~150 students in the class, so they were all a blur.

This was also a few years before the web took hold, so I could not have "Google-stalked" her even if I had been so inclined.

I do remember my fellow TA's name! But that's probably not surprising.

She certainly wasn't penalized, but I don't remember if she was given credit for her answer to Q2.

iirc, the student stopped attending my recitation after that.

I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end.

- One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions.

- There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for consistency).

- We re-assembled the exams and returned them to the students.

- A few days after the exam, one of "my" students (she attended my recitation) came to me with her exam and explained that I had incorrectly graded question 2.

- I told her that I didn't grade question 2, so she had to go take it up with "TA # 2"

- A few hours later, "TA #2" pays me a visit and she (TA#2) is annoyed. She tells me, "Your student is trying to pull a fast one. She answered Q2 incorrectly. She erased her answer and put in the correct answer and she wants it re-graded"

- I briefly defended the student and said something like, "Why would she do that... and how could you even know?"

- "TA#2" responded with "... because I photocopied all of the student responses after I graded them."

- Then I felt like a piece of shit for doubting my fellow TA. And felt even worse being naive enough to not be suspicious.

- "TA#2" and I brought all of this info up with the prof. who was running the course.

- We were told that the situation would be handled by an Honor Committee or something like that. We forwarded the information to the committee, but no one spoke to us and we were not allowed to participate in the deliberations.

- After about a week, all we were told was that the student was able to explain the "discrepancy" between her exam and the photocopy.

To this day, I have no idea what that student could have possibly said to explain her actions.

After that, I started photocopying every damned scrap of paper that I graded.

edits for clarity. The student did not get a zero on the exam, nor was she booted from the course. I don't remember if she was given credit for Question 2, but the TA and I were both expecting her to be tossed, which obviously didn't happen.

but sometimes being 19 is difficult in that way.

Thank you.

I was thinking about what you said w/r/t the proximal issue (gambling in prediction markets) and my 1st though was "why is this a big deal? If you're not an insider, just don't participate in these markets ... and then the insiders don't have a counterparty to fleece."

But I thought a little more about and I think you're right. Insider's fleecing others in prediction markets just erodes trust everywhere. And we need a considerable amount of trust in people we don't know for society to function properly.

I don't know the owner at my local hardware store, but I trust that he won't sell me shoddy tools. The same goes for every societal interaction. We need to trust people we don't know. If that gets eroded, we go back a several centuries.

The rest is irrelevant to what has been threatened.

edit. to be clear, the rest of your post is offensive in that it implies that under a different genetic lineage, the threats would be justified. I can't believe I have to even write this.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -GB Shaw

I don't fully agree with the quotation from Shaw, but there's some truth to it. And I suspect a common quality of the billionaire class is ruthless unreasonableness -- and considerable luck.

The only thing I can add (regarding the motivations of people willing to invest with a fraudster) is that many people invest with the belief that they'll make money because they are just part of the scam and they assume there's a greater fool somewhere down the line.

But that's probably obvious.

$99.85 at Sigma-Aldrich

* My MacMini was constantly beachballing and, unfortunately, it took me a long time to realize that there was a problem with the device.

* I now have a 2023 MBP that screams like a "Formula Un" racing car.

I suspect you have a faulty device.

edit: Just saw that you live far away from an Apple store. I imagine you could mail it in for some type of service, but obviously, that's not optimal if you have no immediate replacement.

there's no obvious word searching. he's always been simplistic and unencumbered by the need for logical consistency. he was never a word smith. he has his stock phrases (eg, "many people are saying..."), which he uses as a crutch, but also to great effect.

as someone who HAS seen dementia from a to z, I don't see it here.

he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."

Don't forget sailing and equestrian.

In general, I agree, but I wouldn't want to ascribe malfeasance ("making shit up") as the dominant problem.

I've seen two types of problems with references.

1. The reference is dead, which means I can't verify or refute the statement in the Wikipedia article. If I see that, I simply remove both the assertion and the reference from the wiki article.

2. The reference is live, but it almost confirms the statement in the wikipedia article, but whoever put it there over-interpreted the information in the reference. In that case, I correct the statement in the article, but I keep the ref.

Those are the two types of reference errors that I've come across.

And, yes, I've come across these types of errors long before LLMs.

They love that one.

Somalis and Ilhan Omar.

Was talking to a Unitarian Universalist minister recently. He says his life is pretty much dealing with immigration issues for the past year.

He said there is considerable 'chatter' that the next significant target will be Maine because there is a large-ish Somali community there.

I have no idea how reliable that chatter is, so take it as a piece of gossip on the internet.