Camera proctoring can reduce cheating.

Fantasy solutions must be ritually recited these days due to social fashion but humanity was never good which is why there is only technical, not "moral" progress (vanity is not progress).

Government is bad because humanity is bad and always was bad.
We are bestial apex predators who happen to be good at technology. Our race tends savage and stupid, intelligence being neuro-divergent. That dictates reality.

Having much of anything on one's phone is terrible security because spyware can easily exfiltrate it without user knowledge, so I don't do that.

Having stuff that matters on your phone is like storing drugs in your car, you can but nothing makes that smart. At most a phone used when crossing borders should be a distraction whose storage holds plausible files like ebooks and does not have an email client etc. If one must an alternative is storing encrypted, useful files elsewhere for later downloading with nothing on one's phone.

Making one's phone a central information repository is silly
with or without possibility of formal inspection. Wishful thinking is not security. The world was always a very bad place so choose wisely without passion.

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 had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

In the US they're corrupt by nature and will only cooperate when terrified.

Coerce them to serve the people by any means necessary and without empathy, compassion or mercy. They are selling out the commons in return for power.

In a just society the public would use them to decorate lamp posts. The system is beyond fixing without pitiless aggression which I can only hope accelerates.

Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.

Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.

If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.

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)

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

gets cash and adds leverage for advantageous leave use

Four days leave atop thirty days normal leave per year plus whatever specialty bonus is basically a tip. Wise troops would delay taking leave until their final enlistment is up so I did. The more I had to carry forward the better.

Not everyone gives a shit about long deployments, self for example. Troops who simply don't care about long deployments (there are more than a few of us!) but do want to accrue leave as leverage to take leave (so their unit doesn't look like ass for not permitting it) in large chunks can use the additional days to their advantage.

My objective from the day I enlisted was always to accrue as much leave as practical (normally 90 days/year) to carry forward to the end of my career so I could bolt three months early (plus the custom of "commanders days" where G.I.s were allowed to disappear then show up to out process than take formal leave).

I also used it accrued leave in conjunction with offering to take long leave outside the holiday season so others in my work center could spend time with their kids. These customs go back to long before I enlisted.

I do STRONGLY suggest that anyone who considers themselves at all sensitive not join the armed forces because that's stress they don't need.
Sensitivity and war do not go together and never did. Not everyone is suited to every career civil or military and there's no shame in not fitting, just wisdom in
choosing wisely!

It's not that sensitivity is a fault, it's that it's simply not optimal and opens the door to stress-induced discomfort and emotional damage. I knew in childhood I'd fit the Air Force which I did with the goal of retiring young and debt-free which I also did, but it's not for everyone. The fewer young people who enlist the better for all concerned because ONLY enlistment and retention create meaningful institutional pressure to raise pay and benefits!

When you serve whatever cretinous hack our dimwit (intelligence is not a choice and is, arguably neuro-divergent!) voters self-inflict you are doing other taxpayers a favor for which you should be compensated! Uncle Sugar will get his use out of you so get your use out of him! There aren't many "idealistic" reasons to fight for a nation (which means people) this contemptibly stupid. The price of not having (even more expensive and like the last time a social disaster) an active draft is to pay the fucking troops.

The USA really is a business, not a country. That's just human nature.

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

Same here except my server is a Supermicro of similar vintage.
"Want" and "require" are not the same.

If someone needs a PC to make money then like other business equipment they can spend accordingly.