What they think these tip lines will give: “My professor is dangerously woke, he used someone’s pronouns today and is clearly some kind of terrorist”

What they’ll actually get: about 1000 variations of “This course is too hard; I shouldn’t have to attend the classes to pass”

Source: I teach at a university and we get a few if these every year; “ghosts” who think that paying a fee magically entitles them to a passing grade regardless of the quality of work they submit.

“Does morality exist if we have no free will” just entered the chat.

Old enough to remember a world that smelled like an ashtray. Old enough to have played sonic 1 on a Japanese cart on release. Old enough to remember the wild west days of the web, before it became a corporate wasteland.

Funnily enough, if you actually follow “work to the job, not the clock” you get more work done, and you generally go home early.

You’re also less likely to quit, and more likely to develop and share good practice.

The top secret way to defeat trump - one single cast of mend buttcrack.

That’s ok, it’ll take them a while to write them out by hand, and they can really think on what utter clowns they are while they do it.

Back to hand written manuscripts only!

Story is clearly fiction, everyone didn’t clap at the end.

Agreed, so when are we getting clear glass doors, and can we take all these curtains down?

To be fair, the site is absolutely hilarious.

If it gets swallowed as training data it could easily poison an entire generation of models. Indeed, someone amoral could feed misinformation in and have it amplified…

I wonder if we can convince the bots that deleting system32 fixes any problem.

Gonna need that book reference - I’m teaching maths for finance and economics next year…

The article site itself is a good example of what’s wrong with the internet.

The guardian used a “pay or ok” model for cookie acceptance.

Archive link to avoid that nonsense: https://archive.ph/pHNdt

The comments section:

Sure, might be a good pilot scheme for work that is societally enriching, but not necessarily profitable.

The internet has many strange rules, one of the unwritten ones is “if little Timmy wants titties, little Timmy is going to find titties”.

No matter how you hard you try, you’re not going to stop this phenomenon. You’ll just push kids to sites that refuse to comply (usually the dodgy ones), or inhabit grey areas (a lot of streamer content counts as softcore), or they’ll get Nd a workaround (current VPN situation), or they’ll just gaslight an AI model into generating porn.

Trying to block access isn’t viable as there is always a work around, what is needed is someone sitting down with a kid to put it into context. That’s not the job of the government, that’s the job of a parent.

I’ll put this thought out here for anyone saying “they voted for Brexit”.

Given the age divide on that vote, most folks who voted for it are enjoying retirement, or are just plain dead.

Brexit is a root cause, however simple corporate greed and mismanagement are also a huge factor of the UK’s dysfunction. Keep in mind, most of our large companies are owned by the US or countries in Europe (so the profits vanish overseas); a lot of our housing acts as an investment for the wealthy of other nations (driving the cost of living crisis); we’ve also got the “north/south” divide, where all the wealth and investment stats in and around London.

We’re also exiting over a decade under a party who see poverty as a moral failing, and voted in a party that lacks the balls to make the changes needed to begin reversing these issues.

So, all things said, there’s a lot more at play than just the act of national self harm that was Brexit.

So, if your field appears instantly/imminently monetisable, then the private sector is an option. However, the wider benefits of your research are VERY unlikely to reach the wider public in your lifetime. Yes, you will basically be working to make someone else rich. However, this kind of grant is very likely to succeed in academic settings as universities love patents.

If you’re doing abstract or fundamental research, you’re pretty much out of luck - the private sector does not want anything to do with this. However, it’s little better in the academic sector because you have to spend almost all your time chasing grants, or teaching topics outside your expertise (i.e. the ones industry sees immediate value in) to survive.

In short, there is a lot of options to finish things (because everyone loves intellectual property as an asset), but very few to develop them (no-one likes to pay for the groundwork).

“I want to make the world a better place at no real benefit to myself”

“Ok, but only if you beg us for the money”

Modern academia in a nutshell