I could see that. But if we get that kind of social collapse no-one is going to care what the tech bros think. The 'haves' will discover that their bodyguards have a lot more power than a geek does in a post-collapse world.

Interesting. I had noticed the enshitification of Youtube ads with AI junk recently, but that just goes along with the general enshitification of Youtube with AI videos.

> It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work.

It doesn't work and they don't have magic to make it work. To the extent it does work, it's mostly automating away jobs which could have been automated away long ago but have been kept around for political reasons.

Sure, they can sack people and claim that AI will magically do what they used to do, but that just causes an Enshitification Cascade which leads to nothing working any more. And then we get social collapse.

> "washington bureaucracy" just means "democrats"

Don't something like 80% of Federal employees vote Democrat?

If so, yeah, they would appear to be correct.

They're well aware that the Chinese aren't idiots and their worst nightmare is for China to start selling cheap AI chips which undercut those $50,000 GPUs and put them out of business.

Which is exactly what will happen if China can't buy Western chips and rely on them continuing to work if Trump decides he's going to bomb China next.

Ok, I'm imagining a class of high school students breaking the guardrails, getting it to report that they're doing brilliantly and deserve A+ while they watch tiktok... at the very least they'll make it say racist things and publish that on tiktok for the lulz. It'll also find a way to organically mention how much its been hearing that everyone else really likes new Pepsi Cherry Zero on a daily basis too.

Is that not the outcome you were imagining too?

Oooh... yes please, i can't wait for virtual Feyman prefacing his lectures with the lords prayer, explaining how God created the universe and all the physics in it; and also: you look thirsty, there is a Pepsi machine with new Pepsi Cherry Zero in the hallway; have you tried it?

Einstein meanwhile extols the virtue of Zionist colonization in Palestine...

Wait? Do you actually think that it would go differently? If we create puppets of brilliant revered thinkers they'll inevitably say whatever slop some combination of political appointees and advertising companies want them to say. Why on earth would anyone think they would be used for anything else?

Its frequently used on general elective courses because they're big enough (often hundreds of students) that the statistical variation between student cohorts fits normal curves pretty well.

That doesn't even make sense. The defining characteristic of a credential mill is that it passes everyone who goes. A curve grading system assigns Fs and Ds and C- to the bottom of every class.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, right now, everyone who goes and shows up to class passes, and half of them get As. How is that not "essentially a credential mill" right now?

Even more damning, a generation ago 25% of them got As. What's your theory on that? Harvard students this generation are just a lot smarter and more studious and they're mastering the material at a much higher rate? Or that Harvard is handing As out like participation trophies now?

I know where my money is at. And Harvard's own teaching staff agrees.

Yes. With companies declaring that they're going to replace most jobs with LLMs it seems weird that universities would be telling students they can't use them.

The entire university system is broken and they haven't yet come to terms with that.

But I'm sure Xi would much rather throw money at building up local AI chip design and chip manufacturing.

Your splitting hairs. The OP complained that having your grade affected by the grades of your peers was wrong. Then you said, well it would be fine if they based the grades on the "top score" which is still having your grade determined by what (one of) your peers did.

If your 40% on the exam would be an A if the brightest kid got a 44% but would be a B+ if the brightest kid got a 48%, I doubt the OP would be any "happier" with that situation.

My daughter recently took a course where the average final exam score was around 30%. Nobody hit 50%. Nobody completed the test. They were graded on the curve, as everyone expected they would be, and the A's, B's and C's were distributed pretty appropriately in the end.

In your world, apparently this was simply the dumbest cohort of 4th year university students ever to walk the halls, and they all deserved an F ??

Or maybe, just maybe, it was a brutally difficult exam.

Grading on the curve works perfectly fine if you realize that the student cohorts tend to be more consistent than the tests are from professor to professor, year to year.

The only way "your way" makes any sense at all at approaching fairness is if the tests are standardized... but that creates a whole whack of new problems. -- If the test is standardized, then students are incentivized to just study the test, not the material. Meanwhile, In many advanced degree courses, the material taught from semester to semester varies by professor and year for the same course. How do you standardize the test when even the material is variable?

Unsurprisingly the teaching staff at Harvard know a lot more about this than you do.

High level undergrad course work, and graduate level course work isn't like a primary school arithmetic or spelling test.

> Along with the 8 hour day and the five-day work week (for those of you with a life other than work), vacations, benefits - every single thing came from unions.

All those things came from companies wanting to hire good employees and keep them. The more benefits they offered, the better employees they got.

Look at Henry Ford, who doubled his workers wages because had more than 100% annual employee turnover and doubling the wages meant he got the best people and they had nowhere else to go for a better-paid job in the auto business. Or the entire health insurance system in the US which largely came about because employers wanted to hire more and better people in WWII and couldn't raise wages so gave them more benefits instead.

My girlfriend is in a union. A few years ago a new employee was such an asshole that a couple of existing employees quit over it. They tried to sack the new employee because she was still in her probation anyway and could be let go for any reason, but the union blocked it... even though other union members had quit their jobs to get away from that person.

I've rarely seen a union anyone I know belongs to do anything worthwhile.

We tried the whole "if you don't like it, leave!" Boomer thing but then it turned out that many companies are run by sociopaths with no concept of normal human behaviour. So no, they don't get to say Muh Private Company any more.

And what about the computer that was used to write to the floppies?

The big problem with AI Art is getting the "AI" to do what you want. I'm currently generating an ebook cover and there would be some great covers if I could tell it "yeah, take the text from image #2, take the background from image #4, take the character from image #5" and have it produce the cover I want the way a human artist could. But instead I generate 500 images, quickly go through them, pick the one that sucks the least and run it through an AI upscale model which can also make style changes while upscaling.

It's still an improvement over the old method of going to a stock photo site, paying $2 for an image that kind of works and adding text to it.