He's got a valid point. For example, if you use wolfram alpha after you do a math problem to check the result you came up with you can actually learn MORE than just doing the problem yourself, and may even add to the time the work takes, as if your result is wrong, you'll spend extra time working out where you went wrong and fixing it. And ultimately learning more in the process.

OTOH - If you use wolfram alpha to DO the question for you, you will learn nothing at all.

But further to that, you can even use tools to save time and learn more.

The other day, my daughter and I chatted about docker build scripts while she was doing her homework (which used docker containers), and that conversation clarified a lot of details and subtleties. (I learned a few things in the course of that conversation myself.) Nothing we talked about wasn't in the documentation, strictly speaking, but the conversation was a more natural way to learn and address the specific details we were talking about, with examples, and use cases that we came up with on the flay to make sense of and highlight those specific nuances. She probably could have read and reread the docs and easily spent more time on it, while learning less.

Now, in this case, she was learning 'from me', but you could swap "Dad" out for an "LLM", and get the same benefit.

All that said, I don't think the AI systems we have right now are likely a good idea for homework. The temptation to use it self-destructively is just going to be too high for a large number of students. Probably the majority of them. But it definitely can be used to learn more, and even learn more faster in the hands of someone who uses it for that.

There's a lot wrong with your question.
Firstly, China's gun laws are among the strictest in the world. Private ownership of firearms is generally prohibited. You'll get better returns on matching China's homicide rates by matching their firearms laws than you will by catching up with them on surveillance.

Are you wiling to do that? I somehow doubt it. And to be a safe as china, you could do both -- give up your guns AND submit to a police surveillance state. What could go wrong?

China has done other things too - absolutely massive government investments in infrastructure and construction, creating jobs and reducing poverty in the process, uplifting people who would otherwise be more desperate and more likely to turn to crime etc.

And speaking of Crime, China is pretty busy with state executions too. And is quite adept at artificially making those numbers look smaller, frequently recording the execution of multiple people as a single execution. That may play a part in the lower homicide rate too.

Secondly, you imply the tradeoff is simple prudishness - we give up peoples lives for the ability to "go to a strip club secretly".
That's not that half of it, and you should know that. It's also the ability to go, for example, to a political party meeting secretly.

Do you really trust your government so much that you'd give them that power over you? That some fuckwit won't get into power and leverage this against the people? The best protection the civilian population has from government abuse is to resist giving them the tools to abuse you in the first place. The government doesn't need to know where every person is at all times, this will inevitably be used against you. The supposed 'safety' gains are not worth living in a police surveillance state.

When I think about it, I can see a clear difference.

There were all manner of places where human eyes were accepted, but still/video cameras were not, long predating "smart glasses". From changing rooms, saunas, locker rooms, and bath houses to performances like plays and concerts, and movie theatres to executive board room meetings, and even court rooms in many cases.

There are lots of scenarios where everybody accepts and consents that other people will see/hear them, but do not accept or consent to be recorded.

  Are you really incapable of seeing the multiple clear and obvious differences between "seeing/hearing something" and "recording something" ?

But the individual didn't destroy it. The agent did the physical act of destroying it.

Suppose you were at the border with your phone, and the agent confiscated it.
Then the agent had said, how do i get into this phone?
You said, "put it in a blender".
If the agent puts it in the blender, the agent destroyed it, not you.

Now clearly, one would expect the agent to know that putting it in a blender would destroy it.

And equally clearly the inference here is that the agent did not know that the password he was given would wipe the phone as part of opening it. But isn't the onus still on the officer?

If it had been a physical safe, and you gave him the code, but the safe contained something that would self-destruct in exposure to air, and must be opened inside an enclosure with inert gas to get at the contents... who would be responsible for destroying the evidence inside the safe?

As a second scenario, what if you had printed a PIN password on a piece of paper and included that in your wallet. If the agent had confiscated your wallet and discovered the paper; and then used that password on your phone? If that was your duress password, who is responsible for destroying evidence in that case?

Legally, Isn't the onus ultimately still on the agent to apply caution before pushing buttons on a device they confiscated?

To blame you the suspect for destroying evidence on something the agent had custody and full physical control over seems a bit far fetched to me.

On a 13" screen most people would have scaling enabled to see it anyway. Not really sure its worth the extra horsepower to push quadruple the pixels, and average them out.

Don't get me wrong, I love 4k screens. My desktop has a pair of 32" 120hz 4k screens.

But on a laptop, especially a 13" model, my priority is going to be battery life, not performance; so 4k is not a hard requirement. Plus this unit features a more old school 3:2 aspect ratio which is arguably more practical and useful than a 1.78:1 widescreen at 13".

Higher than a 13" dell xps. Higher than the 13" Macbook Neo. Higher than a 13" Macbook air... hell it just edges out the display on the Macbook air 15".

Its 120Hz. It's matte. It's touchscreen (if you care).
It seems to be a very solid 13" laptop screen overall.

Copy protection on the original sleeping beauty is long expired.
Copy protection on the Disney version is good for years yet.

In the original versions, the scene i quoted? There is no scene like that in the original version. But it is beat for beat straight from the Disney version. If you want to tell a sleeping beauty story, you absolutely can, the original source material not copy protected, you can faithfully tell that story, including the unconscious rape of the princess to impregnate her so that she finally wakes up at child birth... or you can create more family friendly version all your own with whatever you like. But you can't simply lift a bunch of scenes that only exist in the copy protected Disney version and call it your own original interpretation by changing a few details.

The chatgpt story is a ripoff of the Disney version though.

The scene I quoted with the three "magical gaurdians" bestowing three gifts at a celebration crashed by the sorcerous who places the curse -- that is not from the original source material, its not novel either, its a scene ripped straight from the Disney version. And its not an isolated issue with the AI version.

There is no question that Disney doesn't "own" sleeping beauty, but they do own their telling of it. This was an obvious ripoff of that particular telling in several places.

If a child handed in the Moonlit Princess the teacher would give them a lecture about plagiarism. Because its not remotely original enough. It is so clearly taking so many things straight from Disney's version. Sure the names are changed, and the words "aren't the same", but its far too derivative of that particular version to credibly claim its an original telling of the sleeping beauty story.

"No. It is not copyright infringement"

Go ahead, prompt for that story and publish your own 'moonlit princess". It is not a court case you'd win; the details taken from the Disney version are beyond excessive.

" and there's no reason to hold copyright so sacred anyway. Are you seriously wanting to protect hundred year old fairy tails from being retold?"

That's an entirely separate discussion. Legally it is infringement. Whether it should be is completely separate question, or how long it should be are separate questions.

FWIW, I don't agree with copyright being 100 years.

Who is they? And what database are you referring to?

Dictionaries often contain quotes from original source material, or references to where it was first used, or first used a certain way.

Dictionary publishers have never been accused of downloading massive torrents of pirated copies of books and processing them.

Google on the other hand HAS been accused of that, and the decade of litigation related to that ultimately rules that the limited things google was doing with it was fair use. The dictionary companies are likely paying for enhanced access to that google data now.

The AI companies are singing the same fair use tune, but its really quite different. Google was doing it (at the time) to allow for search so you could enter phrase or quote and find the book it was from and the page it was on, and to collect other meta data - word count, word frequency, analyze sentence complexity, etc... all factual information.

AI companies are using the content of that digitized corpus and everything else they can get their hands on to generate new content, much of which non-factual in nature, and often very arguably explicitly creatively derivative.

prompt: "Make a story like sleeping beauty" ... 2 seconds later we have "The Moonlit Princess" and we'll just self-publish that on Amazon... boom I'm an author!

You seriously telling me this is NOT copyright infringement? Even if you wanted to argue that sleeping beauty is a classic fairytale from the 17th century and not under copyright, the prose above is a pretty blatant Disney ripoff.

You can replace your entire BMW seat if you like with seats from another vendor. Put in a racing seat, or even install a seat you designed yourself.

This probably was not the brilliant analogy you thought it was going to be. :p

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

They recently bragged about how much they were getting done with AI vibe-coding.

Could it be related to the wave of bugs? Say it ain't so!

Exactly yes. You don't need a license to "copy" something to your mind.

You technically do need a license to copy something to a disk or to RAM. A number of cases around hacking/cracking have hinged even on the nuance that the hacker, by violating the "terms and conditions", no longer had a software license to make the "copy" of the software that was loaded from disk to RAM for example, and it was therefore copyright infringement.

In any case, yes, you are of course also correct that although you are free to remember anything, what you produce from that memory *may* be an infringing copy or infringing derivative work that requires a license.

But the difference of course, is that the LLM itself is already an infringing derivative work before it even produces anything. Your mind isn't.

And everything the LLM produces is basically just taking that collection of derivative works, and rolling dice on it to generate output. The output is a strictly a function of the input. On some level, it can't "not produce" derivative works. The best it does is slice and dice so many of them together that we can't tell.

I suppose that might be what the total sum of what human creativity is too, and some people genuinely believe that. It appears to be a surprisingly capable facsimile in some respects. But most people think there is more to the spark of human experience of creativity than *just* that, at least for now.