None of our current societies support it being acceptable to have someone else know what you're thinking.
They all support it - the reason we developed language is to communicate our thoughts to each other. It may be imperfect but the great advantage is that we can choose which thoughts to communicate and which not.
There's nothing in physics that says the universe can't continue matter free
Yes there is because some matter does not decay, for example electrons and neutrinos.
Has anyone actually figured out how hallucinations and done so using a small enough model (way less than 1B) to make a reproducible test?
Given that linear algebra, for instance, is one of six topics covered it seems unlikely that it covers the same ground as a lower division college course
I can't speak to what it covers now - the UK system underwent a major downgrade when GCSEs replaced O' levels - but the one I went through basically covered everything in the first two linear algebra courses at university: eigenvalues, eigenvectors, diagonalization and inverse techniques, solving simultaneous equations, unitarity, hermitian matrices etc. Essentially I never did any linear algebra at university level although I'm sure those taking maths did more.
At some point you have to stop calling these guys a start-up.
You're leaving out the cost. The son who dropped out was looking at the $80k/year his parents were spending and not seeing the value.
The cost of university in Canada is typically under $10k/year for tuition...and those are Canadian dollars.
Also, how on Earth could anyone progress in high school fast enough to be in a linear algebra class?
I went throught the UK system and left secondary school (high school) having done linear algebra, second order ODEs and even very basic contour integration. UK standards have dropped since (they were dropping even when I was at school) but go look up maths and further maths A'level papers from the late 1980's and you can see what was covered. We did specialize to just 3-4 subjects in the last two years of school but the maths I learnt at university started with PDEs and vector calculus. Indeed, the maths O' level (taken two years before A' levels) that everyone going to univeristy for any subject contained basic calculus.
You'd be amazed at the academic heights people can reach if you make that the required standard.
son who dropped out of a very good university after one year because it was obviously a scam by everyone involved.
I think it depends a lot on the subject. I do not see much evidence that the STEM fields have lost value much at all in top universities, at least in Canada but also from interactions with colleagues in the US and UK. Certainly the content is new (science has advanced considerably) and we are all dealing with lower educational standards in schools meaning incoming students are less prepared but ultimately, at least in physics but also in many other technical STEM subjects, I do not see any evidence that good universities have in any way become "scams". Indeed, many of us do still think that linear algebra is fun, so fun in fact that along with basic calculus it should really be taught more in schools rather than universities.
As an engineering professor, my prediction is that the economic value of a liberal arts degree is going to fall nearly to zero by 2033 at the latest.
As a physics professor I'd say you do not need to predict anything - I think we are already there but for slightly different reasons. It's not that using AI to cheat has rendered such degrees worthless (although I agree that is happening too), it is more that AI itself has rendered such degrees useless because most of the skills you learn from a liberal arts degree vs. a STEM degree are those that AI is now replacing.
But in the long run, no degree program is safe.
That's always a safe bet given technological progress but I do not see current "AI" technology as being much of a threat to STEM fields because ultimately our fields concentrate on understanding concepts and using that knowledge to do things that nobody has done before or apply those concepts to new situations. Current "AI" does not understand concepts at all, it is a predictive text engine who can parrot its training data to make it sound like it understands concepts but really does not and, because it relies on its training is not great at coming up with completely new things or dealing with new situations.
I saw him do it, and told him that it was reasonable so long as he didn't try to submit something that was completely written by AI.
Actually I think that is a bad way to use AI.Having it write an outline that you then flesh out is backwards compared to what we call "AI" can do and while you may be able to get away with that in less technical subjects, it is much less likely to work in the sciences, particularly the hard sciences.
Current AI is nothing more than a text prediction algorithm. It does not understand concepts. This makes it a very poor choice to write outlines since it will miss details, get concepts wrong or even just hallucinate rubbish. Worse, knowing and assembling concepts together to make the outline is typically the high-level knowledge skill that writing reports/essays etc. is supposed to be testing so this arguably is cheating.
Where AI excels though is in copy editing. So the best way to use AI that I know of and that I tell my students to use is to write the first rough draft of a report and then use AI as your own personal copy-editor to edit for clarity and style. You still have to check that it has not done something stupid but, since it is just a predictive text engine that knows which words sound good together, if you give it the concepts and knowledge in text you wrote it is very good at re-expressing them better than you did.
However, the real effect of AI so far has been that far more weight is now put on assessment under exam conditions where you cannot use AI. So I do not know about college, but I am very confident that you can't cheat yourself through a subject like physics at university with AI but you could use AI to cheat yourself out of a degree.
How does one explain those timelapses of satellite imagery of beaches that show the exact same sea level over 20 years?
It's impoosible to answer that accurately without knowing which beach you are referring to. However, you should be aware that coasts are affected by more that just sea level rises. In some places land is rising and in others it is sinking which can either increase or entirely offset any effect of sea level rise. Then there is erosion vs. deposition: come coast is being heavily eroded while elsewhere, like deltas, material is being deposited. Also steeper beaches will see far less effect than beaches with very shallow slopes where a small change in sea level vs. the land corresponds to a large horizontal displacement. So with no details it is impossible to explain why a beach may seem unchanged because there are many reasons why that may be the case.
Equally simply seeing a beach get more and more inundated does not necessarily mean that sea levels are rising either. However, there is little reason to doubt sea level rises though. We know the globe is warming, we know water expands with increasing temperature once it is above a few degrees above zero and we can measure the rise directly itself. So the physics is extremely well understood: we know exactly why this is happening and we can measure it happening too using satellites to measure changes in sea levels over large areas.
Why did so many Americans think he was somehow better than someone who can actually string coherent sentences together?
I suspect it was exactly what also drove so many Brits to vote for Brexit - the previous winner of "biggest own goal" a country has scored. It was not that they voted for the crazy stuff it was that they were voting against the alternative. If people strongly reject the platform you are putting forward and believe the alternative platform looks better, or at least less bad, they may well be inclined to overlook the red flags or assume that they will not be as bad as they are.
I mean let's be honest here - how many Canadians thought Trump would be an existential threat to us and would actually consider annexing us if elected? Given that, I suspect that many Americans who voted for him did not think Trump 2.0 would be as utterly insane and dangerous as he has turned out to be.
Indeed, it makes zero sense.
Broadcom, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to redefine the term "zero day".
"Broadcom defines a zero-day security patch as a patch or workaround for Critical Severity Security Alerts with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score greater than or equal to 9.0."
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fknowledge.broadcom.com...
So for Broadcom, zero day just means "really bad".
Do you remember The Great Tea Trolley Disaster of 67?
No, but I do remember the great beer bottle fiasco of 1996. My colleagues on LEP were not happy because they lost a lot of beam time.
Sure. But you may have heard about a thing called "common sense".
I'm not the one arguing that electronic computers have not replaced any low level jobs...or as you claim you wanted to write...only a few specialities. If you had any sense, let alone common sense, you'd know how daft that statement is. I mean the list is huge: in addition to human computers and secretaries they have replaced travel agents, switchboard operators, bank tellers, cashiers and so on.
At this point either you are just trolling or frankly you are only a few steps away from joining the flat earthers.
Kill Ugly Processor Architectures - Karl Lehenbauer
