Fascinating. This is even worse than I thought. For this, there should be ample correct data in the training data set. But it still cannot do it. Well.

The reason scams like this are illegal is because there is always plenty of pople who believe this crap against all rationality. If regular people were able to fact-check, scammers would die out.

The home-user does not really matter in this. It is corporate users that provide basically all MS profits.

Then add Azure getting hacked and being massively insecure, several times now. Add that many people are looking into leaving o365 because MS blocked a user for political reasons.

MS is done for. They just will take quite a while dying. But there is no realistic chance they can turn things around anymore.

Yes. That should get this person barred for life from any research position. Had that gone on for longer, it would have done significant damage.

Lets face it: LLMs are somewhat better search, can summarize non-complex texts and can do simple, well-known work with not very good reliability. But that really is it. And that in no way justifies the hype.

There are other factors at work as well. But we will see what happens. Still, being well educated is always a huge advantage, even if it sometimes requires time to manifest. Obviously, if you study a BS subject or do not apply yourself, you will be screwed except in a boom.

What nonsense. First, the most important part in teaching is to select the materials and structure them in a way that makes sense. Second is the actual teaching and anybody halfway competent does far more than just reading the slides. It is about demonstrating you know your stuff, the materials are worthwhile working through, you respect the time of the participants and any good lecture will also need a real entertainment factor.

I think you have never designed and then held a lecture. And if you ever have heard lectures, apparently they were not any good.

Indeed. As an example, I currently have a student looking at all the major AIs (including coding ones with paid subscriptions) for code security review. With small, well known samples they are good. With larger samples, they are >50% fail. With CVEs (the things that matter) they are so far almost 100% fail.

Add that using AI coding assistants makes you about 20% slower, and the only thing AI could be called for this application is "completely unsuitable".

Indeed. I mean they have been subjected to slow for a full semester now. Anybody that does not see the limitations after that has a problem.

Hahaha, in 4 years the collapse of the hallucination that LLMs are actually very useful will have concluded. Things are already mightily crumbling. Those that apply themselves and learn stuff will find something worthwhile in 4 years. Obviously, with this mockery of teaching, that will be impossible, but real teaching is still being done. You just need to insist on it.

Tell that to those that place profits over everything else in life. Failures like Elon Musk that, despite all his money, obviously suffers from a deep (and justified) feeling of inadequacy.

The primary job of a lecturer is design of the lecture, select the material and structure it. That requires insight, experience and understanding of the target audience. The second most important thing is teaching the material and that requires a lot more than just standing there and reading the slides. In fact, just reading the slides is a complete fail. What you need to di is talk about what is ion the slides, signal what is important, how this relates to the rest of the world, what is the future perspective and, most important, do a bit of storytelling with real-world examples not on the slides, etc. The students must have the impression you know your stuff, and that you, as the lecturer, respect their time and provide something of value. That is what keeps them engaged and is critical for the learning effect. Things must be _interesting_ for them.

Hence this "course" is a complete fail and waste of time and essentially a scam. The students would have been much better served by being told to buy a specific book and to work through it.

I think they're a bit more than that, but assume you're right... have you considered that they're less than three years old? ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. And the reasoning models that have made them massively more effective in many areas (especially software development) are barely a year old?

If you reason about what will happen in the next decade or two based on where the technology is right now, a technology that didn't even exist five years ago and is still obviously in its infancy, you're clearly missing the most important point, which is that the pace of improvement has been and continues to be incredibly rapid. You need to base your reasoning on what the models will be capable of five years from now, ten years from now. Unless we suddenly hit a wall, they'll be vastly better. How much better? No one knows, but it seems safe to expect that they'll be orders of magnitude better.

I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.

If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved them so far, but they've responded by going the wrong direction.