To make AC go completely away? Maybe.

Just joking. I meant Firefox, as in "Would I donate money to Firefox for a browser-only VPN?"

The answer is quite clear on this one. No. There are plenty of VPNs in the market and I could buy one if I wanted it, and it would cover my browser, too. But even worse, I actually downloaded Opera to look at the included VPN and concluded it wasn't worth it. Haven't used Opera in a long time now. However as Firefox continues to add unwanted cruft they are increasing the pressure to switch to some other browser. Perhaps Opera?

Silly to talk about solutions on the pointless rant-hub Slashdot has devolved into. Even when the same solution approach could apply to fix some of Slashdot's ancient problems. "Would I donate to add Unicode support to Slashdot?" Quite possibly yes, but not an option. Or what about "to improve the moderation system" or various other things. And I am convinced no such option will ever appear 'round these parts.

So rather than flog that dead horse I'll recycle the ancient joke "What's your better idea?"

Your tone is belligerent and you clearly did not read what I actually wrote. Overall, your reply is not even worth an apology for my poor writing nor an invitation to ask for clarification.

So I'll just say you're still wrong. Completely. It appears you couldn't catch a clue if you were dipped in clue musk and dropped in a field of rampaging clues at the height of clue mating season.

But if you were going for funny, then you didn't get there. (Which was actually the response I anticipated.)

Oh, but surely they'll win, they indicted [strike]a ham sandwich[/strike] this man! And the Trump administration has such a spectacular record with high-profile prosecutions thusfar...

I think he's already lost and will keep paying more money to the lawyers for a long time. Whether or not he gets convicted has become moot when the actual goal is scaring people into compliance.

Actually the obvious next step is to criminalize the duress passcode and go after anyone who creates such software. Fundamental advantage on their side because trying to advertise such software has to include contact information... Losses in court are irrelevant to the creation of fear.

Silly to suggest a solution on Slashdot (but I rarely get any Funny mod points, and especially not for solution-oriented rants), but I think I have a simple solution approach for part of the SCOTUS problem:

If anyone is interested I can explain how it would work at some depth. Even some thoughts about a path to implementation. Now lets go for the biggest Funny of all: Or you could describe your better idea.

Another rich target missed.

Well, okay, but are you going to leave your brain to science for the research? (Or time to modify my own will?)

Disappointed. Large discussion, even larger potential for funny, but nada laugh in the house of Slashdot.

But propagating the vacuous AC Subject also makes it impossible to label the bad actors. Just a worm can of nameless faceless worms. Searching on "supporter" now... The scroll bar indicator indicates AC "won" by "conquering the Subject" of more than half of the fairly large discussion.

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 can't #deleteFacebook because Facebook deleted me. One of the best events of my long life, though I still wonder why.

And so little interest, too. Oh well. At least the story isn't intrinsically Funny. I'm not seeing any low-hanging cannibalistic clowns that tasted funny.

Mod parent and FP branch insightful mixed with funny.

I would offer a solution approach, but that would be insane in this context. There is no way to un-evil YouTube without cutting into the profits, even if there are no profits and the entire YouTube thing is really a loss leader if you could only see the full books.

Root of the problem? Perhaps that normal people just want enough to live comfortably but the changes are decided by insanely greedy people who EVER have enough. Especially not enough money, which is especially hilarious since they are destroying the meanings of every notion of "money" and "value" and even "right versus wrong".

Y'all are making me feel weird. Or even more weird than usual?