The open letter, signed by over 500 faculty from various UC sites, says "current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors." "We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics," with 1 in 12 admitted UC San Diego students falling below middle school levels in math assessments.

"The current admissions metrics, based primarily on GPA and essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays."

But if the flip side (getting compensated) wasn't also an important concern then maybe far more software would be OSS in recent decades...

For the 'don't want to live in transit-dense cities like London' crowd, beating the economics of taxis may not be enough since that's not what you're competing with out in the suburbs.

On the other hand, the suburbs don't have much that is even comparable to city taxis in price or availability today, so maybe if it existed that price point would indeed do just as well away from cities too.

- When GPT 4 was asked to evaluate resume executive summaries, it preferred ones written by GPT over human-written ones > 93% of the time.

- Similar "bias" was exhibited by other models including LLaMA 3.3 and Deepseek v3.

- Even when human annotators judged the human-written summary to be higher quality, leading LLMs still preferred their own writing 67-82% of the time.

- Preference was stronger in larger models.

- In several cases, LLMs also prefer their own writing over that of other LLMs.

There's a pretty decent longer summary in this thread where I first heard about the article: https://x.com/heynavtoor/status/2048088874686300431

Intercepting a meteor falling to Earth may be not too unlike intercepting a ballistic missile in its terminal descent from high altitude.

TLDR: The majority of teens surveyed by Pew Research talk to AI chatbot characters/companions. Teens were aware of cases of suicide blamed on them, and told the NY Times they know the bots have risks, but mainly for their most vulnerable peers.

They also say many of the bots tend to lead conversations in flirty or sexual directions even when the teens weren’t seeking it — and the age requirements in many apps seem easily bypassed. On the other hand, one teen they interviewed credited the chatbots with improving his writing and making him better at taking about his feelings.

And in fact wasn't a popular Python library just compromised very recently? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426.

So Python's clearly not "batteries included" enough to avoid this kind of risk.

That's my point. You can have a large standard library like those languages I mentioned, but that isn't going to include everything nor cover every use case, so you'll have external libraries (via PyPi for Python, NuGet for .NET, and Maven for Java/JVM).

Also what is the capitol cost to stand up a golf course vs. a solar farm of equal size? I would imagine solar requires locking up a much larger investment.

For PV, land will be a very small fraction of that capex.

Yeah; golf course land tends to be in places with high property values.

If we normalize by $ instead of by acre, the hypothetical golf course conversion would produce >> 10% of land requirements.

Your main point still stands, but aren't both of them renewable? Corn is a renewable resource, thus ethanol derived from it is too. It's just seemingly a much less efficient renewable fuel for powering a car compared to solar.

You're right. Perhaps clean would better capture the distinction in favor of solar in this context? Both corn and solar convert insolation to usable power with a short time between capture and use. Solar, on the other hand, is net negative when it comes to emissions, while the corn harvest is just burnt with the CO2 escaping back to the atmosphere. (And potentially, the solar panels can just be recycled back to new solar panels when they reach the end of their lifetimes. They're mostly aluminum and glass after all.)

Corn ethanol isn't a renewable resource. The land use of corn is a problem, but it's rounding error compared to the petroleum consumption of that industry, or the topsoil degradation.

To get one Joule out of corn ethanol, the US is burning more than one Joule of oil. This is probably the main reason corn subsidies are so popular politically. They serve the oil barons, mega farms, and big agriculture firms like Monsanto.

On top of that, modern farming practices degrade topsoil over time. It's gotten a bit better than the Dust Bowl days, but we're still burning through topsoil at crazy rates, and it is beyond current technology to manufacture new topsoil.

So, ethanol corn is like heating your house by dumping gas on a field and burning it to boil water. Then you carry the water inside. There only difference is the number of levels of indirection.

The last I checked, it took less energy to make a solar panel than the expected lifetime output of the panel. So, at least you can power solar factories (in theory) with solar. There's still the problem of the environmental impact of rare earth refining, but at least it's a second order issue, and not like the first order issues corn ethanol has.

(Note that not all ethanol farming is as dumb as what the US does: For example, Brazil has had a net positive energy industry from sugar ethanol for a while. They "just" have to clear cut the rain forest to replace the farmland that house of cards is destroying.)

> The last I checked, it took less energy to make a solar panel than the expected lifetime output of the panel.

An order of magnitude less.

Even ignoring all non renewable consumption in growing the corn to be turned into ethanol it is still going towards an incredibly polluting infrastructure.

While each solar panel is a small step towards more and better electrification

But in this case, isn't the whole pitch that the agent has access to all your data (and the network!) so it can fluidly perform any task you ask of it?

Either the agent needs to be a superuser, with all the attendant risks... or you go the Windows Vista route and constantly prompt users to approve every single access need, which we've all seen how that turns out.