Fission fragment rocket engines are also (theoretically) extremely efficient.. using the particles that come out of the reaction directly as a high-velocity exhaust stream.
Practical for many missions, just not for sending humans in person to other planets. For example, consider a mission to deliver a telescope out past 550AU so that it can use the whole sun as a gravitational lens. That’s more than 11× further than Pluto, but a fission fragment drive could get the telescope out there in about the amount of time it took New Horizons to fly past Pluto.
Reminds me of how every random electronic item would seemingly pick up audible interference from nearby GSM phones. Nonlinear components would involuntarily modulate the RF signal.
When close enough, and especially when GSM antennas are mis-tuned it's perfectly possible to turn on the ESD protection diodes on low voltage inputs. For 1.8v IOs with weak current driven pull-ups you can trip the TTL threshold hysteresis.
I saw this once in a pre-production cell phone where tact-switch IO inputs were being spuriously activated. Figuring out that part of the UI required pushing physical buttons, suddenly made sense of "why do your batteries only last an hour".
You can't just handwave the fact that we're requiring what probably amounts to two orders of magnitude more discipline and self control out of students than we've ever done before. The educational system will collapse under this.
I'm not seeing how it requires any more self control than not copying another student's work or asking them for the answer. It's basically the same thing. We're also talking about adults here. They understand if they're cheating.
The difference is huge. Put yourself in the shoes of a student.
The student you're copying from won't be sitting next to you for the rest of your career. The LLM probably will be, and you'll be probably expected to use it, so why not use it here as well?
All your peers are doing it too, and look at all the cool things they're doing while you're struggling with the basics. And what if the LLMs keep improving at a high rate? What if being able to use them efficiently turns out to be a more important skill than what you're being taught anyways?
Because you're paying a lot of money and opportunity cost to learn how to do something. No one needs the assignment. It's there for you to learn. You were given the assignment for you. Any adult should be able to understand this. We're not talking about 7 year olds asking why they need to learn to multiply when a calculator can do it better than them. These are 20 year olds. If they don't have the maturity for this, a university should not be accepting them.
Being able to use LLMs efficiently isn't a specific skill. It's a reflection of your ability to articulate what you want, which is a reflection of your understanding of the world, which is what you're in school to build. Terence Tao can get an LLM to do math better than I can. I can probably get one to build software better than he can.
And you can still use one to do cool things like your peers. Just not your assignments, the purpose of which is literally to teach you the basics that you're struggling with and that you're there to learn in the first place.
This is like why don't you copy out of the back of the book or look up proofs on the internet. It's all there, but doing that completely misses the point of why you're there.
This only makes any sense if youre happy dropping most folks from higher education.
You want adults to be very disciplined and rational. That sounds great but are most of the adults in your own life experience at this level? They certainly aren't for me (I'm not sure I am at this level).
If I recall correctly, there was a mandatory ENGR 101 class that all of the different engineering fields had to take at my school, and on the first day, the lecturer said somewhere around half (might've been more, might've been fewer, I don't remember anymore) of the students in the hall were not going to complete the degree. So yeah, most folks dropping sounds about right.
And it's not even about discipline; it's lying. If you're not going to do the work, just don't do the work. Don't turn it in. Pretty much every syllabus ever says that turning in work you did not do is grounds for failing the class and possibly expulsion.
And why would we want to pass these people through? Then when they come interview with someone like me, I'm still going to find out within like a minute of talking to them that they didn't actually learn anything, and they won't get hired. Do I want to work with somebody incompetent? No. Do I want to work with somebody dishonest? Definitely no. Those both make my job more difficult to have around. So then they end up with a bunch of debt complaining about how they don't have a job.
That reminds of those old belt-driven ceiling fan systems. You'd have a single motor and a system of belts arranged on the ceiling to drive an array of ceiling fans. I think that'd be a super charming feature to bring back in bars and cafés.
I've sometimes thought of making a YouTube series where the foundations of precision are created as increasingly precise artifacts, building on each other and following the history. Something like the "Primitive Technology" channel but for machine tools.
It follows a somewhat similar premise, though it's obviously a work of fiction, and animated. Still, the progression of rebuilding all of the world's technology from scratch is very detailed and impressive.
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