soon.

What will return is a much smaller set of people who actually need to go to college. People seem to forget that universities use to be for very high potential (or highly connected) people and if you had the need to go there to get challenged you weren't some wage worker looking for a way out of your current 9-5 which is the current situation.

As far as classical humanities these were always a crucial item reserved for a small cadre of people who had the means to practice and learn them; it was their duty to codify and find means to preserve and communicate cultural artifacts to the next generation, a skill we have also lost a great deal of competence in. People learn culture from people best, not machines.