It's almost as if someone who is selling api "access" to the "latest frontier models" is prepending "Say you are <frontier model>" and forwarding the request to <not frontier model> :P
The framing that a 20% A cap distinguishes "extraordinary" from "merely strong" work is self-defeating. It measures performance relative to a single cohort, not against any absolute standard of mastery. If 40% of a class genuinely does exceptional work, 20% get mislabeled as mediocre. If it's a weak year and only 5% are truly exceptional, 15% get a free ride. The signal is still noise ... with artificial scarcity bolted on.
Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.
Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.
I think comparison within a cohort is likely more valuable and more tractable than ranking between members of different cohorts and/or ranking between cohorts.
An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad. GPA may not actually be a predictive metric within a cohort, but it's measurable and capping the A grades likely offers more precision in comparison; even if that precision is not an indicator of anything useful.
I do agree that an absolute standard of mastery would also be nice... But the diploma is supposed to indicate acceptable mastery.
> An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad.
that's a really good point, actually. in every situation i can think of where someone is looking at your grade (always admission to the next step in the ladder, in whatever form), you are being compared to people "from the same time" as you.
and i'd like to reiterate how difficult it would be to have a "stable" standard of mastery, no matter how nice. technical fields change a lot, and fast, these days. all across STEM, in 20 years everything changes. everything's so niche, as well, sometimes it may be hard to compare two degrees with the same name of different institutions. maybe we could do it with the fundamentals (mathematics and physics)? but look at a textbook from 100 years ago (say, Whittaker and Watson) and you'll find that even this changes. and even if the field doesn't change, the world does: i'm imagining how old-timers could claim that in their time information wasn't so easily accessible.
> If 40% of a class genuinely does exceptional work, 20% get mislabeled as mediocre. If it's a weak year and only 5% are truly exceptional, 15% get a free ride.
Having been on the grading side of things, this essentially never happens. As soon as you have a pool large enough where it is mathematically sound to have a curve (30 people or so), you will not find a situation where 40% do excellent work.
Coursework follows Sturgeon’s law. In a class of 30, there’s maybe 3-4 people who do excellent work, and there is a rapid fall off from there.
Agreed, but there are differences between different classes too: the students vary somewhat in intrinsic quality and motivation, and in those years I've done a particularly good job of teaching and motivation the results can be better overall because the students are putting more effort in.
Similarly the other way. There are classes I've given no first class (~A) marks in, because nobody earned one. Still a curve in practice, but with the top at an upper second.
mega deflating - i was just telling a colleague how openAI missed the mark by trying to mimic google search by incorporating ads into chat responses... and then google follows suit. do not want
Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.
You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.
Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.
Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.
An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.
No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.
>discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.
So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.
It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).
When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.
When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.
To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.
>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it
And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist.
And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real".
This can be made more clear if you understand that every "real" object is made up of pixe dust aka fields. When you see a particle at some point, say an electron, there is actually nothing there...but the space at that location behaves, for some reason, as if there is an electron there...
And that is another problem with the physical idea. What happens if you continuously split an object? If it is really physical, then it should remain physical no matter how many times it is split. But we see that it is not the case.
Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty.
The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.
Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.
Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,
P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion
You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.
The assumption that you made earlier , that reality is material first and perceptual second , continues unchallenged in your experience. Your certainty is based on the words of others who also don't know. You should really examine this more carefully. Screening of direct-experience through words is an obstacle that must be overcome.
You say "you don't see seeing, you see objects" ... Seeing itself is an irreducible fundamental of the universe in the human perspective, that's the point. If it could be reduced and you could split the act of seeing into components, you could say there's the eye [sense faculty], the focal object, and the visual consciousness. You're conflating the three and saying objects are both the eye and the visual consciousness, which is imprecise and unhelpful. A mirror doesn't show you yourself, it shows you a reflection of your external appearance. To say you can see yourself in a mirror is akin to saying you can see a sun in the shadow of a tree.
GPT is unusable, untrustworthy, unreliable now [may 2026] - SouthPark poked fun at GPT calling everything a brilliant idea and the retaliation by "Open"AI was to nerf any response that didn't denigrate the user and inflate the LLM.
> If you would like to test your compiler (posting back the results in the comments is really appreciated, especially from strange/uncommon compilers and other languages which support pre- / post- increment ....
Uh, 85% of them show the wrong result so 85% of them clearly do not support pre and post increment.
Except that ++a means increment first and a++ means increment after. And that's well-documented and thoroughly understood. Implying that this is undefined behavior is a cop out and cope. Preposterous and juvenile. If not implemented , it should be. Case closed.
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