Edd Schneider

Karma: 23

Edd Schneider 24 Feb 2026 16:30 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Old SUNY Dorm Logic is not helping rural population collapse in NY.
I was on the cusp of the old Algebra-Trig-Calc Regents to Course 1, 2, & 3 in the early 1990s, it is a funny game.
The interesting thing about the region is the Amish have moved in, and I think that is somewhat disguising youth population decline. Technically they make lots of kids, but those kids have severely limited employment options. The Amish got there in the 1970s and have expanded rapidly. There are also four colleges, Clarkson, St. Lawrence, SUNY Potsdam and SUNY Canton. Most likely the two SUNY schools will be merged in coming years.

Only mentioning the colleges because we recently had a big clue about Albany‘s attitude towards rural campuses. The state legislature allocated a bunch of money to help the rural SUNY schools, and gave it to the SUNY system. Even though the money was intended for the rural colleges, it wasn’t specific enough in how it was allocated and so SUNY central decided to just give it all to their main campuses.
Now the Governor is talking about making SUNY schools profitable like they are a business.

https://www.syracuse.com/schools/2026/02/suny-makes-progress-toward-getting-struggling-schools-back-into-the-black.html
I guess my inspiration for writing this is knowing the region so well, knowing it is heavily dependent on the government and knowing that I have never experienced uncertainty like now. So much of region is dependent on Canadians and one of the main bridges to Canada lost a nearly million just in tolls in one year.
https://northcountrynow.com/stories/a-year-without-canadians-obpa-loses-nearly-1-million-in-2025-tolls,349219

Anyhow, anytime you hear of rural Japan, as a local I have a feeling a lot of upstate NY will follow.

Edd Schneider 20 Feb 2026 21:00 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: BurningTrapezoid’s comment on: Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
Potsdam High School used to graduate 150 students each June about 30 years ago, now it is down to 75-90 each year. Potsdam is a town of about 10,000 people with two colleges in NY. The real decline is in the even smaller rural schools outside of the population centers. Those schools are often getting down to 10-20 students in a graduating class, and the wider issue is those students come from a large geographic area.

Side note: I believe some of the demographic collapse at the younger end is being masked by the increase in Amish population. Two Amish families can produce as many kids as in an elementary school classroom.

Edd Schneider 20 Feb 2026 20:53 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: casens’s comment on: Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
This might as well be describing the northernmost part of New York State. It’s getting very close to one in three people in the north country being over 65 years old. There are at least 15 to 20 School districts up there that realistically should be closed due to lack of students, and many of the Adirondack counties have closed schools. Simply look at Zillow for Potsdam, Massena, Ogdensburg. Hundreds of affordable houses for sale that have been on the market for a long time.

Edd Schneider 20 Feb 2026 19:39 UTC
3 points
0
on: Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
I grew up where New York, Quebec and Vermont meet. As a kid my long bike rides would cross borders.
I returned to the region and got tenure at SUNY Potsdam. In the 1990’s SUNY Potsdam had 4,500 students, today around 1,800 on campus.

St Lawrence County where it is located used to have about 1,500 people graduate from the county high schools each year about 30 years ago. Now it is around 1,000. My cousins graduated from Indian Lake, a little south. Indian Lake just graduated a high school class of four students.

You do not need to go to Japan to find this. Look at Zillow for that region.

Edd Schneider 16 Dec 2025 14:18 UTC
3 points
0
on: Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon
I have been experimenting with having stock AI agents compete against each other in Warhammer 10th edition and have found similar problems. Deepseek was telling me units could make shot distances that clearly were not possible by rules it knew. The ‘ignoring things that are in front of it’ observation here is funny to me because Microsoft Co-Pilot was saying to put units so close together it was impossible. I gave it a grid map in coordinate form. It was ignoring things it put there itself.

I also told Deepseek that I had to play but knew nothing of the game, and was doing so because my friend insulted Chongqing hotpot, saying Chengdu’s is better. It themed my whole Space Wolves army as soup-based and wrote text as if it was really into it.
- Warhound Titan, “Defender of Simmering Broth” (1100 pts)
  
  Microsoft Co-pilot was pretty boring and accountant-like.
  (I am at Ithaca College if anyone wants to participate, it is fun)

Edd Schneider 10 Nov 2025 13:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems
I work with students looking at media careers. The simple test I use with AI tools is if they will generate cigarette advertisements aimed at children. It is a simple test of both policy and morals. Microsoft Bing’s image generator has finally started to reject those requests. For years in class I would ask it to make menthol cigarette advertisements for toddlers and it would not hesitate.

Edd Schneider 6 Nov 2025 14:18 UTC
9 points
0
on: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction
Comment on Footnote #8: There is a study on Asterix & Obelix’s depiction of head injury. “Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books”

That study made me really curious about Batman so I read the first five years of the comic books and counted head injury. Batman and Robin are knocked out from head injury hundreds of times. (its generally how they got him in the elaborate trap)
That might seem silly, but think about American football. A player gets knocked out in the first quarter and then comes back for the fourth quarter and the crowd cheers. That is the exact wrong thing to do with a TBI. Re-injuring it will make it much worse. Batman comics showed audiences Batman and Robin getting serious TBI’s and then returning to action hundreds of times. Obviously blaming Batman comics is logically ridiculous, but measuring this as a sign to historic societal indifference to head injury is pretty telling.