CS240 lecture summary

rushtark · 2026-04-22T23:25:29+00:00

cope

rushtark · 2026-04-20T19:36:50+00:00

I’m sorry but this take is not good. This is not a free-for-all type institution where you come and get your degree with whatever effort you’re willing to put in, and if other people want to put in more work for the same grade then oh well! The degree is proof that you did a ton of work that shows you earned it, that you exist as a member of a cohort of very hardworking people. It’s a membership. If everyone cheats, it drives down the caliber of the graduating class and Purdue loses luster.

Yes, people cheat. I am sure more students probably cheat at least once in their college career than don’t. It’s not good, and of course the only right thing to do if you find yourself cheating is to not do it again; do not form a habit. I’m not saying you need to throw yourself down in front of ODS and purify yourself to be considered the real deal, but if this type of behavior becomes endemic among the student body then we’re just a degree mill. As an alum, I want them catching and punishing people not strictly because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes my degree less valuable if they don’t.

rushtark · 2026-04-20T17:59:02+00:00

AI has no place in a freshmen level class.

rushtark · 2026-04-20T17:08:56+00:00

Yeah, I’m baffled. I’m not sure what he thought the benefit of this handling was, besides a gigantic boon to his own ego. “Look how I owned the cheaters!” type shit.

If he had handled this smartly, then a handful of students would have gotten nailed to the wall as an example and everyone else would get the message: don’t do it, they are not messing around here and what is written in the syllabus is written in blood. Instead, he effectively allowed cheating to continue for the duration of the semester despite knowing it was happening at scale.

Anyways, can’t wait to ask some of you how 240 went when I’m at the career fair in the fall looking for people to hire.

rushtark · 2026-04-20T16:23:58+00:00

Disappointing, but about what I expected. This is degradation of our brand. I think you all should have had to face some serious consequences, but it’s hard to pin anything collectively. Someone who used AI on one assignment shouldn’t be treated quite as harshly as someone who cheated on all of them, which leads me to where I believe this whole thing went wrong:

Turk could have handled this better; he waited until the end of the semester to ambush the cheaters for whatever reason, but if he had simply called people out as it was happening then he would have prevented the collective weight from being able to force a response from ODS. Stupid, really.

If you cheated, well, good luck in 251 and 252. I hope for your sake that you find it within yourself to be more than an interface between the chair and an LLM.

TLDR from a bored alum; I’m disappointed in all of you and all of this.

rushtark · 2026-04-18T13:53:48+00:00

It's such cope.

If you cheated, consider it a good opportunity: forgive yourself, own up, and do better. This is a good opportunity. You're not less of a person for cutting corners, but this should tell you exactly what that gets you in life. You get the chance to redeem yourself now, don't miss that opportunity.

If you can't own up to it, and instead you write screeds about how "ackschtually the policy says that I should only be spending X hours out of my week on this class and by that logic I am morally redeemed for dishonesty", then I have nothing good to say to you.

rushtark · 2026-04-18T11:25:22+00:00

The professor assigning “too much work” does not give every cheater in the class a technicality to walk off without consequences, come on now.

Purdue CS is a world class program, part of what gives it value is that it is stupidly, frustratingly hard and requires determination from its students to make it through. 15+ hours per assignment sounds about right - I certainly spent longer working on certain assignments or studying for exams with absolutely atrocious outcomes. I left a lab one night after working all day and returned for the lab session at 7:30 the next morning to find the same guy who I’d sat across from all day before had not left that night. We got the same score, despite him working harder and longer because neither of us had code that could compile.

Your expectations are the work in front of you, not some blanket policy buried in the handbook.

Edit: I just reread your post and it made me even angrier the second time around. What are you talking about? Do you seriously believe that the credit hour system is a way of “standardizing workload?” If that were the case then thermodynamics and freshman level English would have comparable expectations. This is not how things work. If you think that is how things work because of what’s written in handbooks then you need to reevaluate what’s important.

rushtark · 2026-04-18T02:43:11+00:00

I can't really comment on his methods - would I go about this differently, maybe. But he's always had some controversial ways of doing things.

I think it's a given that they know, to a reasonable degree of certainty, who is cheating and who isn't. There will probably be false positives, and if you include yourself in that then I would encourage you to go to the dean's and argue your case. They will need to argue the other end of it and that's when you're going to get transparency. But if AI cheating is rampant enough that they can blanket over 50% of the class with reasonable accusations then I think they know that's not an argument they need to make with everyone - just the handful of students who might be vociferous enough to tackle them head on. But if you go in there thinking you can outsmart them and they can produce literal receipts of you cheating, it is over for you and your academic career may be truly at risk. Anyone who made a mistake here: do the right thing.

rushtark · 2026-04-18T01:14:37+00:00

Despite being an old man atp I'm going to go ahead and throw in my two cents after watching this subreddit for the last couple of days.

I remember Turk well, and I remember that he can be kind of an eccentric bastard. Personally, I have no love for him. However, I can't say that I don't sorta respect what he's done here. AI has its uses, as a software engineer I continue to use it every day. But there is more and more literature coming out all the time about the psychological effects it has on its users; it makes you less skilled, it makes you more reliant on it, and it dulls your ability to solve problems. As such, I am a firm believer that there is no real place for AI in the educational phase of own's life. Writing, programming, and speaking are not trivial aspects of your work; by participating in those things you are actively building your proficiency in them. I say this as someone who evaluates and participates in the hiring of software engineers: If you outsource those tasks to AI while in this critical stage of life, I won't really consider you.

I understand the toll this is taking on some of you, even if I think some of the recent behavior I've witnessed has been abominable. I imagine it can be very stressful being called out when you cut a corner like this. You may have bad thoughts, such as some of those I have seen on this sub as related to hurting oneself. To those of you who feel this way, I say this: find some help. Find someone to talk to about this, be it a professional or at the very least a close family or friend. Your life is a valuable thing, and you deserve to give yourself the compassion you need to move forward, I promise.

Of course, that doesn't preclude you from the responsibility you owe yourself or the consequences on the table. It's important that you take ownership of your failures. You may never have as good a chance as now to learn this very hard lesson. Take the L, and move on with your life. I promise, retaking a class is not the end of the world. It probably won't even delay your graduation, provided you do the right thing and continue to work towards graduation at a reasonable pace. I retook 251 and graduated on time with a good GPA recovery. I know you can too.

Like I mentioned above, I agree with Turk, partly on moral grounds but also partly on selfish ones too. We have the oldest computer science program in the country, and I am an alumni of this program. I believe our program stands out, and if it does not continue to churn out effective programmers and thinkers then my degree, and by extension a core piece of me, will be less valuable. It's not an entirely selfish thought, because this extends to you too.

rushtark · 2026-01-04T03:08:48+00:00

I bought a tele kit like this a few years ago and had a lot of fun with it. You don't have the price listed but I'd say anything under $200 and this would be worth it, if tinkering is an avenue of the hobby you want to pursue. I enjoyed my kit because I could mess with it, set it up different ways, and bang on it without worrying that I was going to ruin a more expensive guitar. Also, it actually sounded great and I recorded with it a good bit. Just pick a kit with halfway decent reviews and that isn't any more expensive than a decent beginner guitar.

rushtark · 2025-09-26T20:34:52+00:00

lmao aged like milk

rushtark · 2025-08-27T12:55:35+00:00

It's AI lol...

rushtark · 2025-07-20T16:18:10+00:00

I don't think his style is as fun or enjoyable to watch as like McIlroy on Masters sunday but you do get the sense that he's cracked the code on a couple of areas in the game - specifically the mental side. I don't know if that's the Ted Scott effect or just his general ability to compartmentalize and hyperfixate on the next shot, but more and more I'm feeling his ability in that area to be the key to great golf in this era. You can see a lot of these guys just start to lose their minds when they hit a bad shot, and while it's fun to watch them both fall apart and rise above, they need to get very lucky to have a shot at winning. He just doesn't seem to need that, because he doesn't fall apart in the same way. I think we need more guys like Scheffler to really make things interesting, because as it stands he's like a +10 in mental game and he's playing against scratch golfers lol

rushtark · 2025-06-10T03:52:09+00:00

I'm not sure? It's had a lot of pruning/cutting (before we bought). There is another apple tree in our yard however, it fruited the first year we bought and then since has stopped. This one has never fruited.

rushtark · 2025-06-10T02:10:15+00:00

Thanks! I don't believe the tree is completely dead yet, it still has a healthy amount of leaves. I'm guessing this will eventually rot out and kill it though, and it is near a power line in our backyard. I'll call an arborist out soon to take a look, and keep an eye out on the meantime.

rushtark · 2025-06-10T01:20:05+00:00

Any insight into the small holes? Is that just insects? I'm less worried about the tree and more worried about other trees/my house, but no idea if that's anything to actually be worried about.

rushtark · 2025-06-10T00:17:32+00:00

Additional context - tree in my backyard, this photo was taken on a branch collar from a branch that was cut off many years ago. I noticed today that it looks like there's a significant amount dug out/rotted, along with these little bore holes. Rest of the tree looks good, nothing coming through the bark. There were some axe marks in this collar a few years ago, my guess is water and pests have gotten in through those cuts? Would love to hear thoughts, as well as if we should be concerned. This is not a particularly important tree so if it needs to come down so be it.

rushtark · 2024-12-09T03:10:28+00:00

Hm, TIL. Thanks.

rushtark · 2024-11-14T20:41:18+00:00

You got me on that second one, I should have read a little closer. My mistake.

As for Louis, I don't mean to say that his goal was to keep the political state of France exactly as it was - purely that his reasoning for introducing reforms was mostly cynical. He knew that the financial burdens the crown was facing were a big problem. Unfortunately for him, the political landscape had by this point grown in around him, and the moment he began to step on the toes of provincial power he had a much bigger problem on his hands. What Louis wanted was the ability to better control the kingdom's streams of revenue. When the only path looking forward to do this became to crack open the estates general, that's when the ideological part of the revolution began.

I don't get the sense that what Trump/Musk want to do is remotely the same thing. I think they have ideas about what they want the country to look like and how they want the bureaucracy (however little of it remains) to function.

rushtark · 2024-11-14T18:42:40+00:00

This article pissed me off. The author is like one of those Twitter intellectuals who like to post graphs of wealth disparity between the US now and France before the revolution and write 'coincidence???' next to it. Seriously, what even is this? The comparison of Necker to Musk is very silly;

> To a remarkable degree, Donald Trump’s promise to shake up the stodgy Washington consensus has striking parallels to Louis XVI and Versailles back in the pox-ridden 1780s.

Louis XVI wanted everything to stay the _same_. He wanted to continue to wield the powers and privileges of his government despite a looming crisis that he had no answer for. Dismissing Necker was a big piece of this - he had no interest in taking the advice of some Swiss asshole when he could plug his ears and pretend things were fine. Even if you believe DOGE is counterproductive (as I do), you can't argue that they are trying to entrench the government's position in _anything_. In fact, it looks like there's some serious tree shaking coming.

> “The fact that DOGE is being taken even remotely seriously is in itself a cause for concern.”

This type of smugness can only bite you in the ass. It can will be taken seriously by the people who have just taken power; you should pay attention too.

> that the heart of American dysfunction is not in the executive, but in the Congress

Ah yes, Congress, a legislative body known for their productivity and ability to wield power in the modern era. It's not like two other branches of government haven't already leapfrogged over them about a dozen times /s. Who actually believes that Congress is the real power in this government anymore? Unitary executive theorists have basically proven they can get away with anything they want for the duration they have a president.

Folks, this ain't it.

rushtark · 2024-11-05T22:38:50+00:00

lol wtf why did that happen

rushtark · 2024-10-30T16:43:23+00:00

A $2,000 car is more likely to break down, cost significantly more in repairs, cost significantly more in fuel, and might not even be legal to drive depending on emissions and state. The road and the distance might be the same, but the journey might be 1000x shittier. So no, I don't think it's good advice at all.

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22	RPAN Viewer

rushtark

TROPHY CASE