You generally have to find someone willing to sell you a fleet vehicle if you want a full 8 foot bed. Modern trucks are more like minivans with a vestigial bed sticking out of the back.
I have on old fleet truck: four full doors and an eight-foot bed. I love it, it’s getting quite old, and I have no idea how I’m ever going to replace it
Atm, not easy indeed, it's hacked together code that barely works as-is, with a config that would be an even bigger mystery. Best hope is that I someday feel like cleaning it up and open sourcing it, alternatively you write something simple yourself :) Sorry!
Working for the Federal government used to provide a solid pension, solid healthcare for life, and rock solid job security. The first has been mostly eroded away over the last decade. The last of course has completely evaporated over the past 3 months. AFAIK you still get healthcare for life if you manage to retire. All in all, I can absolutely see why someone would take the US civil service deal 20 years ago. Not so much 5-10 years ago.
Healthcare has also been eroded away as it is frequently needed to pay extra for concierge or direct primary care to be able to see a doctor, otherwise you are being seen by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner first.
>In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions.
Not defense, but my government contract works the same way. I'm on company number two, but I know people who have worked for 4 different companies, all while doing the same job on evolutions of the same contract. There are people who have done full careers working onsite for my agency without ever converting to be a civil servant.
>For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".
Does that actually work? I'm long past having easy access to college programming assignments, but based on my limited interaction with ChatGPT I would be absolutely shocked if it produced output that was even coherent, much less working code given such an approach.
It doesn't matter who coherent the output is - the students will paste it anyway, then fail the assignment (and you need to deal with grading it) and then complain to parents and school board that you're incompetent because you're failing the majority of the class.
Your post is based in a misguided idea that students actually care about some basic quality of their work.
Sure. Works in my IDE. "Create a linked list implementation, use that implementation in a method to reverse a linked list and write example code to demonstrate usage".
Working code in a few seconds.
I'm very glad I didn't have access to anything like that when I was doing my CS degree.
Yeah, and forget about giving skeleton code to students they should fill in; using an AI can quite frequently completely ace a typical undergraduate level assignment. I actually feel bad for people teaching programming courses, as the only real assessment one can now do is in-class testing without computers, but that is a strange way to test students’ ability to write and develop code to solve certain classes of problems…
Hopefully someone is thinking about adapting the assessments. Asking questions that focus on a big picture understanding instead of details on those in-class tests.
Yeah. On the other hand, "implement boruvkas MST algorithm in cuda such that only the while(numcomponents > 1) loop runs on the CPU, and everything else runs in the gpu. Memcpy everything onto the gpu first and only transfer back the count each iteration/keep it in pinned memory"
It never gets it right, even after many reattempts in cursor. And even if it gets it right, it doesn't do the parallelization effectively enough - it's a hard problem to parallelize.
As I said, I'm not a student, so I don't have access to a homework assignment to paste in. Ironically I have pretty much everything I ever submitted for my undergrad, but it seems like I absolutely never archived the assignments for some reason.
since late 2024/early 2025 it now is the case, especially with a reasoning model like Sonnet 3.7, DeepSeek-r1, o3, Gemini 2.5, etc., and especially if you upload the textbook, slides, etc alongside the homework to be cheated on.
most normal-difficulty undergraduate assignments are now doable reliably by AI with little to no human oversight. this includes both programming and mathematical problem sets.
for harder problem sets that require some insight, or very unstructured larger-scale programming projects, it wouldn't work so reliably.
but easier homework assignments serve a valid purpose to check understanding, and now they are no longer viable.
Yeah, there's a disturbing trend of products advertising a "lifetime warranty", only the fine print says that the "lifetime" in question is the "lifetime of the product", which is whatever the manufacturer says it is (usually no better than the competition).
Overwhelmingly, new compilers will compile old code just fine. IIRC, the only time old code is broken intentionally is when fixing a bug in the compiler itself causes the code to break.
Why? How? The US balanced the budget under Clinton. I was pretty young, but I don't remember the standard of living collapsing in the early 90s (quite the opposite in fact).
I mean, the CBO has a range of policies for fixing the federal deficit, most of which are pretty reasonable. I'm a fan of taxing the better off more (but I'm not a US citizen or taxpayer so that's easy for me to say).
Define "the better off?" I also agree with you in principle, but you're overlooking an important fact about American politics. The mainstream "left" in the U.S. is dominated by affluent professionals who hate paying taxes as much as any Reagan Republican. They pay lip service to the idea of "taxing the better off more," but by that they mean "billionaires." That's not a big enough tax base to raise the $1-2 trillion we would need to fix the deficit.
That's why you get a ridiculous situation where even the center-left party is promising not to raise taxes on people making under $400k/year. In reality, such a tax plan wouldn't even meaningfully raise taxes on people making $1 million a year. You can't solve the deficit by raising taxes if you're unwilling to tax 99.5% of the population.
Which countries are we currently invading? Regardless, in the 2023 budget Social security far outstrips defense, Medicare is just a shade higher, and Medicaid is not far behind. I'm entirely in favor of slimming down the US military industrial complex, but doing so isn't going to fix the deficit. You could 0 out the defense budget entirely and there would still be another trillion dollars of deficit to deal with.
Just listing the ones from my short life so far: Afganistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine & Lebanon (indirectly through massive support to Israel). I'm sure I missed a few since there are so many.
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