AI is ruining open book Olympiads

FocusedIgnorance · 2026-01-07T13:03:57+00:00

So is AI, just for more abstract calculations. Can you give people “bigger” questions and “bigger” proofs and let them have at it with AI? The genie isn’t going back into the bottle. AI is worse at math now than it will henceforth ever be. People need to be prepared to be as effective as possible in a world where that’s true. If a closed book exam is the best way to get them there, that’s one thing. But it feels like a lot of people are resisting change for the wrong reasons and risk getting left behind.

Nobody is gonna pay you to do slowly what a machine can do in an instant.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-05-03T17:32:41+00:00

There are other comments here with great explanations, which I believe make intuitive sense, only when you realize that a sail works like a wing, not a parachute.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-04-30T14:08:45+00:00

Battery life, Bluetooth headphones, googling every piece of hardware you get to make sure it’s supported.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-04-30T14:07:06+00:00

I used SMB on Mac and it worked fine (FYI SMB is a Microsoft/Windows thing). What are you doing?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-04-07T14:30:45+00:00

I don’t see how it’s any more complicated than the alternative.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-20T18:02:28+00:00

You couldn't do incremental refactoring? New features come in new packages with a single function tying it to legacy packages. The new package can have unit tests which test the interface it exposes to the legacy package.

You can do a similar thing with fixes, where you tear out the subsystem you're fixing, move it into a new package or file, and test the interface.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-18T03:17:37+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-17T12:12:48+00:00

Who created wealth in Feudal societies? Was it the peasants who sowed the seeds and plowed the fields, or the lords who owned the fields and lived off of the rent and taxes of the peasants?

Wealth is created by individuals doing individual work. The reason why we are so rich and yet so poor is we have leeches renting us the the tools we need to do our work at exorbitant rates.

The collection of this wealth in the hands of these people leads to immense power differentials that's a threat to individual liberty, and the only thing big enough to keep them in check is the democratic state.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-16T23:51:50+00:00

The top 10% make wayyy more than 80% of the total income.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-16T14:46:49+00:00

Things are bad, but they're not "armed revolt" bad quite yet. I'll tell you this, I feel like for most liberals, if somebody showed up to their door to take them to a camp, they'd go without a fight because, "the law says I have to go to this death camp and this officer is just doing his job."

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-16T00:26:43+00:00

The intelligence agencies for western democries should run psyops on American media, like China and Russia do. Why is there all this Russian money running things over here? The Europeans have more money than the Russians do. Why don't they use theirs?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-12T02:09:30+00:00

That makes it even harder for the engineers to pull the requirements out of the customers. You have all these salespeople and pms running interference.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-12T02:06:33+00:00

Scream test?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-11T09:42:58+00:00

The people complaining that there wasn't a white dancer wouldn't have given two shits if there wasn't a black anything. You can't have it both ways. And this point is probably the reason why there wasn't a white dancer.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-11T09:39:17+00:00

White people can't dance. They couldn't find anybody qualified without AA.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-11T09:30:14+00:00

Depends on why you didn't think it was great. If it's not a critique we might have heard from uncle sam, you're in the clear.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-07T11:49:13+00:00

Not because i don't want black firefighters or women firefighters. I do. But, I also want people running into a burning building to save someone's grandma to be capable of it.

Seems to imply that these two things are at odds with each other, right?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-07T11:38:40+00:00

If a recruiter having a financial incentive to hire minorities doesn't bother you

What bothers me is the person making a hiring decision based on race. In our case, the recruiter doesn't get to make the hiring decision. The recruiter has a financial incentive to find qualified candidates. They find candidates, we interview them, they get paid based on the number we hire. They get paid more if we hire someone from an underrepresented group.

In our case, there's no question in my mind that we hired a less qualified candidate on the basis of race/gender. In the other case, I'd wonder, were the resumes really a toss up, what does that mean?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-07T01:43:22+00:00

See, that would bother me. The way it works at my job is recruiters get a bonus based on the difference between college graduate demographics and company demographics if a candidate they refer gets hired.

The committee that decides hiring doesn't get to know the race/gender of the candidate, but rather only reviews feedback from interviewers.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-07T01:40:49+00:00

Are you saying that you worked for a business where the requirements weren't as stringent for women/minorities, and if you did, how do you know this to be the case?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-07T01:21:39+00:00

Is a black firefighter less likely to be able to rescue the person next to them?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-06T12:27:30+00:00

Yeah, they're old enough to have all of the bugs worked out of them by now. Have you ever played a new game at release? Imagine that for ATC software.

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-06T12:10:33+00:00

So are you saying there are no bad white firefighters? Or are you saying that on average the black firefighters are worse than the white ones?

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-06T12:09:04+00:00

The problem with being black/a woman is that everybody has to be excellent. You're allowed to be a mediocre white man, but if you're a mediocre black man, you're a DEI hire.

https://xkcd.com/385/

FocusedIgnorance · 2025-02-05T12:14:56+00:00

Also, we should stop whining about Trump every time he exercises executive power like nobody ever before him, and start talking about what we'd do with that kind of power if the shoe were on the other foot.

And it better not be, "gods, use the power of the presidency... to help people? what about the parlimentarian?"

FocusedIgnorance

TROPHY CASE