They are trying to make their exit from the MS crap easier. As the UK is not EU anymore, they have to do their own pushing.

Indeed. If you go for a career where you need to have actual skills, cheating is a really bad idea. If your main skill is bullshit, lying and grandstanding, then cheating is part of your education.

The one thing I cannot get over is how bad average people are at selecting leaders.

Indeed. But LLMs must be hyped so that some assholes can get even richer, hence story. Obviously, this is a) an irrelevant even b) just "better search" and c) this person did not get competent help to do things before.

Most people struggle with a). The Internet just makes that more obvious.

You may have missed how quickly those got fixed. Try to keep up.

It does. But it is the "straw-fire" type of optimization.

To be fair, it does save money as it is currently done. It also leads to work and especially engineering done "cheaper than possible". That is not survivable for a longer time. Think Boeing (who may or may not survive not being able to design planes) or Microsoft (who still has excellent business numbers, but their teach gets worse and worse and will soon be unsustainable).

That does not work. Upper skill level white collar workers (mostly engineers and other STEM people on comparable levels) would be the ones able to do that, but they are not that affected. They can move, often globally. Their skills remain rare and hard to find and impossible to train regular people for. Who would need to go blue collar is white collar people at the lower and low end. Think they can do it? A semi-competent paper pusher does not make for a competent carpenter or plumber or electrician or welder. (Some will, but not enough to matter statistically.) So what are they going to do (besides voting for more and more extreme political liars)? The number of house-cleaner jobs is limited and even they need some really skill to be done well.

Also, why do you think the economy will normalize? Have you noticed how many countries and whole economic blocs have given up on the US? The EU is pissed and actively working (and succeeding) at replacing the US as trading and military partner. China thinks the US is a bad joke. Canada refuses to be bullied and more and more does its own thing with other partners. And nobody is going to forget that the US is massively unreliable now. Sure, Trump will be gone (better sooner than later), but the idiots and assholes that voted him in will not be and the current clown-show could get a repeat anytime. And businesses looking to do manufacturing in the US or really invest in trading with the US know that and will stay away.

Maybe in 20 years, things will look up again, but only if basically all US administrations in between do a really good job of mea-culpa and real amends. How likely is that? It is far more likely that this is not a temporary recession, but a permanent decline. And these you recover from in terms of half-centuries or longer or not at all.

Ah, now. When you alienate countries and whole political blocks (like the EU), that takes generations to fix and often it cannot be fixed at all. The US is on the way to 2nd world status now (in many ways it already has reached that) and may just continue to decline after. It may or may not eventually make a comeback, but not in the next few decades while the ones making the decisions elsewhere still remember the current shit-show.

Statistics look backwards. In times with no radical changes, this works to a degree. It does not work now. Some actual insight required to see that. You have none.

Well, really dumb and highly aggressive politics have that effect. But I do not think it is a recession. I think it is actually a decline, so no or only very partial recovery to be expected. Look at all the nations that the Dumb has alienated and that are now building trade zones and defensive alliances without the US. Think the US will be let back in when (if) it gets sane leadership? I doubt that. This is very mich a case of "fool me once". And the world currently is finding out that it can actually run pretty well without the US.

It is more like that people teaching at universities know what their responsibilities are and can see a hype for what it is. Example: To competently review code written by an LLM (which is absolutely critical), you need to be on a level above the complexity level of the task and the solution you review. Code review is harder than writing that code. But if you do not educate anybody that can do it or will eventually be able to, then there will be nobody that can review it in 10 or 20 years. The whole thing is the completely dumb short-term thinking that we have come to expect from C-level "decision makers". All it will do is reduce skill levels of western engineers even more and at some time the tech dominance will be completely over. That process has been running for a while, but LLMs are an accelerator.

Obviously, people that are excellent engineers will always find good jobs. The human race has not enough of them even if we find every last person with the potential. But anybody more in the average range will suffer. And a lot of low-skill "paper pusher" jobs will vanish, because specialized (not general) LLMs can very likely do many of them.

That said, I could do exams that allow LLMs. In fact, one software security course I teach has exactly that: They get a number of tasks in groups and hand in their results to be graded. But there is a post-discussion and when they have no clue abut what they handed in, their grades go down, including the possibility to fail the task. Results are pretty good.

I do not give my students LLMs or Internet search. But I give them "as much paper as you want with whatever you want on it". I have gotten feedback from students quite often now, that preparing that paper was really good exam preparation and also made them actually revisit and really understand the subjects. So very much not just exam preparation but actual learning and understanding of things. In addition, if somebody finds some exam question not to clear, I answer questions about the exam questions during the exam. I also give a generous amount of time.

And yes, it does make grading a lot more effort, especially as I do not do multiple-choice questions and I do accept answers that are well thought out but do not match what I think. But, in the end, good teaching requires motivation to do good teaching and that means not trying to make things too easy on myself. I am very much aware of the multiplication factor my teaching has and the responsibility towards my students and society that comes with. I am also aware that quite a few people do teaching "just as a job" and do not realize the multiplication factor or their responsibility towards students and society. In teaching, same as in many other things (like leadership positions), the human race remains incompetent at selecting the best people for the job or even only selecting good people consistently.

A relatively small number of dishonorable and dishonest egoists is all to takes to mess things up. Same as in basically every aspect of life.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.