I suspect the move back to pen-and-paper exams is being resisted by the teachers. It shouldn't be that hard though--when the workload became to great, most of my own professors would offload part of the grading task to TAs and grad students.
It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.
I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ...
AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers.
It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.
On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).
> How do I belong? How do I make my community a better place? How do I build wealth for the people I love?
What remains after is something like the social status games of the aristocratic class, which I suspect is why there's a race to accumulate as much as possible now before the means to do so evaporate.
It's garbage opinions like this that makes PG so tiring. The superficial air of reasonableness makes it attractive to younger SF tech people who haven't experienced the context out of which these arguments arose and have no idea who he's plagiarizing/channeling. (For starters, the distinction between wealth and money/capital goes back at least to the 17th century.) For those who are more interested in being the "next unicorn" than engaging seriously with ideas, his little "essays" serve as kind of armor--we don't have to think about that problem because PG wrote about it!
If it's any consolation, these companies paying for ads on a competitor's brand name are probably paying through the nose to get clicks that only bounce. IF it's worth it at all, it's probably temporary. It's an indicator that market share is still up for grabs.
This was my first thought too. The last generation of activity tracking, while still dystopian, was a little different at least in that it was mainly statistical. So action-wise, it might point managers at "potential problems," but doesn't make its way into a performance review (e.g. "your mouse only traveled 81.72 screen-miles this quarter, 2 standard deviations below the mean, while you also scored the lowest on number of keystrokes with vscode as the active window..."). If a manager really wanted to summarize exactly what was done they had to spend an almost equal amount of time to watch. To some degree, this alleviates that.
Why would software be qualitatively different from all other forms of automation that came before? And suppose, for the sake of argument, that software is fully automated at some point--what then happens to the firm?
Tao is great in lots of ways--obviously as a first-rate mathematician, but also as an educator and an ambassador of mathematics to the general public. It's cool to see him thinking along these lines, but if anyone is really interested in where this line of thinking goes, it's basically the problem of modernity. Just about everyone in the humanities is fully aware of this already. It emerged vaguely around the 1830s and basically became the major subject of the humanities--in one way or another--ever since. Marshall Berman's book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is good intro. I would expect that if you take Tao's specific line of thinking here (society beginning gas-like, interacting particles, then clumping together at various levels of abstraction, and interacting up and down the levels, etc) you get into all sorts of issues that were debated endlessly a very long time ago. But as a quick, temporary prism for looking at the world it's fine I guess. As a symptom, it makes one think something else might be going on when a very famous mathematician is suddenly now rediscovering modernity--perhaps things become more clear the more they break apart. One might even go so far as to say Tao's apparent ignorance of the issue of modernity has something to do with specialization, i.e. is a symptom of modernity itself.
PS--to add one thing as a criticism, the "retreat" into "grassroots groups" has also long been viewed as a false solution to the problem. Politically, this "solution" emerged in various forms: the 19th century's utopian socialism (especially in the US!), late 19th-early 20th century syndicalism, 1960s communes and "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out," up to now with the stubborn idea that communal living is somehow "revolutionary" and various other guises. It's there in less "radical" forms too, like when liberals say we just need to restart the bowling leagues. It's fine as an individual respite, but will never really get at the problem, not least because there are many other (and better!) ways of getting some "relief".
It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.
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