Persistent cheating should result in expulsion.

And reading the comments below, I now realize the average age of many of the commenters. I never realized that so many were still in highschool (judging from their defensiveness about cheating together with their choice of language).

They are so biased and think that pretending to know about something when you don't is not the problem. The problem is everyone else.

Well it's not. And sadly so many people don't even pretend to care about personal integrity.

I will give one defence for using AI. Grades matter. If you don't plan on doing further schooling, then they don't matter very much. But they do matter a lot for grad school.

So if want to get ahead, you feel desperate. And if everyone else is getting an artificial (see the pun? lol) advantage, then by not using AI, you unfairly fall behind.

Having said all of that, if you cheat enough, you'll hardly learn anything, and if you actually need one day to do some statistics or explain what something means, you're going to regret it.

If you must cheat, at least feel some inner shame.

I was on a train. A guy brought a boombox on it and intentionally cracked up the volume playing obnoxiously loud music. He also made a point of screaming at the lady accompanying him. I was powerless. They guy was super aggressive and was looking for a fight. I'm assuming everyone here would be in favor of fining them too.

I may be the only person supporting OpenAI here but they have a lot of legitimate points.

First, training using people's data is not literally copying it. The whole point of copyright law is to get people to create things that won't be immediately copied and thus cause the original creator to not create again.

If you write a book, you do it to sell books, not to sell training data. And saying that you lack the money from selling it for training purposes is circular reasoning.

Second, we all read things and train our own minds. We even see copyrighted things that we didn't pay for. So far, learning about the world and getting new ideas is legal. Otherwise, growing up would be a crime.

I don't see much of a difference between a human learning and an emerging technology that may soon have lifeform characteristics.

Third consider *why* we have IP law. The whole point of IP which is to encourage innovation. When IP does the opposite, it's illegitimate and the law must be immediately changed. It retards progress to force companies to pay for training sets.

Now consider what OpenAI did. They created something of great value at great cost. The weights from a training model are at least a great corporate secret. They are something created using innovation. Whether they subject to copyrighted is an emerging part of IP law.

But we do want to encourage such innovation and at the very least we don't want firms stealing data from each other. If American firms would know that if they spend $1 billion on R&D the results will be stolen by a competitor who will then use it to make a competing product, they probably won't be willing to take such a huge risk.

That is precisely *why* IP law exists and that is also why training set weights should be protected. (The fact that meta made its weights open source just means they have s different business model and can afford to do so because they have other streams of revenue.)

Chinese firms are notorious for stealing corporate secrets. And btw, no wonder DeepSeek was able to make it's model so cheaply. They based their work on the expensive heaving lifting done by OpenAI.

So, OpenAI are completely justified in their outrage.

Until Europe starts learning to store solar energy, I doubt it will be much of a panacea. And that's reflected in the absurdly high price consumers pay for electricity.

That said, I look forward to the day when wind and solar energy are stored.

It's not just the mid ocean ridge systems that are moving apart. Even of they weren't, it will cost much more than estimated.

The closest example is the Channel Tunnel. It experienced a 80% cost overrun. The cost overrun was partly due to enhanced safety, security, and environmental demands. Financing costs were 140% higher than forecast.

Now look at the California Bullet train. When Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled his scaled for he proposed project, it was going to cost $33 billion. Now the latest estimate is $133 billion. Projected ridership is 25% less than anticipated.

So take the $20 trillion estimate and once you account for so called unforseen cost escalation and financing difficulties, it will cost the equivalent of $120 trillion. The extra interest costs are a big part of this too.

We could use the money in much more productive ways.

And when the project goes bankrupt the rest of us will have to bail it out.

I was thinking the sane thing. But they're trying to stay relevant and be hip. There have been other recent changes that only make sense because of social pressure and not scientific excellence.

I could though defend them a bit in the sense that particle physics is stuck in a bit of a rut. String theory and loop quantum gravity have not gone anywhere. All the test results have been negative. Sabine Hossenfelder has been pointing this out for a while. So they're a bit desperate for something that is a genuinely important discovery.

The core of the issue is that we don't take into account inflation and GDP growth (and this problem afflicts ither countries too). According to the Economic History Association US GDP per capita in 1913 was $401.53 when the US Federal Reserve was established. ($5301 in 1990 international dollars). It initially printed $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills some of which were only printed until 1945 and issued until 1969.

It meant you could use cash conveniently for almost all transactions barring huge amounts of real estate or buying a large company. Part of the allure of cryptocurrency is privacy. Well cash mostly gives you that so why not keep it viable too.

Just going up to the $100 bill that meant that about a quarter of GDP per capita could be expressed as an easy to hold bill. According to the St Louis Federal Reserve Q2 GDP per capita was $85,099. Proportionally to 1913 the equivalent $100 bill would be $21,193.68. That rounds to a $20,000 bill. The ratio of a quarter to GDP per capita then expressed in todays GDP per capita is $52.98. that implies we should have a $50 coin.

We are richer now so its reasonable that we have more coins and bills to reflect that. While the ceiling for bills is best reflected by the size of the economy, inflation best measures the minimum coin We even used to have a half cent coin too which gives a good sense of what the minimum value of a coin should be. That way we can have coins that roughly have the same smallest value in inflation adjusted terms while having the largest ones that keep pace with incomes.

A half cent in 1913 is now worth 16 cents in today's dollars. So we should either start with a dime or quarter coin. Personally I'm happy to start with a dime. Coins also reflect very commonly used bits of currency and as incomes rise with inflation and GDP per capita the requirement for what coins we need will go up ahead of just inflation.

In order to make cash fully viable we need the following coins:

Dime - 10 cents
Quarter - 25 cents
$1 coin
$2.50 coin serving the same function as an old quarter
$10 coin
$20 coin
$50 coin

Bills:
$100
$200
$500
$1000
$10,000
$100,000

The old $10,000 bill is about $2 million relative to GDP per capita now. If there was demand we should akso print a $1 million dollar bill too.

People are scared of large amounts of cash but that is because they're socialized to be especially by those who make money by opposing cash.

We have a measurable number of people who are unbanked and have to pay exorbitant fees just to access their own money. More access to cash would help while also mandating that businesses accept cash.

Cash means that financial service companies have a harder time figuring out a way to charge fees so of course they don't like it and ditto for certain legislators too who get huge campaign contributions from them.

Unless we update our currency once every 10-30 years (depending on inflation) cash will become unviable. The debate over the one cent coin is just a small part of much larger problem.

Btw, don't fall for the criminal thing and suggest that we must eventually give up all of our financial privacy as they bury cash.

Look at this paper which finds:

"that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises."

https://www.tandfonline.com/do...

And since when do governments do things correctly? Look at that state of infrastructure around much of the world. Are laws passed for the benefit of society or for the benefits of elites? There is a housing shortage in much of the world. Why should we trust government with something new when it constrains the supply of urgently needed housing? It's gotten to the point that gen Z is being completely impoverished by artificially high rents and making buying a home only possible for a small fraction.

Ever consider that IP is responsible for a huge proportion of income inequality. Copyright is justified in terms of benefits to society only when it's about 7 years. Yet it keeps on growing. It now even applies to buildings. They want to even apply it to clothing. Our governments have completely failed us.

What I see is a battle of elites. Silicon Valley vs various governments. Such competition is healthy as it keeps power dispersed and allows for new ideas and groups to coalesce. I read a thesis that it was the war of religions in the 16th century and beyond that enabled the growth of the idea of democracy - elites were too busy fighting each other to stop new democratic ideas and groups from emerging.

When said and done, the social agenda of much of these companies is very similar to much of the government anyway. I'm surprised that elites care that much. They both support censorship and newer (last 30 years) progressive ideas. Maybe it's all about who is in charge, not what happens when they are.

You're missing the point that the original pro Palestinian demonstrations at Harvard were a lot more than just that. They were mixed with antisemitism and harassment of Jews on campus.

Publicly, students called for "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" which is a mere dog whistle for genocide against Jews in Israel, In more private tirades and epithets, the same antisemitic students talked about "the Jews" and how they hated them. Jewish students all over campus who had little or nothing to do with Israel advocacy suddenly became very afraid mainly because of how the public calls quickly produced a torrent of private abuse against them. Those who vocally defended Israel were targeted by daily threats on a whole worse level, culminating in violence in some cases, and continue to be.

This bigotry by some Harvard students was further vented by various Harvard student groups. While the blood was still warm, a mere hours after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, they put out a statement that they âoehold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violenceâ. As though mass rape and mutilation of live babies is in any circumstance justified. They viewed an act of terror against Jews as the fault fully of Jews, just like antisemites have been doing for the last 2,000 years.

At that point Bill Ackman, a Harvard alum, started to worry about how his alma mater had sunk so low into an abyss of hatred.

I was thinking the same thing. Game engines are just too fundamental to be at the whims of a for profit company. Even movie studios are now using them. It would behove all media developers to contribute (much less) to an open source project instead, via money or time. That way we could get a reliable "Linux" of media/game engines that won't bankrupt developers.

Yes! The issues with big tech behaving badly doesn't negate the fact that governments want to spy on us. The UK has an awful record and it always starts with the "proverbial children". Can't we just have some privacy. This is the same UK that isn't dealing properly with simple street crime.

Exactly! California reclassified felony theft offenses as misdemeanors. The result? An increase in shoplifting (and aggressive shoplifting at that) as there are fewer consequences and it's now easier to drop the charges as they're just misdemeanors.

Yet instead of reversing that stupid change, the state is going headlong into data privacy. I think they just don't care about quality of life issues. When a criminal assaults someone, steals from a store, or commits a home invasion, they are doing so much harm to the rest of us. It's so sad that those in power in California are blind to that.

On the other hand, if they took care of quality of life issues, I would have no problem with them dealing with data privacy.

The government has limited resources. It has limited political oxygen. There's a subliminal message here too demonizing large corporations that further enabled crime. California has a bizarre number of rules on how money needs to be spent. It has many regulations.

Yet quality of life there is declining. Home prices are unbelievably high. Retail crime is slowly killing downtown San Francisco. The government is not dealing with the everyday needs if its citizens. Instead it's distracted by less important issues.

[Note, I'm not saying that personal data should not be private. I'm just saying that we have bigger fish to fry right now.]

Why is it that California and places like it are more interesting in worrying about data privacy than about actual safety and security of the person and their property.

There are CVS's being shoplifted without any shame where the criminal clears the shelves into a full cart. Murders are up. Anti social behavior is up. If I had to choose between losing my possessions / money and losing my data, I'd choose my data. And my personal safety would trump both of them.

The government should stick to the basics if it is struggling with enforcing basic common laws. Once crime is stable, then they can go onto other things.

How does Homeschooling lower public schooling standards? It should raise them because there are more resources for other kids. Blaming homeschooling is like saying public schools are doing badly because it rained somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.