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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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So we have an even more sophisticated way for college students to cheat on tests? Seems to be the only useful thing so far

I was at a demo at work two days ago where a mid level engineer was showing some (very useful to the organization) results on data collection and analysis. At the end, he shows us how to extend it and add our own graphs etc, and he’s like “this python data analysis tooling might look messy and intimidating, but I had zero idea how to use it two days ago myself, and it’s all basically just a result of a long ChatGPT session, just look at this (he shows the transcript here)”.

This effectively means that if ChatGPT saved him half a day of work, then this generates hundreds of dollars for the company in extra productivity.

The thing is if you joke that the thing can effectively help students cheat you still imply its somewhere around the intelligence level of average college students, which certainly implies it is useful in ways that college students or recent grads can be.

Best current estimates are that College student IQ is about the population average of 100

I use o1 a bunch for coding, and it still gets things wrong a lot, I'd happily pay for something significantly better.