MengerSponge

Bro. The Acropolis is a temple.

They saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.

Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.

They learned from Scoble's glasshole picture https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/yes-you-can-w...

It's already hard to tell, because chunky sunglasses don't change in volume much when you add electronics and optics. You kind of have to know what you're looking for to clock even these: https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/electronics/RW7002ray-ban%20meta...

I've seen videos of flock cameras installed improperly (missing a breakaway device) right next to roads. The city must be able to remove unsafe devices!

https://highways.dot.gov/safety/local-rural/maintenance-sign...

I'm curious what those conversations in Meta sound like:

A> People are calling our omnipresent surveillance technology "Pervert glasses"

B> Are the people who wear them perverts?

A> Most probably aren't.

They care about rheology because that expertise enables fracking, and they're smart enough to understand that you have to fund basic science to get (valuable) applied science.

It's horrifying. I don't remember acid rain or CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer, but I'm good enough at pattern recognition to see it playing out again.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...

Doesn't a fiber tether give its drone desktop-class computing?

"Is you taking notes on a criminal f-cking conspiracy?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZLoMrRgFFE

Calculus exists, but analytic solutions generally don't. Gaudi's chains and weights serve as an incredibly elegant mechanical computer that were only surpassed in the last few decades by CAD. Designers used mechanical splines until the advent of CAD in the 70's/80's.

There's a frozen custard shop in my town. They sometimes do silly things like including raw sliced strawberries that just turn into ice shards, but their vanilla and chocolate absolutely beat the pants off anything I can find in the grocery.

Do they have an insignia or patch? Can we buy it?

That's prior art if there ever was prior art. It's just unicode U+1D54F

AC is far more efficient than most heating methods, but there isn't the same level of censure applied to traditional heating technologies. If you listen, people talk about AC like it's inherently polluting, like it's something to moralize.

Europe historically has not been this hot, but they regularly have heat waves. I remember a 40C heat wave more than a decade ago! That's enough time to add emergency infrastructure, unless you're hoping to snuff old people. When you get your third hundred year flood in a decade it's time to update your priors.

CSAM?

Good idea! Nothing bad could possibly come from advocating for centralization of academic assessment! Let's give more authority to a handful of private publishers who adapt their curricula to the whims of Texas!

It's not just because "it would just show how terrible they actually are"

There are schools with severe penalties for cheating (Army/Navy, Haverford, Davidson), but most aren't set up for that. Professors didn't self-select to be prosecutors, and we didn't spend decades becoming world experts to then become cops.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you let yourself start blaming students, you open a pretty corrosive path of moral judgement. Students are clever, and they're making choices informed by what they see in the world. Don't blame them for being unwilling to fail a class that cost a down payment on a house. Don't blame them for seeing powerful people get away with cheating and trying to do the same.

Kallus is right: qualitative assessment is an adversarial problem. Build the assessment correctly, and all of those previous points become moot. By clearly establishing and enforcing the rules you make it more fair to boot.

Understanding 90-95% of someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own ;)

It's hard to verify that you understand someone else's work at 100%, but it's reasonable for an expert to tell once they've built it themselves, right?

The reasons for not marking it are ignorance and fraud. Both are terrible looks for an academic.

If it's a new article it should say something new.

You can save your reader's time and your own effort by quoting some of those words, or by citing all of them. That trims almost 500 superfluous words from your paper, and what's left will be better, which respects your reader.

Course credit is not the same as professional certifications. You can apply past expertise/work to as many different certifications as you can manage.

Submitting previously graded work for a new course wastes your own time. It also wastes the professor's time, because they assigned that writing for you to develop a specific skill, and you're trying to not practice whatever they're trying to teach you.

If you have a perfectly matched essay to the assignment, you should talk to the professor about how the assignment can be adapted.

Shades of

"You can't go to the sun! You'll burn alive!"

"Duh! That's why we're going at night!"

It's bad manners and a waste of people's time and attention to present previously published work as novel.

Repeating a phrase or two in a document's introduction isn't going to raise flags from any serious people, but copying data, analysis, or large swaths of text? That's a paddlin'.

I'm not sure what's happening to Germany, but I suspect fax machines are involved.

Highly recommend "If Books Could Kill"

https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social

It really is all the same book.

Theologically their support for Israel is rooted in antisemitism. They need Israel to trigger the end times so Jews and other nonbelievers will be punished and ultimately destroyed.

If you pry and ask the right questions, they'll admit that they don't want this to happen, because they really want all those Jews and nonbelievers to convert and be saved. This is also antisemitism, but it's wrapped up in a millenia-old death cult.

I'm at a public southeastern R2. Not selective. Mostly regional catchment. Most of our students have to learn how to be good students their first year or two.

We're making major changes in course structure as a result, so if things go well we won't have enough data to measure any kind of meaningful trend

No.

No. CS majors take a different physics sequence at my institution.

The proximate cause is the wide release of somewhat effective AI tooling. When the tools weren't able to do or explain, students didn't use them. Now the tools are somewhat competent, so students do use them.

The students didn't substantially change from Fall 2025 to Spring 2026. You can have whavever gatekeeping hobby-horse you want, but it's not germane to this particular conversation.