That would require that there are no more and no less than the materials required in existence. The problem students face is not lack of materials. The problem is they are faced with vastly more materials than they need and most do not yet have the skills to competently make a selection and structure structure what they selected.

Other than that, I agree with your statement.

Indeed. Also reminds me of a certain "stable genius".

It's just below IRC and just above Usenet.

Hate to disappoint...but it was exactly that for longer than it was the P2P network from which it got its notoriety.

Circa 2003, Napster came back as a legit music seller, just like iTunes. They spent a few years selling DRM'd WMA files, but they were between a rock and a hard place because Apple wouldn't license the iTunes DRM that worked on iPods, nor would they license Microsoft's WMA format, and the RIAA wasn't about to let them sell ordinary MP3 files without DRM (God knows how Amazon managed to score that deal)...so, Napster blamed Microsoft for the fact that their sales paled in comparison to Apple.

I'd argue that they were also a bit ahead of their time; Napster To Go was a monthly subscription service that used Microsoft's Janus DRM to enforce subscriptions...the Slashdot crowd hated the DRM at the time, but in a pre-LTE era, that was pretty much how subscription music on mobile was going to happen...and several years later, we have Spotify, which is basically the successor of Napster To Go, enforcing its DRM by other means. They also had a short-lived partnership with XM Radio that allowed subscribers to listen to linear streams of certain music channels, in turn allowing rental or purchases of songs that were liked while broadcast. A decade later, Shazam would do that with Apple Music and audio recognition, but Napster implemented a rudimentary version of the idea before Apple implemented iMessage.

In 2011, Rhapsody acquired Napster, but their niche was in licensing to other businesses. While they kept the "Spotify from Temu or Wish.com" setup for a while, their real bread and butter was in licensing to other companies; many of those music channels available on cable subscriptions were Rhapsody on the back end. They also did 'compliant music for businesses', similar to Muzak and other companies who pumped music into stores and bars and things. Amusingly enough, Rhapsody rebranded itself as Napster, and continued on the model, going through a handful of private equity firms, until earlier this year, when once again, the company found itself in court...again...due to unpaid licensing fees.

So...yeah, while they've floundered around for a number of reasons (some their fault, some not), they were a P2P service for about three years...and a (mostly) law-abiding corporation for over 20...and most of the highlights were posted as articles here on Slashdot.

I know how to use this stuff: Stay away from it, it adds nothing and wastes my time. Oh, I have one use: I currently have a student evaluate the major coding assistant and some general LLMs on how good they can judge code security. The results so far are that they work well for toy examples and not well or not at all for real situations. This may eventually get me a nice publication.

While I do not completely agree, the idea has merit.

This may well be one of the dumbest questions ever asked on /. as it ignores the entirety of human history.

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.

Unfortunately Acela sucks. I took Acela from New York to Boston once. Once. It was terrifying—the tracks aren't really suited for running at (haha!) 100mph. The idea that this is high-speed rail and that anybody takes that name seriously just illustrates what a backwater the U.S. is nowadays.