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?

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)

Mod parent Funny, though "continues to be money" was a bit annoying or something. Or maybe my case is too weird or too ancient? Even worse, it was an open contract with no special incentives. (And none of that insane "Thank you for your service" garbage in those days.)