That is not what they found. What they found is that if you spend 60 minutes doing the homework with AI, you learn approximately as much as someone who spends 60 minutes doing it without AI. If you spend 20 minutes doing it with AI, you learn as much as someone who spends 20 minutes doing it without AI. Etc. The only real difference is that the AI people get way better homework scores, and as a result, tend to stop spending as much time, and thus tend to learn less.

That's what this preprint study found.

100% this. Even a short 5-minute quiz with just a couple questions at the start of each day will do the trick. But you simply can't rely on homework scores to be a proxy of learning or time spent studying anymore. Brief daily quizzes on the previous day's material will force them to.

Also, It's not like students have the excuse of, "I couldn't study, I didn't have anyone to explain X to me" anymore. The very AI that they might otherwise use to cheat on their homework can also explain to them the things they missed in last year's algebra class that are blocking them from learning this year's calculus, or whatnot. Congrats - you now have an infinitely patient personal tutor who will spend hours dumbing things down for you until you get it. Now you have no excuse - learn the material. It becomes all about actually putting the time in.

Yeah. There's been widespread misrepresentation of this (preprint!) in the media. What they actually found: test scores correspond to how much time you spend doing homework, regardless of whether you use AI or not. Which should not be a surprising result! Of course, the AI people, esp. those who had been using AI for more than a few months, stopped spending much time on their homework, and then their test scores fell to match the non-AI users who didn't spend much time in their homework either.

The TL/DR is, in today's age, you cannot use test scores as a proxy of how much time a user is studying or knows the material.

There are of course some caveats, beyond the fact that it's just a preprint - notably that there's nothing to separate why the user started using AI to do their homework, so there's potential confounders in there. For example, if a student is in a poor family, maybe they had to get a job to help pay the bills. But working a job itself can lower test scores - for example, having to work late the night before an exam. So there are some confounder problems with the study. That said, I'm sure the general conclusion is correct: time spent doing the thing = amount of learning the thing (relatively independent of what tools you're using in the process).

I feel like I'm in a constant race to flee enshittification : Used to use Cursor (it's still my only option at work), but then Musk bought it, and they instantly went in on hard-sell tactics. Switched to vscode + copilot + OpenRouter, but was getting concerned about API costs. Just yesterday I set up a Tencent TokenHub account with their Max package, which required that I switch off copilot if I wanted to be able to use some models like Kimi K3 (had a temperature=1.0 requirement, copilot doesn't let you set temperatures and hardcodes them to very low), so now it's vscode + Pi + TokenHub.

Sigh. Please don't make me move again...

(Not that Tencent is in any way "the good guys"... but they're also providing a very generic product)

Man we live in a world where phantomfive does not even read the sentences he is quoting. Maybe the problem is YOU and maybe it is a symptom of to much screen time.

Screen time is killing our kids, no wait screen time is making our kids smarter than ever, maybe screen time does not really matter, omg screen time is killing our kids...

For individuals there really is only one reasonable course here. Ignore the sensational studies and news. Make sure you kids get some play with things that are not screens. Make sure not all the screen time is 'games' and at least some of it cognitive activities even if it is writing little text games in python/ruby/perl/etc that AI could crap out in seconds, letting them think work and solve a problem matters.

wait 20 years for the science to catch up as it has on cholesterol and saturated fats; tell yourself you did your best and let your kids know to not mess up your grand kids they way you did them.

"patch your shit" totally works too with 1000s of patches per month thanks to 'AI'

sounds exactly like sort of guidance CISA would spend $1 billion in tax dollars coming up with in 2026.

I have negotiated as part of my hiring package some additional time off in my first year for some pre-planed travel, or other event for pretty much every job I have ever taken after high school.

This is really no different. In all seriousness the main motivation for almost anyone taking any job is money. Even if you "love what you do" the vast majority could simply do it (at some scale) as a hobby.

Making this about GTA gets attention, its free advertising for military recruitment. In reality it is essentially four days of extra PTO as hiring / retention sweeter. I would even be surprised if someone thinking of signing on for another tour said, can have my four days in ... the answer is probably yes, because after all granting everyone leave at the same time isn't really convenient operationally speaking, probably better if for the service if they do let people who are not so interested in playing GTA take their time some other time.

Point is this seems really smart to me. It is headline grabbing, and it is very likely something that was already on the table anyway.

Ah, the good 'ol "No True Communism" argument :)

"It suggests" if you ignore that their confounder control is terrible. First, sugar wasn't the only restricted food in post-war Britain - there was also rationing of eggs, butter, cheese and meats that ended during the same timeperiod. So you're not actually testing the effects of sugar consumption, now are you? Also, the early 1950s was a period of rapid change in the US, including the maturation and expansion of the NHS (founded in 1948), the introduction of new childhood vaccines, major environmental shifts (for example, the Great Smog of London in 1952 vs. the 1956 Clean Air Act). Saying "all changes = sugar" just based on birthdate seems absurd.

It's also worth mentioning that there's also survivorship bias - anyone who died before the study couldn't be enrolled, and there's also no actual linking to any maternal / childhood dietary logs. Also, the ratios of cancer differences they're describing aren't small, they're massive. Are we to attribute a lung cancer difference on the order of smoking vs. nonsmoking households as being to sugar, or due to, you know, smoking (or pollution) trends not accounted for in their cohort?

Way to out yourself as being American by being simultaneously loudly, assertively ignorant and racist at the same time.

** - Collective guilt is a fallacy; modern Germany is a highly democratic constitutional state with a commendable record on teaching against extremism; Marx and Engel drew heavily from French utopian socialists (e.g., Saint-Simon, Fourier), while it was the Russians who actually implemented communism; World War I began with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, triggering a chain reaction of ultimatums and alliances involving Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, France, Germany, and Great Britain, with any individual state bearing guilt for the war being a notion firmly rejected by modern historians; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary and was an Austrian citizen until he renounced it in 1925, not gaining German citizenship until 1932; the East German government and the Stasi was forced on the people of Germany by the USSR, and it was not a global phenomenon "brought to the world", but rather dissolved with the GDR in 1990. TL/DR: Go fuck yourself.

A lot of states actually have five mile an hour laws, where they explicitly don't write citations for people going five over or less for exactly those reasons. We don't want to be punishing people for minor calibration errors ( could be the cops equipment too ) when the reason for the law is to prevent people from creating dangerous situations. 68 in a 60 zone probably isn't most of the time.

However I bet you that same officer watches people buzz by at 70+ all day long and also does nothing. I don't think rsilvergun is actually far off here. I just think he isn't clear on who is fooling who. All the people with influence do like the status quo. Those speed limits were set a long time ago when equipment really was less effective and less safe. The stopping distance in my modern car is way better than the one I was driving 30 years ago and the speed limit hasn't changed. Cops do like the discretion in pulling people over; they may even tell themselves their subjective judgements about the apparent maintenance status, alertness of the driver, etc justify that discretion that they are not being unfair and making everyone safer. No voter really is asking for more speeding tickets (well not for ones to be issued the them anyway). In fact if you ask any of these people they'd probably tell you justice should be blind/equal/... but all their actions don't really line up with that.

Just like the cop/councilman/whoever who believes in the flock camera, he probably believes he'd never abuse it but I guarantee left unsupervised long enough sooner or later will rationalize 'one little lookup of ... because they were ... today ... i really should make sure everything is alright.' that is just how people work. All of these people believe they are 'good' and most of them are by any human standard. They would all tell you they want justice, and most of them know what would really be needed to get it, but when it comes down to it their commitment to the problem takes a back seat other agendas.

I return to flock. Flock is an example. The real problems are:
-Compulsory display of unique identifiers in the age of big data
-Free for all photography of public spaces

If Flock does not ALPN all the things people will just snap a bunch of photos and on phones and Google's AI efforts will end up compiling the same dataset. The costs, customers, use case on the tin might change the effects dont.

As long as everyone is driving around with number plates on vehicles, and letting people snap photos of them everywhere they go in public on connected devices privacy is an illusion. Their real objection to Flock isnt the privacy violation its that it breaks the illusion..

The only spasm Russia is having is a death spasm, which it has been having since about 2014, and that has nothing at all to do with the USA playing world police or not.

It has everything to do with not really opening up the Western world to economic participation by Russia in the early 90s because because Yeltsin could not remake the entire Russian economy fast enough for our preferences. We treated them like that gas where everyone pumps and leaves without ever stopping in the quick-shop portion, they have been starving since.

The despair has placed and kept Putin in power a long with other reactionaries and looters. Ukraine was a desperation play too, because Putin had to see that people were going to start asking 'when is it going to get better' and he had no answers. Russia isn't influential, and has not needed any real checking by anyone. That was apparent in the first days the operation, it was logistical s***-show from the start. They have failed utterly to invade a neighbor they *ostensibly* dwarfed physically and economically; because the truth was Russia they were all bluster with little other than legacy soviet projects and no blow. This should have been apparent to the intel people (I am sure it actually was) because otherwise there would have been no need for 2000s Russia to be playing with an Aircraft carrier they can't even service, and finishing construction of 1970s submarine classes and trying to play them off as contemporary boats.

They got nothing now, they had little. What is left is some nukes that are strategically impossible to use due to MAD.

Had we just ignored Russia post 1991, let them trade on neutral terms and let people travely they'd probably have ended up with a somewhat functional government and enough going on at home that foreign adventures to chase false memories of old soviet glory would have held enough nationalistic appeal to be seen as domestic political tool worth employing. At least not beyond messing around in some low consequence easily abandon playground like Syria for more than news cycle or two.

A lot of people have very un-even incomes too. Traditionally those folks build up a cash reserve they draw dawn in the lean time and build up at 'harvest'; but for those starting out they almost always have used either a gift or a loan.

If you are a farmer you have to buy the seed for *at least* your first planting and you won't have income until you have grain ready for market. Some more white collar careers feature these booms and busts too. If you are sales person marketing stuff large business you might see huge swings in commission q1 when buyers have new budgets, and again in q4 when they spend due to use it or lose it policies. Meanwhile in q2-3 you have people on vacations, managers holding back spending in case of surprise expenses or shifting upper management priorities. My point is not everyone even relatively successful high earners get consistent paycheck every 2 weeks.

what is different here or appears to be, is that so many people are down the wire, and expenses are rising faster than their forward planning allowed for. That leaves additional short term borrowing to fill in the gap. The problem is the gap plus the additional interest expense leaves them with even less to store up for the next slow period. - Which brings is to the real problem for society at large

Fundamentally savings (that make return of principle certain) are pretty inefficient. That usually means capital that simply can't be employed because to do so implies some risk. So the whole economy slows down because assets must sit idle. This is why stable inflation, reliable legal frameworks, and debated negotiated policy with good forward guidance is so important. These are really the secrets to America's post war boom. Not the only factors but the things that let us take maximum advantage of the environment.

Increasingly we have been breaking these rules with one moral crisis after another, where we have abandon principle and the chickens are coming home to roost. It started with with 07/08 financial crisis response and it has been one thing after another slowly boiling the frogs until COVID hit and we really went completely bat-shit crazy, and then spent the next 3 years letting crazy ride. At this point their IS going to be a train crash. You can see it when the treasury department is trying to game the yen carry trade because they have to prevent bond yields from going nuts, but can't actually manage to pull it off mostly for lack real value to inject.

Its going to get ugly but you also can't sell. Because its going to get ugly no matter what you swap into. One thing I am pretty sure of if you have a lot cash assets you will burned badly. People need to recognize "sell the news", front running it will see you punished not intentionally but because the real estate and corporate markets HAVE to be bailed out if at all possible. The government does not want to see people turned out of their homes in mass, or empty grocery store shelves. Even if they wipe out equity values with forced stock issuance they going to be doing the injection more printed money and FED balance sheet expansion. So it is going wipe out the value of cash and nuke the return on debt at the same time. You might think the rest of the world won't let us get away with it but that is also not true. Sure Japan/China/Others can sell those bonds, but that money then must go somewhere, it could only go to the EU, where again it would have to go somewhere lest it trigger hyper inflation there, which would mean wait for it, they'd probably be back buying US bonds.. The dollar still is the reserve currency, so at least for one round here the US Treasury will 'get' to revalue it radically. I could not hazard a guess what happens after that 'singularity' nor do I know when it arrives. Might be a two weeks or 10 years, my advice to any still reading, is do that read the damn news every day because this will happen slowly then very quickly. Know your account numbers, your brokers phone number, how to make 401k withdrawls etc so you can act when it is time to act.

the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate,

So one in every five thousand people who walk into your stores is going to be falsely accused of a crime? Wow, thanks for making abundantly clear that people should NOT shop there...