mechoman444

This is… Unfortunately completely true. ☹️

TLDR: LLMs are better information aggregators than Google, which has become a mess of ads and SEO spam. Using AI to complete homework isn’t inherently cheating; homework is practice, not an exam. If schools want to measure independent knowledge, they should use supervised assessments instead of take-home assignments. And if an assignment offers little educational value, perhaps the assignment is the problem, not the tool students use to complete it.

I think the more important takeaway from this study is that people produce better results when querying LLMs than when using traditional search engines. To me, that points to a problem with conventional search more than it demonstrates a detriment to using LLMs.

Have you tried Googling anything in recent years? It’s a bloody mess. Google increasingly prioritizes what it wants you to see, and more importantly, what advertisers have paid it to show you. Finding genuinely useful information has become an exercise in digging through sponsored results, SEO spam, and pages that exist primarily to generate ad revenue.

LLMs, for all their faults, are arguably better information aggregators at this point. That isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of AI, considering that they aren’t particularly good at searching either. It just illustrates how bad conventional search has become.

I wouldn’t interpret using an LLM to complete a task as inherently equivalent to students cheating. I’d argue that LLMs are simply another tool for finding, processing, and synthesizing information. If students can produce better results using those tools, perhaps we should be asking why we’re so determined to prevent them from doing so rather than examining the tools themselves.

And frankly, you can’t really cheat on homework. It’s homework, not a supervised examination. Students should be able to complete assignments using whatever resources are available to them. If the objective is to determine what students can accomplish independently, then schools should assess that through supervised examinations rather than take-home assignments.

More importantly, there’s a broader question about whether we’re assigning too much homework in the first place. Research has repeatedly found that its educational benefits depend on factors such as age, workload, and assignment quality. If an assignment provides little educational value beyond producing a completed worksheet, then perhaps the problem isn’t that students are using AI to complete it. Perhaps the assignment itself isn’t worth doing.

Shenanigans.

That’s not 37 pieces of flare!

This article is a perfect example of how legitimate research gets turned into sensationalist nonsense, and the post on Lemmy is making it worse.

The study involved 1,222 participants across three experiments. Researchers had people use AI to help with math and reading comprehension, then tested them when that assistance was removed. They found that participants were more likely to struggle with accuracy and persistence when they had to work independently.

That’s an interesting finding. It’s worth discussing.

But this whole fixation on “just 10 minutes” is ridiculous. Ten minutes of AI use under specific experimental conditions does not mean that ten minutes of ChatGPT permanently damages your brain or destroys your ability to think for yourself. The study did not demonstrate that.

There’s a pretty significant difference between showing that people can become reliant on assistance and struggle when that assistance is suddenly taken away, and claiming that AI use fundamentally erodes your cognitive abilities. One is an experimental finding. The other is an exaggeration of what that finding actually means.

And this is where I have a problem with the article and the way it’s being presented on Lemmy. The actual research is interesting enough without having to dress it up in sensationalist headlines. If the point is that people need to struggle with difficult problems to develop their skills, then make that argument. It’s a perfectly reasonable one.

But “using AI for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things” is a hell of a lot more dramatic than what the research actually establishes.

There’s a difference between reporting scientific findings and manufacturing a narrative around them. We should be capable of discussing the potential downsides of AI without resorting to clickbait and misrepresenting what the research actually says.

Ok.

Every post-apocalyptic society we can point to is fictional. After all, we’ve never actually experienced an apocalypse on that scale.

But just off the top of my head, The Book of Eli depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has largely devolved into anarchy, with power concentrated in the hands of warlords and whoever can enforce their will through violence.

Cyborg presents a similar picture: societal collapse, competing factions, and survival through force.

Then there’s Mad Max, where civilization has collapsed into violent competition over increasingly scarce resources, with whoever controls the necessities of life holding the power.

But I’d also venture to say that many of the post-apocalyptic societies people point to as examples of socialism are actually post-scarcity societies, or at least societies in which scarcity has been resolved to some degree. When the necessities of life are readily available, the incentive to hoard resources and compete for basic survival diminishes. That creates the conditions for people to organize society around collective needs rather than individual accumulation.

In other words, what people identify as socialism in these fictional settings may actually be the result of a fundamental change in the material conditions of society.

The interesting question isn’t whether people are naturally selfish or naturally cooperative. It’s how the conditions people live under influence which behaviors become necessary for survival. When resources are scarce and institutions collapse, people may turn to violence and self-preservation. When their basic needs are reliably met, cooperation and collective ownership become much more practical.

Of course, neither outcome is inevitable. Scarcity doesn’t automatically produce anarchy, and abundance doesn’t automatically produce socialism. But the material conditions of a society have a tremendous influence on the political and economic systems that can realistically emerge.

Dude it’s not even that like it took me significantly more words to explain how bad the article is and how long the actual article is.

And people aren’t going to actually read the article they’re just going to look at the title and be like oh my God conspiracies!

This article is extremely short, misleading, and ultimately pointless.

The owner of the coffee machine was unable to determine why it had generated approximately 1 TB of network traffic in just 10 days. However, the data reportedly remained within his own Wi-Fi network and was never transmitted over the internet. The owner himself acknowledged that it was likely some kind of error, software malfunction, or defective unit.

More importantly, he admitted that he never investigated the issue further. Instead, he simply unplugged the machine and replaced it rather than attempting to determine what was actually happening.

So what, exactly, does this article accomplish? It provides no technical explanation, identifies no underlying cause, and offers no evidence that the manufacturer was collecting, transmitting, or doing anything nefarious with the data. It presents an unexplained technical anomaly and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

The implication is obvious: look at how much data this coffee machine is generating! What could the manufacturer possibly be doing with all that information? The article encourages suspicion without providing the evidence necessary to justify it.

And the irony is that the sheer volume of traffic makes the most sensational interpretation less plausible, not more. One terabyte of data in 10 days is an extraordinary amount for a coffee machine. Without knowing what the traffic consisted of, the most reasonable starting point is a software bug, a malfunctioning device, or some other technical error, not a manufacturer secretly harvesting an unprecedented amount of information about someone’s coffee-drinking habits.

Could there be a legitimate privacy concern? Certainly. But establishing one requires examining the traffic, identifying its destination, determining what information was being exchanged, and explaining why. None of that appears to have happened here.

Instead, we are left with an unexplained anomaly, an owner who chose not to investigate it, and an article that invites readers to fill in the blanks with their own conspiracy theories.

If the goal was to inform readers about the privacy risks of connected appliances, the author had an opportunity to do so. Instead, the article generates suspicion without generating any meaningful understanding.

That is the real problem with this kind of reporting: it teaches people to be afraid of technology without teaching them how to evaluate the evidence. There is a legitimate conversation to be had about connected devices, data collection, and consumer privacy. Stories like this do little to advance it.

It wouldn’t matter if she was buck naked in the middle of Octoberfest no one has the right to touch anyone without their consent.

You know why right?

You know why he still has the big signs up and why he’s still considers himself to be a supporter of trump and his ilk?

Because politics in America are treated like team sports… Got to stick by your team in the good years and the bad unfortunately it’s just not how politics work you can’t just trade a bad politician for a better one from another state.

One of the fundamental issues I have with private corporations is how they seem to think raising prices is going to work indefinitely.

Prices should fluctuate with the market, but they never seem to come back down, at least not significantly. You cannot simply keep raising prices forever to avoid taking a loss, because eventually you are going to incur losses anyway. Nobody is going to buy your product if it becomes too expensive.

Diesel being $6.30 a gallon in America is ostentatious. It may not be completely unreasonable given the circumstances, but that doesn’t make it any less absurd.

And when it comes to petroleum, it doesn’t actually matter that much whether a particular company makes money every single quarter. Somebody is going to step in and sell it at whatever price the market will support, as long as there is demand.

I think we have been conned, as a society, into believing that corporations simply cannot incur losses or they will immediately go out of business. Historically, that has never really been the case. Essential businesses and gargantuan corporations are consistently propped up by governments, investors, and financial institutions because, in many cases, we simply cannot allow them to fail.

We cannot currently function as a modern society without diesel.

So when a company says, essentially, “We have to raise prices because otherwise we’ll lose money,” my response is: Okay. Then lose some money.

Businesses are allowed to have bad years. They are allowed to make less profit. They are even allowed to lose money. The idea that every company must continually increase prices, maintain or increase profit margins, and never meaningfully absorb a loss is not some immutable law of economics. It is a business model.

Okay, just a couple of details here I’d like to put out in the open.

First and foremost, I don’t like billionaires. I think they should all have their wealth stripped down until they’re under a billion dollars. There is no reason why billionaires should exist. That’s such an incredibly large number that our human brains don’t even really understand the difference between a million, 100 million, and a billion. It’s visually difficult to even represent. So as far as I’m concerned, the sooner these guys can get their wealth back down to a more reasonable level, the better it is for the world in general.

Second, I really like Proposition 40. It’s got some real teeth to it. The proposition doesn’t simply charge taxes on revenue that a billionaire produces; it charges the tax against their net worth, which I think is absolutely fantastic because it actually targets accumulated wealth.

And that’s important because billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting around in a checking account. They may have significantly less than even a billion dollars in liquid cash. If Mr. Sergey Brin is worth $250 billion, for example, a 5% wealth tax would represent roughly $12.5 billion. He’s going to have to come up with that money somehow. He can cash out assets, borrow against them, sell investments, or use other sources of liquidity. The proposition also provides for payment over a period of up to five years, although doing so comes with additional charges.

That’s going to be a real interruption for billionaires, and I absolutely love that aspect of it. These people have accumulated enormous amounts of wealth while the rest of us live in an economy where ordinary people are taxed on their income, their purchases, their property, and virtually everything else they do.

For decades, America’s tax system has allowed enormous fortunes to accumulate largely through appreciating assets rather than ordinary taxable income. Billionaires can therefore become dramatically wealthier without necessarily realizing that wealth as conventional income.

Good on California for proposing a tax on extreme wealth that actually has the potential to put a dent in those fortunes.

Mind you, these billionaires are ultimately trying to avoid what amounts to superficial damage to their coffers. Five percent of a $250 billion fortune is still an enormous amount of money, but it leaves $237.5 billion behind. And if their assets continue appreciating, they can potentially recover that lost wealth relatively quickly.

I’m not saying 5% is going to destroy these people. It won’t. But that’s exactly why I think it’s a good step. It’s a real tax on accumulated wealth, it actually requires the ultra-wealthy to part with a meaningful amount of money, and it demonstrates that enormous fortunes aren’t necessarily untouchable simply because the wealth isn’t sitting in a bank account.

Yes which is why I almost immediately deleted my comment.

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I feel like this is ops humble brag about him having a big penis.

I was in behavioral therapy for over a decade a lot of it was about how to handle finances and the way of economics now and how they impact mental health. It was a common subject and group as well.

Don’t make it out to be like there’s some kind of conspiracy that mental health professionals on a lot talk about finances.

Well sir… This is definitely a much more succinct way of saying everything that I said. ☹️

Let me ask you this: you’re a 10- to 18-year-old kid, maybe younger. You live with your parents, you have some kind of game console, or perhaps a computer your parents bought for you or use themselves. One day, you tell your parents, “I want to play Grand Theft Auto.”

Your parents essentially have to purchase the game for you, because a retailer isn’t going to sell a mature-rated game directly to a child. If you’re buying it digitally through Steam or another online store, you generally need a payment method, which again means your parents are involved in the transaction.

So what exactly is age verification at the game or operating-system level supposed to accomplish?

The purchasing process is already, by its nature, an age-gated process. If a parent is willing to purchase a mature-rated game for their child and allow that child to play it, then the parent has already made that decision. If the parent is irresponsible enough to allow their child to play violent or otherwise age-restricted games without supervision, that is a separate parenting issue. I don’t see how forcing developers, publishers, distributors, or operating-system manufacturers to verify the child’s age meaningfully addresses that problem.

That’s what I don’t understand about these laws: what is the actual benefit?

From a political perspective, I don’t see an obvious constituency demanding this. I don’t see how it provides a significant benefit to corporations, either. It doesn’t seem particularly popular or politically consequential because the issue is so niche. So what is actually driving this?

I’m not saying there has to be some grand conspiracy behind it. But if there is a rational explanation for why governments keep pursuing increasingly complicated age-verification requirements, I’d genuinely like to understand what it is. Is this primarily about liability? Political signaling? Pressure from advocacy groups? Regulatory precedent? Or is the government simply trying to establish a broader principle that online services should be responsible for determining the age of their users?

Then there’s the technological problem.

The infrastructure simply isn’t designed around reliable age verification. Take operating systems as an example. A law can require an operating system to verify the age of its users, but that doesn’t mean the operating system actually has reliable access to that information. Windows and macOS may be able to integrate age verification through accounts or other identity systems, but what happens on Linux? What mechanism is the operating system supposed to use to determine whether the person sitting at the keyboard is 12, 22, or 52?

And even if you solve that problem, you haven’t necessarily solved the underlying problem. A child can use a parent’s account, a shared computer, a friend’s device, or any number of other arrangements. You can build increasingly elaborate verification systems, but ultimately you still run into the fact that parents control the devices, accounts, and purchases in the home.

So I keep coming back to the same question: what problem is this actually solving that existing parental control systems and the purchasing process don’t already address?

I’m not opposed to reasonable protections for children online. I’m questioning whether mandatory age verification actually provides enough additional protection to justify the enormous technological and regulatory infrastructure required to implement it.

Because if the practical result is simply that the government requires companies to verify something that parents are already responsible for controlling, then I’m having a difficult time seeing what meaningful benefit we’re getting in exchange for all of this additional regulation.

By crypto he meant doge.

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EXACTLY!

All those things that the meme mentions are something that the government should be looking into regardless of what economy they institute!

I’m paying $2,000 a month for a three bedroom that shouldn’t cost anywhere above $1100 a month!

I went to home Depot last night bought some cockroach traps, Teflon tape a plunger and a short length of stainless steel tubing for $30. What’s up on tables 98 cents the plunger was $4 the box of cockroach traps was eight bucks and the length of tubing was $15! And none of the prices make any sense!