You assume there will be no takers to replace Gmail, whereas there probably will be hundreds waiting to do it.

There are plenty of e-mail providers out there. None of them have even come close to toppling gmail. Gmail is free and good enough for most people. Gmail is to e-mail what kleenex is to tissue. It's almost synonymous.

Exams have performance variance. Otherwise you're only getting a pass/fall signal in any case.

Grading assignments just punishes people that don't cheat on their homework. It's worse than worthless, it actively helps the worst students.

You forget things can be signed, with the key owned by the school. It can be done.

Does signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective?

Exactly this, when was the last time a HN user had to interact with the prototypical 60-year-old set-in-their-ways professor?

Extremely non-tech savvy, hates computers, and is gonna grumble "What the hell is a PGP? Better not be another one of those phone code things." as you try to pitch this highly-technological solution to a largely niche problem domain.

They don’t even need to not be tech savvy. This stuff just registers as “hassle” to most people so they do the bare minimum or search for ways to not deal with it at all. It’s easy to “tut tut” at them but ultimately we need to accept reality: privacy, security, these things take extra effort that isn’t strictly necessary for people to go about their daily lives even though the stakes can be super high. It’s not a problem until it is, so they aren’t really barriers that require people to do the work. It’s like convincing someone who just simply doesn’t want to go out and buy/install a lock on their door to go do it, except it’s not even a one-time thing. Their door works fine. They can come and go as they please. It’s not until something happens that they maybe change their tune (and even then!)

Hell just getting people to do secure passwords is a whole thing.

I mean a cloud based learning management system also seems to be a very technological solution to the very old problem of checks notes grading quizzes?

Not that long ago the workflow was to turn code comments into code. Maybe leave some comments as is now.

You can't ask something to check its own work without external reward/penalty. It'll cheat.

Weirdly, and i fully think this is just some cognitive bias I don't have the knowledge to name, the ai seems very happy to please me. Like when it gets something done in one shot, it seems very happy to do so.

It's because expressing emotion tests well in RLHF (reinforcement learning, human feedback), which is the layer on top of the next-token-predictor LLM. As a bonus, it helps manipulate operator reactions to incorrect output, and improve engagement (aka token use).

The "thought process" of an LLM only exists as inference response to next token prediction prompts. It's the illusion of emotion.

Can you not have it write your harness for you, or have it be the first step? You can push your own determinism where you need, surely.

True. The prompt reads: Run the following Python: ```

Aren't they just buying time to build you whatever harness you need? They want to be the only software engineering shop in the world.

Or freeze them live into a block of ice.

What are the top alternatives? (And are they doing the same thing?)

I went with Exodus.

Have fun trying to get your funds out of Coinbase. I managed after about 3 days and 10 support tickets. The process seems intentinally broken. What a nasty company.

Hardware wallet. Or just stamp the wallet and private key on a sheet of aluminum.