It's not a flaw in my argument, since the device arrived in a known, secured, and clean state, the only plausible data I can hand over doesn't exist. Since I don't have to destroy the data, the best they can assume is I had wiped the device before leaving, but, that's not an issue. If that was an issue, preforming any kind of reset would be illegal or involve the courts, no matter when it was done.

Yes, that's precisely what I'm doing, I'm assuming guilt was present, hence the destruction. The other important part to that, in a court of law, since I'm not a court, and I don't have legal authority in this case, I can assume he's guilty all I want.

Good job predicting that, you prophet.

The baby killers always lie. Absolute scum of the earth

Tim Cook thought AR (augmented reality) was the future, that's why he started putting in the beefy hardware. Turned out the future was in chatbots.

Now Tim is not in charge anymore, the things he liked at Apple are like old leaves flowing away in soft autumn wind.

No border agent, without a warrant, will be able to compel an entire notebook + data inspection. I can turn it on, I can even boot it, and I've had to do that before for a US border agent. Since the volume is hidden, and it's encrypted, you would have no way to determine what is it, easily, or what it contains, in any pleasable reality.

I don't think he should be charged, a warrant wasn't issued for the data, so the data wasn't legally compelled. Therefore, what he destroyed at best was just requested data, and what he chose to hand over was no requested data. The stupidity of it, he had to know what was going to happen! The government, no government, is your friend. They're public servants in name, but not in accountability, and he had to know the government was going to turn his life upside down from doing that.

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.

 

My Prius Prime has a large infotainment touch screen, and it's been replaced 6 times, the last time I had to pay for the replacement when the glass shattered on a cold winter day. They introduce needless complexity, they're distracting, and don't really serve a purpose. Why do I need a large tablet in my car? My old Corolla had a small touch screen, that could do everything, so frankly, I don't need or want a large touch screen.

I was at Walmart yesterday, the 21st of August 2026, and I used Google Wallet to tap my debit card. Maybe this is a US thing, I've been taping my phone to pay at Walmart for at least a year, if not longer.

Before I travel I back up my phone to a hidden encrypted VeraCrypt volume, then wipe it. I've done the same with my tablet, and ereader, and it's just the sensible thing to do, you can restore it at the destination. I don't have anything incriminating on my phone, but, the government has no right to any of that data, for any reason. The issue here, is that he intentionally destroyed the data when it as in the hands of a government agent, which you only do if there is some reason to destroy it. If you back up and wipe a device beforehand, that's just sensible data hygiene. If you wipe the device in the hands of law enforcement, or a government actor, what possible reason did you have for doing that? Even if you're entirely innocent, why did you do that, instead of securing the device before you left?

Should he be charged with anything, no, but, did he do something stupid? Yes!

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.

Yes, and that is a real issue, so you have to be careful, but, forgoing that, have multiple AI agents run the code. I've used OpenAI, Claude, Junie, at the same time, and it's interesting to see how they approach the issue.

I love AI for bug hunting, it's fantastic, providing you keep it narrow, and focused. One of my techniques is to have the AI explain the code block I'm looking at, in detail, with examples, and then as we hunt, keep explaining how X, Y, A, B all link, using examples. What would take a week, or a month manually, can be done in a day, maybe two, and it's fantastic.

When I was taking advanced vector calculus 2, we were working out points in Nth dimensional space. In one lecture the professor Alek was trying to show us symbolically where a point in 12th dimensional space was. He had white board marker in between his fingers, and he was rotating both of his hands to show us where this point was. We were working with advanced antenna design, trying to optimize for noise, strength, stability, and some other properties. The thing was, he had the point in the mirrored position, and I symbolically got it right away, that he had the right alignment, but it was flipped, it's really difficult to accurately describe, but think of a classic X, Y, Z plot. Basically, he had the point at X = 1, when it was X = -1, much more complicated, but that's the idea. The entire lecture was him and me arguing about this point, and the reason it mattered was due to stability, noise, and strength of the antenna. To be fair, the point being mirrored didn't cause everything to fail, or have terrible performance, it was just less than ideal. After nearly an hour of this discussion, he put it to me to design my antenna using the mirrored point, and sure enough, my antenna was just a slight bit more stable, noise resistant, and its strength was better.

What is the point of that story? We're not teaching kids, in my experience, how to think about the problem being solved. They're running through the motions, they get an answer, they don't care, and they move on. When it's long division or simple multiplication, okay, fine, but, when you move on, and you're starting trig, or applied math, now it matters. Is your fraction correct? How do you know? How do you check? Regardless if you're doing the box thing, or a ribbon (I don't know what that is), or something else that's new, it all has to build on the fundamentals.

Teach the box method, that's fine, but also teach the classic method, and show kids how to contrast them, and if they disagree, how to try and figure out why? What really triggers me about this, if a kid completely misunderstood the plot to a story, it wouldn't be taken lightly, or shrugged off. If they don't understand why you should respect a persons pronouns, again, it would not be shrugged off. When it comes to math, it's shrugged off, and I've worked with Jr Engineers who couldn't tell you whether X should be between 2 and 10 or in a literal case, 2 trillion and 5 trillion. In that specific case, they used one method to compute X, instead of two, three or four methods. They didn't grasp what X was, and why it mattered, the value was 7.something, and that lack of awareness, will never fail to bother me.

As for the drawing stuff, have them do it once, twice, or several times, but if they can show they understand, then cut it out. The answer is what matters, but in between the question and the answer, let them solve it their own way, providing they get the right answer, and can defend that answer.