Coding exams (which I do not do) are a problem. You should have the documentation, an editor and the compiler, but no AI. In principle easy to do, you just need a computer room set up for this. But the decision makers are often too cheap to do it and do not understand the need anyways.

There is a difference between trying to not submit to authority because you do not want to (kids...) and actually fact-checking what said authority claims. Only the latter is relevant to this discussion.

No. What Rust calls "unsafe" is essentially a lie. You can still write blatantly unsafe code in Rust, it is just not memory-unsafe. Or why do you think things like PHP, JS, Java, etc. java security problems like crazy?

Unless and until we all admit this is entirely and exclusively a skill issue, things will not get better.

What else is new. If they cannot even get it right for the demo by the CEO, who in their right mind would buy this?

That is simply nonsense. Obviously, people like you deeply fear change.

No argument. These constraints are artificial, not something the system needs to work. Hence they can be circumvented. Makes the whole thing even worse though.

Yes. I do that for my CS students. I have never had to justify that even once, as they all understand what it is about.

That one is dangerous. You just nicely summed up what Adolf Hitler promised the Germans and what got him elected. And, to be fair, he delivered on those promises. For most. And with rather crass caveats. I am sure you did not intend that, but freedom always and critically includes freedom of mind and speech and access to knowledge and education.

Ah, yes. Animism. Not a sign of a strong mind. (That PhD is an indicator of, but not a sure sign of a smart person.)

As they are trained, general purpose LLMs are really just search engines with some aggregation and adaption capabilities. Obviously, no insight or understanding and obviously not a person in any way.

While I am not the one you directed your question at, I think people have always been bad at questioning authority. There is a number from sociology that says only about 10-15% of all people are independent thinkers and only about 20% (including the former) can be convinced by rational argument. The rest does not question authority, unless they are following one that questions another authority and that is something else. The problem we currently have (again) is that so many authorities are of really bad quality.

As to a dystopia, I would say "not yet". Information technology certainly gives the usual authoritarians tools like never before in human history. The reactions to that ranges from embrace (China, and lately the US), to real efforts to limit that (Europe, but with caveats). Depending on how that ends, we might get a dominance of surveillance states on this planet, and that is certainly dystopian. There are also strong and raising fascist tendencies (using the Wikipedia definition) and not a lot of awareness how bad that is.

Indeed. And if you do not at least try to do that, you are cheating them.

It is one of the reasons why monopolies are a massive problem and need to be prevented by regulation. But in the US, greed has long since taken over and the rest of the world is asleep at the wheel regarding this problem. Well, with the increasing unreliability if the US as a partner, maybe Europe will finally wake up now. Or not.

With regard to "model collapse" this is a very good point.

So new data will not be good at all. But old data will get worse as well. The aging is a massive problem. Put this two things together and what we currently see is a straw-fire in the process of burning itself out and no more straw is to be had.

My take is all that will survive is low-quality, outdated and "collapsed" LLMs for cheap or for free for the masses and small, really expensive, special purpose LLMs for some (not a lot) industrial and administrative purposes. Say, 5% of what the AI peddlers promised in actual impact. About the same as from the last AI hypes.

You are basically saying it is a lie with some cover story. That is also possible.

Give the extreme price and low production of Helium 3 on earth (it is basically only produced as Tritium decay product), "some other source" is just as fantastical as getting it from the moon.

Maybe a bit more expensive than you thought?

It is high time to regard events such as this as gross management negligence and to start holding the screw-ups personally responsible. Otherwise things will just continue to get worse.