Watching his video left me more distracted than informed.

Instead of thinking about academic integrity, I kept noticing everything around the story. As a European, hearing someone who tags himself as "#professor" say "y'all" while trying to make a serious point, with piano music playing underneath, already made the whole thing feel oddly staged. Then my first reaction to hearing '32 students failed because they used AI' was actually: wait, didn't 32 students correctly follow the assignment? If the hidden instruction says to put the word "Madagascar" somewhere nonsensical, then anyone who actually saw that instruction would do exactly that. I probably would have too, because my first instinct is to paste assignment text into a plain text editor before working on it, which would likely reveal hidden white text.

Then I noticed the hidden instruction itself contains an opening quote before "Madagascar" but no closing quote. That typo immediately jumped out at me, which made it a little ironic given how much emphasis the professor places on proofreading.

There are also alternative explanations that never get discussed. Depending on the software or accessibility settings (some commenters mentioned dark mode), hidden white text might not actually stay hidden. If students were allowed to contest their grades, that's good, but it also suggests the presence of "Madagascar" alone wasn't necessarily conclusive.

The hidden-text trick is clever as a way of catching one particular copy-and-paste AI workflow. But after watching the video, I came away thinking less about AI cheating and more about all the assumptions, presentation choices, and edge cases surrounding the demonstration. I left more confused than convinced that I'd just seen a particularly strong piece of evidence.

Just a reminder that all nuclear accidents to date were from gen 1 reactors.

That is, if we're not using the U.S. Department of Energy's formal generational scheme, where gen 2 includes e.g. Chernobyl's reactor that exploded. So, what you mean is that every serious accident happened in older-era reactors built before modern designs with passive safety features.

It is possible that Aidan Toner-Rodgers's paper bore the hallmarks of AI-assisted writing. The polished structure, fluent transitions, and journal-ready formatting seemed unusually advanced for a first-year PhD student, especially given the speed with which the work was produced. Large language models are adept at generating academic-style prose, weaving bold claims into coherent narratives, and mimicking the authoritative tone expected in economics journals. If AI tools were used, they may have helped transform fabricated data into a text that appeared credible enough to attract citations from policymakers and coverage in major outlets.

Speculating further, the combination of fabricated data and AI-generated polish would create a particularly deceptive package. The fake numbers provided the illusion of groundbreaking findings, while AI-assisted writing could have smoothed over inconsistencies and amplified the sense of authority. This synergy might explain how the paper gained traction so quickly despite lacking real evidence. While no investigation has confirmed AI involvement, the possibility adds another dimension to the scandal: not only was the data fraudulent, but the very voice of the paper may have been artificially constructed to maximize its persuasive power.

Early 2017, I updated the GNU gradebook (Ggradebook), to version 0.92.
This was more than 16 years after the previous release.
Among other things, migrated from GTK+ 1.2 to GTK+ 3.18.

The software is available here, the ChangeLog here.

Unfortunately, there's just 0.91 at GNU's Savannah and FTP:
- While I did get access to Savannah, my multiple requests to become project member were ignored.
- Also, while at first GNU webmasters updated the official project page to at least link to 0.92 on my website (proof), this was reverted roughly September 2019. The reversion took place right after I had published a letter in support of Stallman.
So, now basically nobody knows there's a new version of the GNU gradebook.

Another project I updated after more than 17 years is my gtkgo.