> The University of Washington today announced that it is part of a multi-pronged grantmaking strategy from Ballmer Group aimed at drawing more people into careers in early childhood education in our state — including by providing more than 1,500 scholarships over the next eight years.
> Ballmer Group is providing a set of gifts totaling more than $43 million to fund scholarships, leadership development and advocacy across multiple organizations, reducing the financial barriers that prevent talent from entering the early childhood workforce. The gifts ensure Washington can successfully implement the Fair Start for Kids Act and build racially diverse leadership in the broader policy field.
> The Ballmer Group has quietly emerged as a major player in the world of education venture-philanthropy, committing more than $250 million to K-12 related efforts during 2017 and 2018. As a limited liability corporation, the group is free to make charitable donations and for-profit investments—none of which have to be publicly disclosed.
> The Ballmers have also gotten on board with the trend of merging charitable giving with venture-capital investments and calling it all philanthropy.
> Those elements of the couple’s approach are reflected in their hefty investment in Social Solutions Global, to help the for-profit company develop nonprofit case-management software that will be able to integrate with the student information systems used by most K-12 school districts.
> By structuring the Ballmer Group as an LLC, the Ballmers have certainly given themselves more levers to pull in service of their goals, said Reckhow, the Michigan State professor. But they also seem to have embraced the notion that billionaires working to reshape public policy and service delivery don’t need to be transparent about what they’re doing.
> Officials from the Ballmer Group, however, told Education Week they would not commit to publicly disclose all the organization’s grants, investments, lobbying work, or support for elected officials and campaigns.
We are in the "Bust" phase of the STEM Crisis Myth[0]
> [Anxiety over the STEM Crisis] has tended to run in cycles that he calls "alarm, boom, and bust." He says the cycle usually starts when "someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians" and as a result the country "is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically." [...]
> The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn't exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their "bust" phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
> Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the "best and the brightest," and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
EDIT: I forgot about the sidebar. This isn't the first time the MIT President has spoken about the STEM Crisis. Here's a quote from the article and compare it to the 2026 quote from Kornbluth.
> "Our national welfare, our defense, our standard of living could all be jeopardized by the mismanagement of this supply and demand problem in the field of trained creative intelligence." James Killian, president of MIT, 1954
> "And frankly, it’s a loss for the nation: When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and you shrink the supply of future scientists." - Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, 2026
I don't mean to pick in MIT specifically, and I do think they are right to call out this administration for its disruptive behavior. They are hardly alone, and undoubtedly more will speak up. However we must rethink how we handle STEM education and employment because the current relationship is untenable. At the very least we should invest in repatriating existing STEM workers who aren't in the field. Otherwise the cycle will repeat to everybody's detriment.
I've run the latest local models over the last year, including the recent Qwen 3.6 30B A3B, on a 9yo GTX 1080 and 32G RAM I have lying around[0]. If I can do that I don't think hardware will be a problem for you in the near term. The only updates I've needed were to Llama.cpp when a new class of model was released.
[0]: In my case, I want to see how local models perform on limited hardware, sacrificing context size and intelligence compared to SOTA models, so I have to really limit my expectations.
I want to come at this from another angle: We are about to tell the entire world wide web where all the kids are.
The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the leaks from these ID services [2]? Or how about these services doing far more than Age Verification [3][4]?
Given the terrible track record of data breaches in tech, this means all this information leaks into even worse hands with little recourse for people and no punishment for companies.
From a security and privacy perspective it's in kids' own self-interest and self-protection for them to undermine all of these laws.
0: "I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for." https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02706...
There is no need to implement these kind of things in a way that gives any PII to Musk or Zuck.
One way is the California approach which requires that device operating systems offer parental controls that parents can set up when creating accounts for their children that will provide an age bracket to apps when the children are using the device. The California laws requires that apps that need to restrict use by children to ask for that age bracket.
Note that the California approach does not actually do any age verification. The parental controls accept whatever the parent says is the the child's age bracket.
Another way is to put actual ID documents on the device, cryptographically tied to the device, and to implement a protocol by which software on the device can prove to a remote site that the device contains such ID documents and that those document show an age that is in the age range that is allowed to use the site but without disclosing to the site any another information from the documents. Google, Apple, and the EU are all using and/or working on this type of approach.
Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)
A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.
When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.
I find it hard to look at the actions of the Japanese and the Americans in the late 1930s and come away with any other impression than that the Americans were the good guys.
I'm not saying Japan was good, and this isn't a callout to you. I'm arguing that the erasure of US brutality in China and the Philippines, as well as Gunboat Diplomacy on Japan itself, is why we can see ourselves as the Good Guys. This erasure is part of Manufacturing Consent. Its better to abandon the temptation to moralize the sides in war and see it as Great Power competition.
First we have US [Commodore Perry] who, in 1854, used gunboat diplomacy in Nagasaki harbor to end Japan's isolation and open it up for trade. This would snowball into the Meiji restoration, which ended the Shogunate, and an Emperor that rapidly modernized Japan's economy and military to prevent foreign domination that China was experiencing at that time.
Three decades prior to Japan's invasion of China, and a decade before Japan seized Korea, the United States and other Great Powers were suppressing the Boxer Rebellion as part of China's [Century of Humiliation] to exploit China for themselves. In addition the US, after it seized the Philippines from Spain, spent several years brutally putting down the native independence movent [p-h war]. Americans aren't taught this history, and fear of that brutality of American reprisals influenced the Japanese against surrendering during WW2.
Speaking of the Philippines, its seizure by the US and other Spanish territories after the Spanish-American war as well as the annexation of Hawaii alarmed Japan. They saw US and other imperial powers as rapidly encroaching on Japanese sphere of influence, in particular the decades of 1890s-1900s. Japan saw all of this and didn't want to be the next China. Japan also saw all of East Asia was it's sphere of influence as a Japanese mirror of the Monroe Doctrine and the western imperial powers as both a tacit threat and competition.
The US wasn't interested in helping China against Japan out of a moral duty, but protecting US interests against a rising Japanese Empire, in addition to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Far East. The tipping point for Japan was when the US embargoed Oil and ship-grade Steel (as well as other strategic commodities and economic sanctions) from Japan throughout 1941, which led to Japan planning to seize more territory in SE Asia. To support these annexations, Japan had to push the US out of the Philippines, and to do that they attacked Pearl Harbor as a way to buy Japan time to take and hold territory before Americans could respond.
I mention all of this because Americans aren't taught this yet so much of our history hinges on these events.
The elephant in the room is 'unverified' users will overwhelmingly be underage kids, and that absence will be tracked across the internet. This whole thing inadvertently exposes who are the kids vs the adults programmatically.
Second, if all it takes to get into underage spaces is not being verified, predators *will* notice and exploit this hole.
Even the absence of information is information.
> The Roblox games site, which recently launched a new age-estimate system, is already suffering from users selling child-aged accounts to adult predators seeking entry to age-restricted areas, Wired reports.
> Second, if all it takes to get into underage spaces is not being verified, predators *will* notice and exploit this hole.
Well the default state is "assume underage". So the default state is be in same location as children. There's nothing for predators to exploit, they get access by default.
Which once people realize that, it all becomes really silly. The only way it would really work is by verifying that people are children, so only children can be in the gated location. But then you need to do mass surveillance on children and I think even the average person realizes this just makes that a great place for predators and the damage caused by a leak is far greater to children. Not to mention the impractical nature of it as children are less likely to able to verify themselves and honestly, you expect kids to jump through extra hoops?
Anyone that believes these systems will keep predators away from children haven't thought about even the most basic aspects of how these systems work. They cannot do what they promise
I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0.
In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].
> Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]
I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.
I sync the database to my phone, and a couple of other devices too with syncthing. I need it on my phone anyway to log into accounts while I'm out and about.
What clients are you using ? Trying syncthing with synctrayzor with my windows boxes and Synctrain on my iPhone and it’s mostly alright but still a little spotty.
I'm also using Synctrayzor on my Windows 10 machine. I'm on Android using the official Syncthing app there as well as on Linux. It sometimes takes a while for them to discover each other, and it of course works better when all the devices are on my home network. The only real problem I've encountered is when filenames have special characters another OS doesn't like.
Hey thanks for the quick reply! Yeah, I've noticed the discoverability is a lot more consistent when I just foreground the app on both devices and let it sit for 10-15 seconds. So used to instant gratification in this age :\
Not the parent, but a heavy user of Keepass. When you unlock your database, you can re-key it with several options for encryption algorithm, key derivation, and the transform rounds. I also have it set up with my Yubikeys as a kinda-sorta two factor for an added layer of security.
To keep the encryption modern regular updates are made to the program, and any migration would happen when re-encrypting the database. Checking my earliest entry, I've used it for 15 years without a hiccup.
Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Dark Forces are my triumvirate of that era. Of all of them, Duke Nukem felt the most interactive. There are times I would clear a level of enemies, then play with all the gizmos the level designers put inside like the jail cell block doors of Death Row. The security cameras were so advanced at the time too! They rendered their view, in real time, on a wall TV. I wouldn't see that effect again until the 2000s. The levels felt intuitive too, at least the Earth levels, that I felt like an urban explorer in a way that Deus Ex would later capture.
> The University of Washington today announced that it is part of a multi-pronged grantmaking strategy from Ballmer Group aimed at drawing more people into careers in early childhood education in our state — including by providing more than 1,500 scholarships over the next eight years.
> Ballmer Group is providing a set of gifts totaling more than $43 million to fund scholarships, leadership development and advocacy across multiple organizations, reducing the financial barriers that prevent talent from entering the early childhood workforce. The gifts ensure Washington can successfully implement the Fair Start for Kids Act and build racially diverse leadership in the broader policy field.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/03/16/43-million-set-of...
> The Ballmer Group has quietly emerged as a major player in the world of education venture-philanthropy, committing more than $250 million to K-12 related efforts during 2017 and 2018. As a limited liability corporation, the group is free to make charitable donations and for-profit investments—none of which have to be publicly disclosed.
> The Ballmers have also gotten on board with the trend of merging charitable giving with venture-capital investments and calling it all philanthropy.
> Those elements of the couple’s approach are reflected in their hefty investment in Social Solutions Global, to help the for-profit company develop nonprofit case-management software that will be able to integrate with the student information systems used by most K-12 school districts.
> By structuring the Ballmer Group as an LLC, the Ballmers have certainly given themselves more levers to pull in service of their goals, said Reckhow, the Michigan State professor. But they also seem to have embraced the notion that billionaires working to reshape public policy and service delivery don’t need to be transparent about what they’re doing.
> Officials from the Ballmer Group, however, told Education Week they would not commit to publicly disclose all the organization’s grants, investments, lobbying work, or support for elected officials and campaigns.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/ex-microsoft-ceo-no-not-th...
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