Stack Overflow had it's heyday, but by the time AI came around I already wasn't using it. Stack Overflow for a long time has been inundated with the kind of people who think everything is the XY problem[1], and arrogantly assume they know what your problem is better than you do. Stack Overflow was all-but-useless for at least 5 years before AI broke into the public eye.

[1] https://xyproblem.info/

And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense.

This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.

Yes, any university understands that many (most?) of their students are simply there for a diploma that opens up opportunities, and the parts of an institution that view it as a business are going to want to maintain the value of that product.

But the faculty of a university isn't typically in it for the money--in most fields you can make more money in industry than in education. A lot of teachers just want their students to learn, whether their students want to learn or not. Faculty senates aren't powerless in steering an institution, and sometimes knowingly make unprofitable decisions--something a lot of HN can't imagine or understand. ;P

And a lot of students are there for that--in fact some of the most profitable students are. Do you think a Saudi prince need a diploma to open up opportunities? No--they're there because they, or someone in their family, values something else about the institution, be it knowledge, networking, etc.

I'm not, that's why I said "Students are at school for a lot of [...] reasons".

> College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.

> For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.

Sure, but that's irrelevant:

1. A cheater is capable of not cheating when they're taking a proctored exam, but it doesn't make them honest--they'll just cheat later in life when given the opportunity.

2. People don't suddenly become cheaters when they're given the opportunity to cheat--the people who would cheat when an exam isn't proctored were going to cheat in other areas anyway.

Integrity and honesty are values, and it's pretty difficult to change people's values. I don't think either policy changes anyone's values. That's particularly true of integrity and honesty as those are how people behave when nobody's watching--if you watch and people know you're watching, everyone behaves honestly.

If you want to change people's values, I'd argue universities are pretty poorly-situated to do that. Philosophers are better at finding ethical ideologies that justify unethical behaviors than they are at getting anyone to give a shit about what behaviors they find ethical or unethical. Changing people's values is best achieved by a society that rewards values we uphold and gives us leaders that embody those values. What we have for leadership is pedophiles and grifters, and a lot of those came from our most prestigious educational institutions.

Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.

And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.

All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).

The hallucination percentage of referenced sources such as Wikipedia is much better than AI, and for many sources such as the NYT or Al Jazeera, it's easier to tell what human bias would cause someone to maybe be inaccurate--we're leveraging our existing knowledge because we deal with other humans all the time.

AI, on the other hand hallucinates in unpredictable ways.

> Learn how to use AI properly just like any tool and you can benefit.

Sure. But the claim I was disagreeing with was that it's easy to use AI ("properly" being implied). I'm saying it's NOT EASY to use AI properly. In fact, it's so difficult that even intelligent people can't do it, and many more won't do it.

This was the original stated purpose, yes. But this works poorly in practice. Hypothesized frictionless tooling that would make it easy to make purchases with crypto has not emerged.

Nowadays it's held more like a speculative asset with value that comes from scarcity and demand, much like gold (though gold has some industrial application which Bitcoin does not).

It's actually not.

It's easy to get an AI to say a lot about a subject, but that doesn't mean anything the AI said was true. There's a significant risk that the AI has simply hallucinated the information, and now you "know" a bunch of false ideas about the subject, which is worse than not knowing anything about it.

1. Your experience is likely an outlier--I'm not saying your experience doesn't matter, I'm saying that your experience and experiences like yours are likely not represented significantly in the data.

2. Other people with outlier experiences may have different needs, i.e. an intervention which improves one reader's experience may make another reader's experience worse.

I did some web accessibility work which involved interviewing a number of disabled clients, and the ultimate conclusion was that we needed to make our site colors configurable. One group with visual impairment needed high contrast, while a few clients with sensory issues were unable to use the site for long when high contrast was used because it was overstimulating. The lower-contrast modes also had issues for colorblind clients, although these clients were less common in the user pool.

In typical American corporate fashion, the entire research results were scrapped when a donor wanted us to use color schemes related to our brand, despite overwhelmingly positive feedback from users on our accessibility configurability.

The long conclusion seems to be that all the conventional wisdom on the subject is not borne out by the empirical evidence. So why spend so much time explaining all the the conventional wisdom? I don't need you to tell me about 100 people's opinions just to tell me they're all wrong.

Yes, I've heard that exact wording from cops.

From normal people, the more common way of saying it is along the lines of "well I don't really care if the cops see anything on my computer".

What's insane that people in 2026 still think tests slow you down.

It takes me maybe 40 hours (1 week) of coding to start receiving ROI from writing tests in a greenfield project, and by 80 hours I'm pretty sure I've saved more time from bugs and improved design due to TDD than I've spent writing the tests.

The ROI is even faster if I'm not the only developer on the project.

If your flagship product takes less time to develop than 40 hours, then your product is extremely vulnerable to being copied by another company, so your entire software project is a bad business idea.

So there really aren't many exceptions: either your project benefits from tests, or it's too easy a project to be a business.

So frankly, it's your comment lacking in cost/benefit analysis.

The "more on that later" was unit tests (also generated by Claude Code) and sample inputs and outputs (which is basically just unit tests by a different name).

This is... horrifically bad. It's stupidly easy to make unit tests pass with broken code, and even more stupidly easy when the test is also broken.

These "guardrails" are made of silly putty.

EDIT: Would downvoters care to share an explanation? Preferably one they thought of?

This is really the crux of it: why are you so insistent that we can only redesign roads? Why can we not redesign roads AND have people do community service?

An aside: red light cameras being illegal is such an unfortunate thing, but I really don't see a solution to that. My ideal world would have red light cameras that can only save the recording when they detect an infraction, so that everyone else's privacy is respected. But of course there's nobody I'd trust to implement, install, or use those cameras--law enforcement doesn't care about privacy--so we can't have red light cameras and have privacy.

There's no ethical justification for speeding--you're just okay with being unethical if it allows you to not have to learn patience.