The Algorithmic Turn: The Emerging Evidence On AI Tutoring That's Hard to Ignore: An excellent and balanced piece on impact of AI on education.
The Harvard study was conducted using GPT-4 in autumn 2023; by the time the paper was published in 2025, the underlying technology had already advanced. If AI tutoring can produce effect sizes of 0.73 to 1.3 standard deviations now, whilst still requiring pre-written solutions and careful scaffolding to prevent errors, what happens when the models can reason through physics problems independently? When they can diagnose misconceptions in real time? When they can adapt not just to individual students but to culturally specific contexts?
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Yet there is a troubling paradox at the heart of AI tutoring. The very same technology that can produce effect sizes above 0.7 standard deviations can also make students demonstrably worse at learning. And I would argue that the harmful version is the one most students are currently using today.
If a bot passes your exam, what are you teaching?
My Tools in Data Science course has a Remote Online Exam. It was so difficult that, in 2023, it sparked threads titled “What is the purpose of an impossible ROE?”
Today, despite making the test harder, students solve it easily with Claude, ChatGPT, etc.
The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills:
This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
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There was a time when applying for a job meant choosing a handful of roles, tailoring a resume, and writing a real cover letter. The effort was a nuisance, but it quietly enforced focus. If you were going to burn a Saturday on an application, you probably cared about the job.
Today, a candidate armed with an LLM can parse dozens of job postings, lift phrasing from each, and generate a set of keyword-optimized cover letters in no time. They can auto-tailor their resume to each posting. They can submit 30 applications in one sitting.
This is better, right?
Not for anyone, actually. Applications soar; recruiters drown. So we bolt on more automation: applicant tracking systems, resume parsers, AI interview schedulers. We convince ourselves we’ve built a better machine, but we haven’t redesigned the only machine that matters: the system matching the right people to the right work.
Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview is the best available image generation model: Read the whole thing and never believe an image again.
That’s a pretty extraordinary result for such a simple prompt. The text is all spelled correctly and rendered without glitches. The content is solid too—it even included logos for the most popular publish platforms, and a tiny thumbnail of the Datasette UI which is close-enough for an infographic.
The Constitution of Innovation:
However around 1980, this unprecedented growth period ended. While the United States maintained a remarkably constant 2 percent growth rate in average income, the European core economies decelerated, slowly and then sharply. Since 1995, Europe’s average annual growth has been just 1.1 percent; since 2004, it has been a mere 0.7 percent – all while the United States has continued on its steady track. By 2022 the relative gap in output per head has returned to where it was in 1970. Decades of convergence were surprisingly wiped out.4
Norway's Wealth Tax Unchains a Capital Exodus: Perhaps Norway needs to click the previous link.
Norway's wealth tax increase, expected to raise $146M, led to a $448M net loss as $54B in wealth left the country, reducing tax revenue by $594M.
‘Are they going to eat me alive?’: trail runners become prey in newest form of hunting:
Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.
Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.
She Took JPMorgan for $175 Million. That Doesn’t Include Her Restaurant Bills.:
In September, Ms. Javice, 33, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for fraud. In 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired her start-up, Frank, for $175 million. Ms. Javice had claimed her company helped millions of people fill out their federal financial aid forms.
After the acquisition, however, the bank discovered that she had lied about most of Frank’s customers. JPMorgan sued, and then prosecutors put Ms. Javice on trial. A jury convicted her this year.
Along the way, Ms. Javice won a ruling that required the bank to pay her legal fees. JPMorgan has objected to the size of the fees in the past, and after her sentencing it decided to try to cut her off. The bank is trying the same maneuver with her former chief growth and acquisition officer, Olivier Amar, who was also convicted of fraud.
Dog Accidentally Shoots and Injures a Pennsylvania Man, the Police Say: No comment.
The man had been cleaning a shotgun and placed it on the bed shortly before it was fired. He received treatment at an area hospital.