Readit NewsLAsteNERD commented on AI's changed (is changing) college education theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/LAsteNERD
If I wanted to read an LLM-generated comment, I'd go to ChatGPT myself.
If the writing does the job it needs to do--in this case, a deft summary of an article--why is it better if it comes from a human vs. AI? Analysis, sure. But summary? This is the whole point of the article...do you actually prefer to read bad writing because it was written by a real person?
LAsteNERD commented on AI's changed (is changing) college education theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/LAsteNERD
The class of 2026 has had generative AI for their entire college career. What started as a novelty in 2022 has become second nature: surveys show >90% of undergrads now use AI for schoolwork, from drafting essays to summarizing readings.
For students, the motivation is pragmatic: AI saves time, reduces stress, and helps balance overwhelming academic and extracurricular demands. It’s less about “cheating” and more about survival in a system that prizes productivity and credentials. Professors, meanwhile, are scrambling—reverting to handwritten exams, shifting grading toward tests, or trying moral appeals. Yet many remain unaware of just how normalized AI has become on campus.
The result: higher ed has been fundamentally reshaped in just three years. Students expect project-based, real-world assignments that resist AI shortcuts. But with faculty stretched thin by budget cuts, research demands, and political headwinds, systemic redesign feels unlikely. For now, both students and professors face the same reality: a college education is what you make of it—AI included.
If you're wondering--yes, I used AI for the synopsis. Big question for me, is what does the future of education look like? How do kids get the skills they need to use AI, while still getting the skills they need to be skeptical of it?
Following last week’s discussion about LANSCE and dynamic imaging at the national labs, here’s a deeper look at a sibling system: pRad (proton radiography).
Los Alamos just ran Pagoda, an experiment probing why some detonations fail, using pRad—one of the few facilities anywhere that scientists can image high explosives in billionths of a second using near-light-speed protons (not x-rays).
Built after nuclear testing ended, pRad feeds critical data into stockpile certification models. But the system is aging. After 25 years and nearly 1000 experiments, it’s finally getting a major upgrade—Cold War hardware out, throughput doubling, and plutonium capability returning.
This is the kind of highly specialized, high-accountability work that likely helps keep DOGE out of the weapons side of the national labs.
Full story (great visuals, including images of the explosion at the bottom): https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/prad-future-sto...
Original discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798695
Discussion continues, with more on dynamic imaging and the labs, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44876919
Following last week’s discussion about LANSCE and dynamic imaging at the national labs, here’s a deeper look at a sibling system: pRad (proton radiography).
Los Alamos just ran Pagoda, an experiment probing why some detonations fail, using pRad—one of the few facilities anywhere that scientists can image high explosives in billionths of a second using near-light-speed protons (not x-rays).
Built after nuclear testing ended, pRad feeds critical data into stockpile certification models. But the system is aging. After 25 years and nearly 1000 experiments, it’s finally getting a major upgrade—Cold War hardware out, throughput doubling, and plutonium capability returning.
This is the kind of highly specialized, high-accountability work that likely helps keep DOGE out of the weapons side of the national labs.
Full story (great visuals, including images of the explosion at the bottom): https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/prad-future-sto...
LAsteNERD commented on Nvidia and AMD cut a revenue sharing deal with Trump fastcompany.com/91383733/... · Posted by u/LAsteNERD
I just don’t get this. Anybody want to take a shot at explaining how this kind of private/public profit-sharing fits into the vision of the capitalist-in-chief?
Nvidia and AMD are reportedly handing over 15% of their China-bound chip revenues (H20 and MI308, respectively) to the U.S. government in exchange for export licenses that had previously been denied on national security grounds. No word yet on what the government plans to do with the money.
The deal effectively clears the way for billions in chip sales to China, despite earlier restrictions—and sets a pretty wild precedent for direct federal revenue participation in corporate exports. Markets didn’t exactly cheer: NVDA and AMD both dipped slightly in premarket.
Using theory, simulations, and IBM’s quantum processors, physicists explored whether small quantum-level disruptions would spiral out of control over time. The result? At the quantum scale, entanglement actually heals damage. A particle “sent back in time” and deliberately altered can return to the present nearly unchanged.
In other words:
Lorenz-style chaos does exist at the quantum level (slight variations can diverge wildly). But there’s also a quantum anti-butterfly effect: in sufficiently entangled systems, information “damaged” in the past can be restored in the present. This has direct implications for quantum computing (a new way to measure “how quantum” a computer really is) and potential applications in information security and error correction. As lead scientist Bin Yan put it: “At the quantum scale, reality is self-healing.”