It's a huge problem. I have several friends in university who have had assignments flagged as AI. They have had entire units failed and forced to retake semesters which is not cheap.
Even if you fight it, the challenge goes into the next semester and pushes out your study timeline and associated costs.
> put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them
Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.
One friend now uses a dashcam to record themselves when writing an assignment so they can prove no AI was used when they are eventually flagged.
Yeah bad choice of words on my part, I apologize. I can imagine that things are pretty chaotic right now and that there are quite a few problems like the one you describe. When I said I don't see a crisis here I meant that more in a more overarching sense and that I see this as solvable.
> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees.
I don't know about that. I can't speak for the US, but at the university where I got my degrees (Math & CS) and later worked prerequisite in-person tests to be allowed to take a given exam were not rare. Most modules had lectures (professor), tutorials (voluntary in-person bonus exercises and tutors to ask questions) and exercise groups where solutions to mandatory exercises were discussed. In the latter sometimes an additional part of the exam requirements was to present and explain a solution at least once or twice over the course of the semester. And some had small, mandatory bi-weekly tests as part of the requirement too.
Obviously I can understand that this would not work equally well in each kind of academic programme.
> > put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them
> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.
When I started uni (slovenia, 2007) the rules were simple: You are adults. The final exam (written + oral) is 100% of your grade. We don’t have the time or willingness to police what you do. Strongly recommend attending classes and doing homework but whatever it’s your life. If you get high enough scores on the optional midterms, you can skip the written portion of the exam.
It was pretty great. Yes we all tried to cram for exams at the last moment. No it didn’t work very well. Needing 2 or 3 tries to pass was common.
Then later we got the bologna system. Professors stopped bragging about fail rates. Students passing became an actual thing they were evaluated on. Homework became graded, midterms were mandatory and part of your grade, attendance was tracked, etc.
College became like high school. More people passed but I think something was lost about teaching adulthood.
For the record: I didn’t graduate. My freelance business got too busy and I could not keep up with both.
Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.
IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.
Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).
Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).
Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.
Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).
There's no profit in technology so there's no interest in starting a business leading to low demand for workers.
Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.
Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless
Isn't the salary difference more about differences between Silicon Valley (or Big tech in US) and Europe?
One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).
Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.
I'm talking about provisions to increase competition in the free market - not classical "corporations bad" regulations.
Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.
For example;
Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.
Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.
Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.
Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.
Yes, anti competitive practices are good for business regardless of geography.
Americans may be the biggest offenders but the pro-competition rules should apply to all.
Personally, I have the skills and interest to write a custom OS for my phone (Linux, custom DE, and waydroid for Android compat) - but it's literally impossible to due to anti competitive practices (I can't reverse engineer drivers and clean room driver development is practically impossible).
Similar story for my router, my "smart" TV and arm64 MacBook pro (or even an arm64 surface laptop).
Having spent a significant amount of time in Bangkok - the city center (and many urban hubs) is an amazing walkable place with pedestrian walkways suspended above major roads, lots of frequent public transit (metro, skytrain) that honestly makes my home city of Sydney feel like a developing country.
The only downside is that traffic creates a lot of pollution, and the engine noise (not honking, there's very little of that) is so bad that you need to yell to a person standing next to you to have a conversation.
As a visitor, I can't claim to know how to fix the problems facing locals, however I can't help but feel that urban centers would be 1000x better with mass adoption of EVs (bikes, cars). I have seen a spike in the number of Chinese EVs across the city - however I'm aware that economic pressures prevent mass adoption by the majority of the road-users
To me, Bangkok feels very much like a developing country.
If you go to Chinese cities, the EV adoption has incredible positive effects to the vibe, though. Shanghai’s French concession is so quiet and peaceful now that most cars are EVs.
Try walking around Newtown in Sydney haha. "Charming" multi-million dollar "victorian-style" shanties with public transit that are a 30 minute walk away and break down every few days.
I think tier 1 Chinese cities are in a league of their own though. It's a shame it's so difficult to stay there for a prolonged period of time as a foreigner.
Thailand strikes a good balance of accessibility and development - that said I certainly agree that there are noticeable signs of it being a developing country. Still better than Sydney on balance though.
Western countries will never match the new East Asian cities. All cities decay as the residents begin to oppose change. All residents begin to oppose change as they age and become wealthier. So whatever you become before the population gets rich is what you will remain.
There will be no new fast subway in San Francisco and there will be no maglev in NYC. There will be no autonomous buses in Sydney and London will be entirely devoid of skyways.
This is the nature of growth. One grows then dies as one fossilizes. The next one grows past but no one will ever reinvent themselves.
That doesn't make much sense to me. HK added transit long after it was a big city. Tokyo added transit. Heck, all the cities of Europe started long before transit became a thing and then added it later.
I agree it seems hard in NYC, SF, etc but other cities have added transit
Developing in Hong Kong has been much harder and expensive than before. The high speed rail that connected Hong Kong to the mainland system was (IIRC) the most expensive rail project per kilometer. (They did it anyway since it was a national objective from the central authorities.) And, given the recent tragic fire in Tai Po, there has been a lot more worry about people not being able to afford to renew aging infrastructure (as in residential buildings).
Not advocating for autocracies, there's something to be said about the relationship between building essential infrastructure and the ability to ignore NIMBYs.
Bangkok just built a new metro line and are currently developing a high speed train from Malaysia to Vietnam, which would eventually lead to a train from Singapore to China.
Australia can't even build a functioning train to the outer city suburbs, let alone between major cities
A 1:1 recreation of the Windows XP or Windows 7 user experience with the classic theme would be killer.
I say this with love, I have used KDE extensively and I still find it more janky than Windows XP. Gnome is "better" (especially since v40) in that it's consistent and has a few nicer utilities, but it also has worse UX (at least for power users) than Windows XP.
Haha that was an entertaining read, thanks for sharing. This is also my third attempt.
The first was much like this one with browser storage. There was a bug in Chrome that wiped out the persisted storage of all websites which nuked all of my records
I tried rewriting it in React because it was the new hotness but spent so much time worried about component rendering cycles, hooks, state that just ended up distracting me away from time on the UI and UX. It was fast (like it matters), but ugly.
As for data sync, I've just added SQLite on the client and going through the painful process of normalizing the records.
My idea is, users will be able to supply a Turso API key and the app can sync against that, keeping a local copy of the data - eventually consistent.
I'll probably do something dumb like keep a timestamp of the last change and push/pull data periodically.
It only works because it's 1 person using the app and no one trains with two phones
Even if you fight it, the challenge goes into the next semester and pushes out your study timeline and associated costs.
> put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them
Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.
One friend now uses a dashcam to record themselves when writing an assignment so they can prove no AI was used when they are eventually flagged.
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