How? There’s no law requiring software developers to have a degree, but employers often still only accept people who do.
Yair Halberstadt
Karma: 2,963
Note this would be illegal (under the term that requires you to provide all resources specifically relating to the exam as opposed to the subject in general to external students).
It would also cause students to appeal, and the statistics would be obvious enough that the appeals committee would investigate, ask for the mark scheme, and would quickly find on the students side because the paper clearly contains arbitrary details designed to do this.
Note there’s a lot of things that are like this in law, where people could in theory cheat, possibly even within the letter of the law, but they don’t because the courts throw the book at them when they do.
And how exactly are universities a good signifier of that? Note I took an external degree from the university of London, which even if universities were a good signifier of that, this one definitely wasn’t, and it did not in any way impact my ability to get a job. Noone cared.
As stated in the OP, I expect this to be the end result of the regulations I suggest. The advantage of this approach is that for now MIT can carry on doing it’s thing instead of forcing a hard switch over where you stop it being able to assess is students without yet having an equivalently respected replacement.
How to end credentialism
If Mikhail spends 100 days proving the theorem, and fails, that acts as evidence the theorem is false, so the optimal strategy changes.
Indeed this is always the optimal strategy. Attempt to prove it true till the chance of it being true is less than 50%, then switch.
Under this method you should start off by spending 122 days trying to prove it true, then continuously alternating, so testing the oracle doesn’t cost you anything at all.
Additionally for modern tools you might be able to continuously track machine settings and include that in the training data.
The particular example given (architecture) doesn’t really make sense IMO:
If you’re building something and want to save money on architecture, the current solution is to take a boilerplate design, tweak it to the current plot and local building code, and build it. Either AI can do that tweaking well, in which case great, or it can’t in which case the architectural costs are fairly low compared to the total cost of the building that it really makes no sense to cut corners there.
If you’re doing something bespoke, you’ll want something that works, and if the architecture firm you use is cheaper than other bespoke firms, but the final product is subpar, you’ll sue. Or at the very least not use them again.
Now this is a nitpick, but I think it might largely apply to the wider point: when you dig into the details it doesn’t really make sense.
Interesting!
I wonder what results you get for Gemini 2.5 pro. It’s COT seems much more structured than other thinking models and I wonder if that increases or decreases the chance it’ll mention the hint.
Accountants use features of excel that are not available in the cloud (e.g. VBA) all the time.
You are lucky that you don’t need these features (and that’s great for you), and assuming that therefore nobody has a legitimate reason to use Windows. This is just a really silly blind spot. Excel is just one of a huge amount of software, used day in and day out by a huge number of people (many of whom are self employed so not using an enterprise laptop) for which Windows is the only sensible option.
That’s fine for one offs, but if, like many, your job is essentially “use Excel” then the simplest solution is to just use windows, not mess around with emulators or VMs.
A lot of people need to use software that’s only available on Windows. I don’t, and on the rare occasion I need to check Windows behaviour I use a cloud instance, so I use a Chromebook instead.
Although there’s at least a few Jewish born or half Jewish cardinals.
(it was a joke, yes 😀)
On the other hand, we know that Jews are very prominent whenever you’re selecting for competence, yet almost no Cardinals are Jewish, suggesting that maybe competence isn’t that important to be a cardinal 🤷?
The case for creating unaligned superintelligence
It is perfectly possible that they directly exchange stocks but denominate prices (and wages, contracts etc.) in a much more stable unit. The bank takes care of working out how much stock to transfer to make a given fiat denominated payment.
The quantity of lean code in the world is orders of magnitude smaller than the quantity of python code. I imagine that most people reporting good results are using very popular languages. My experience using Gemini 2.5 to write lean was poor.
Kolmogorov complexity? Your solution takes more bits to specify than the one in the solution (at least if you’ve already defined a standard library with concepts like primes)?
Why isn’t the fact software developers spend 3 years not learning all that much (far less than they would in 6 months on the job) not a problem?