Technology

The Empire Strikes Back against AI Cheating

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

People are considering whether university evaluations can survive in the AI age. Hollis Robbins wrote on Substack: “How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom“

Robbins emphasizes class size and teaching load against the time of an instructor.  An instructor teaching 4 sections with 100 students each is very limited in their ability to monitor and prosecute AI teaching. It’s worse if this instructor is on a temporary contract.

Limited eyes and hands and human attention really are a constraint here, at least for now. Some people see AI tools in the hands of students as the end of education itself.

I have been tweeting my replies to this:

I don’t do remote exams, but I hear about improvements to remote proctoring technology. The arms race is not over.

Technology goes both ways. The phone students were using to cheat are now being marshalled as a “second camera” for remote test proctoring. Instructors are going to largely win this year if they take current technology seriously, for multiple choice and short answer evaluations.

The commercial Respondus program has just added Word extensions. This technology already exists and can run on the students’ laptops.

Right now, a clever student might still be able to shift their carbon-based eyes to a direction where the answer is displayed illicitly. And the instructor’s eyes can only monitor so many eyes. This is all so 2024. This conversation may be over soon. Human students can be placed under the supervision of machine eyes. Right now, we are still dealing with issues of false positives when machines flag students for cheating, but the machines are improving.

I believe that the roads will eventually be dominated by machine drivers and their unblinking eyes. Humans might drive cars for fun in the hinterlands, but it will no longer be considered a serious thing humans to do for work. Monitoring student cheating will become like truck driving. Human eyes are on the way out. We are going to become more cheat-proof than college has ever been before.

As a college professor, that will have implications for my job, although I can imagine a not-completely-negative future. Maybe I could do more fun work with students because the work of proctoring will be handled automatically. I have spent many many hours constructing tests that would be hard to cheat on and watching students take them. I take cheating seriously, and all the faculty at my business school work hard to protect the value of our degree. I predict that this will become a trivial part of teaching within 10 years.

Will students respond with various forms of hacking and deep fakes against such a system? Maybe. So far, in any arms race, Uncle Sam has been winning in the end for a century now.

If there is a will to do so, we could even bring back the research paper by having students work on a monitored computer that does not let them use AI to write. (We could almost do that already, but perhaps the true limiting factor is that, as I like to say, readers are that which is scarce.)

[Credit to my colleagues Art Carden and Anna Leigh Stone who have talked with me about test proctoring this semester.]

100,000 Glyphosate Lawsuits: Why Roundup Does Not Kill Your Weeds Like It Used To

Scott Buchanan3 Comments

I don’t like wasting time bending over and pulling out weeds, one by one. Much more efficient to go squirt squirt and eliminate lots of weeds at a time. But I realized in the past year that the Roundup I spritzed on the weeds in my mulch beds and sidewalk cracks just wasn’t killing them like it used to. The weeds would shrivel a bit, but then many would bounce right back. So, when I went to Home Depot to buy some more this week, I looked at the ingredients on the label. What?? Where is the glyphosate? For decades, “Roundup” was synonymous with glyphosate.

Glyphosate has several desirable properties as an herbicide. You spray it on the leaves, and it kills the plants right down to the roots. However, it has minimal residual toxicity in the soil, so it is unlikely to kill any plants you did not spray, and you can replant quickly in a soil patch that you had cleared with glyphosate. Farmers love it, because you can buy genetically engineered strains of crops like corn that are immune to glyphosate, so you can spray your fields to kill weeds without harming standing crops.

The glyphosate story is much bigger than homeowners bending over to pull weeds. The chemical has become indispensable for current agriculture. Global glyphosate sales are about $10 billion per year, and its impact on crop productivity is enormous. A 2017 study (apparently not paid for by Monsanto) predicted dire effects of discontinuance:

World prices of all grains, oilseeds and sugar are expected to rise, especially soybeans (+5.4%) and rapeseed (+2%). The welfare impacts are mostly negative, with global welfare falling by $7,408 million per year. Land use changes will arise, with an additional cropping area of 762,000 ha, of which 53% derives from new land brought into cropping agriculture, including 167,000 of deforestation. These land use changes are likely to induce the generation of an additional 234,000 million kg of carbon dioxide emissions.

What’s not to like about glyphosate? Well, maybe it causes cancers in humans. This is a contested claim, and I don’t have the expertise to penetrate the arguments. Because glyphosate makers like Monsanto and its successors Bayer have deep pockets, lawyers on contingency have swarmed like killer bees to file lawsuits, over 100,000 of them, of which about 60,000 remain active globally.

National security issues have muddied the waters here. For instance, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. led a landmark legal case against Monsanto in 2018, securing a $289 million jury verdict (later reduced on appeal to $20.4 million) for a school groundskeeper who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after prolonged exposure to Roundup. That case energized a bazillion further lawsuits. But now Kennedy is going along with the current administration’s position that it is strategically necessary to maintain production and responsible access to glyphosate: farmers demand it, and Bayer operates the only plant in the U.S. producing significant amounts of elemental phosphorus, which is a vital material for defense and, increasingly, for lithium batteries.

Naturally, Bayer denies that glyphosate is particularly harmful. The firm continues to sell the product to farmers and landscape professionals, but it has removed it from retail bottles of Roundup you see on Home Depot shelves, in an effort to reduce exposure for further litigation.

What have they substituted for good old glyphosate? I found a brew of three other chemicals. I can report reliably that this mixture is much less effective, especially on grasses and on well-established weeds. The Internet backs up my observations. The Iowa State garden extension has a great table of the real-world effects of all common herbicides.

So, what to do? For grasses in my backyard gravel patch, I am spraying multiple times. If that doesn’t work, I may try covering that area with a black tarp for a month to kill the grass. I have considered buying a propane flamethrower weeder, but that seems only effective on the same things the current wimpy Roundup kills (small/young broadleaf weeds).

For mulched areas, I am incentivized to keep up with fresh mulch to keep weeds from growing in the first place. For larger weeds, I have now found myself bending down low, grasping them close to the ground, and actually pulling them out by hand.

Allbirds, Inc. Attempts Pivot from Making Wool Sneakers to AI Computing

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

A native New Zealander, Tim Brown had two separate ambitions: to become a professional soccer player and a designer. On the soccer (“football”, outside North America) front, he succeeded beyond expectations. He played on the New Zealand national team between 2004 and 2012, often as captain or vice-captain.  Brown executed a personal pivot in 2012. After retiring from soccer, he enrolled in the London School of Economics to learn the business skills needed to launch an idea he had been mulling for several years. This was a shoe made mainly of wool.

He wanted to give a boost to New Zealand’s declining sheep in industry (battered by competition from polyester textiles), and wanted to promote something more sustainable than the plasticky shoes that he was always being asked to endorse as a professional player. There seemed to be plenty of room in the half-billion dollar per year footwear industry for something more environmentally friendly.

Brown launched his idea on Kickstarter in 2014, raising over $100,000. He and his partner started selling the Allbirds Wool Runner in 2016. Their green vibe was perfect for that era, and their shoes became wildly popular among the Silicon Valley VC set. They were seen on Larry Page, Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a whole gaggle of Hollywood actors and actresses.

Allbirds expanded its product line, and opened brick and mortar stores on several continents. Allbirds went public in 2021, and its market value ran up to $4 billion. But then the novelty of wool shoes wore off, sustainability became less urgent, and it became widely known that these “Wool Runners” are too flimsy to actually run or exercise in. They are more like slippers, and folks outside of Hollywood or Silicon Valley were not eager to pay $150 for a pair of slippers. Also, better-capitalized competitors muscled into the sustainable footwear market. Sales slid down and down, management conflicts erupted, and founder Tim Brown left to pursue other interests. On April 1, Allbirds announced it was selling the remnants of its shoe business for an ignominious $39 million.

So far, the story is unremarkable – – as with so many other startups, idealistic founders have initial success, but eventually go under upon scale-up. But there is an interesting plot twist. Instead of just going chapter 7 BK, paying off creditors, and returning a few pennies to investors, the company is using the shell of its former business to generate capital and transform itself into a new AI venture of renting out computing centers for AI usage. I assume the managers wanted to keep their jobs as managers, and cooked up this scheme to traffic on the current AI hype.


Apparently, these guys know nothing about GPU centers, so they’ll have to hire folks with expertise. Some unknown investor is backing them to the tune of $50 million, but they will have to raise much more than that to compete in the AI server business. That will horribly dilute current stockholders. They are directly competing with much better-capitalized behemoths like CoreWeave and Oracle, that can raise money on better terms. No moat, no expertise, almost no capital. But, hey, it’s AI, and so the company stock BIRD soared 600% on the news of the computing pivot.

I give them modest odds of succeeding bigly, but sometimes a mission pivot like this does come off. I’m thinking of the 1960’s when Berkshire Hathaway, facing declining earnings from its core textile business, under the leadership of Warren Buffett shifted into insurance. That generated the “float” that then enabled the purchase of other profitable businesses. We shall see if Allbirds (soon to be “NewBird”) management can likewise preside over such a seismic business shift.

Our glorious future is tech troubleshooting in space

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Having enjoyed the quotes from our brave astronauts about software troubles, I wrote for Econlog:

Tech Troubleshooting in Space (EconLog)

Click to learn the story of email quote and why it went viral. With all due respect to Christina Koch, I think I’m the first woman in history to paraphrase The Notorious B.I.G. at Econlog.

Are we complaining? Tech has made our lives better. With only a few exceptions, everyone in the country chooses to have TVs and smartphones.

Digital tools like email save me time over what I can only imagine used to be sending paper memos or something. Did people have owls or pigeons or what? But some of that saved time goes to fighting new problems of evil people in cyberspace. Someone (Tyler?) points out that the “better angels of our nature” argument doesn’t look quite as rosy if you consider of all the digital criminality.

I do not know whom to credit for this banger: “Man is born free and everywhere he has to 2-factor authenticate.”

I had to do my annual mandatory employee Cyber Security training session this week. I don’t get paid extra to do this. It’s just work on top of my job. It’s estimated to take 40 minutes to complete. (I powered through in under 15 minutes.) We are obviously living in the future with iPads that translate foreign languages for refugee kids in real time and all, but it would feel more glorious if I could stop these phishing trainings.

If quantum/AI means the end of privacy and cheap tech connectivity, then what will that mean for productivity? To send a secure message to someone, we might need to go back to owl post. Get ready for mandatory annual owl training.

Claude Mythos Is Such a Dangerous Hacker Engine That Anthropic Has Withheld Broad Release

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

The latest AI model from Anthropic is so powerful that they don’t dare release it to the public. It is such a threat that Jay Powell and Scott Bessant summoned the major bank CEOs to a meeting last week to warn them about it. In line with Anthropic’s “helpful, honest, and harmless” motto, they have released it only to their Project Glasswing partners. These are organizations like AWS, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, who have been granted access to the model to identify and patch vulnerabilities in critical software.

Mythos is designed to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in software systems when prompted. Its specialty is identifying critical software vulnerabilities and bugs, but it can also assemble sophisticated exploits.

What makes Mythos particularly unsettling is that its most dangerous capabilities were not deliberately engineered. Anthropic’s team made it clear that they did not explicitly train Mythos to have these capabilities. Instead, they “emerged.”

Internal testing revealed that Mythos has already uncovered thousands of weak points in “every major operating system and web browser.” The implications are disturbing. Claude Mythos has autonomously discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in major operating systems and web browsers— flaws that human security researchers, working for years, had never detected. (see also here and here for examples).

Mythos can rapidly uncover hidden flaws in the codes of organizations and software development firms, but it also raises the fear that attackers could find those vulnerabilities first. Much of the underlying software that Mythos can scan supports banking, retail, airlines, hospitals, and critical utilities. Regulators worry that if Mythos, or models like it, fell into the wrong hands, “systemically important” banks and even entire financial networks could be compromised before institutions even knew they were exposed.

Anthropic launched Project Glasswing in April 2026 to collaborate with tech giants and banks to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.   This year, organizations should expect a large influx of AI-discovered hack points in critical software. The game plan is to use AI tools to patch the vulnerabilities it discovers. Your venerable legacy system is no longer safe. What AI can expose, it can also fix. We hope.

Ray Kurzweil predicted The Singularity (when artificial intelligence growth accelerates beyond human control) would arrive in 2045, but we might be closing in on it ahead of schedule.

A Rant about Long Run Problems and Passe Solutions

Zachary Bartsch5 Comments

If you listen to or read major economists discussing what they think are big-picture problems, then their list usually includes three topics: Fertility, Culture, & the Fiscal Health.  On the wonkier side, you’ll also hear that housing scarcity and affordability is a problem, but let’s stick with the first three.

Fertility

People are deciding to have fewer children for a variety of reasons. In no particular order, the reasons include greater access to financial institutions, more popular female education, higher female wages, lower infant mortality, and falling religiosity. Some also speculate that housing affordability, safety regulations, and social safety nets contribute too.

What’s wrong with lower fertility? In an objective sense, there is nothing wrong. But, in the sense that people value similar things, we are in somewhat uncharted territory. Realized fertility is dropping across the globe. We know that economies of scale increase productivity and real wages. We also know that technological innovation comes from having more minds engaged with economic problems. It’s possible that labor productivity rises faster than the productivity that we lose with smaller scale, but it’s an open question. What happens to the liberal societies and polities when the liberals fail to persist? These are big geopolitical concerns.

Culture

People seem to be more fragmented religiously and culturally. Social scientists used to discuss Judeo-Christian norms more often. Sometimes you’d hear about English or Roman legal tradition or enlightenment values. But now, there seems to be very little in terms of common social cohesion. In the USA, the general common culture seems to be ‘smile and be nice’. That’s not the worst common rule, but it’s not enough to hang our hat on for a capable liberal state.

The lack of cultural cohesion isn’t my own particular concern – public intellectuals in economics and elsewhere feel like there is a problem. There is a mix of reasoning behind the concern. Some people are worried about transmitting values to the next generation, some are worried about how people behave when no one’s watching, and still others are worried about simply lacking a Schelling  point that coordinates large scale economic cooperation.

Fiscal Health

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Oops: Anthropic Accidently Leaked the Entire Code for Its “Claude Code” Program

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

One of Anthropic’s biggest wins has been its wildly-popular Claude Code program, that can do nearly all the grunt work of programming. Properly prompted, it can build new features, migrate databases, fix errors, and automate workflows.

So, it was big news in the AI world last week when an Anthropic employee accidently exposed a link that allowed folks to download the source code for this crown jewel – – the entire code, all 512,000 lines of it, which revealed the complete logic flow of the program, down to the tiniest features. For instance, Claude Code scans for profanity and negative phrases like “this sucks” to discern user sentiment, and tries to adjust for user frustration.

Gleeful researchers, competitors, and hackers promptly downloaded zillions of copies. Anthropic issued broad copyright takedown requests, but the damage was done. Researchers quickly used AI to rewrite the original TypeScript source code into Python and Rust, claiming to get around copyright laws on the original code. Oh, the irony: for years, AI purveyors have been arguing that when they ingest the contents of every published work (including copyrighted works) and repackage them, that’s OK. So now Anthropic is tasting the other side of that claim.

The leak has been damaging to Anthropic to some degree. Competitors don’t have to work to try to reverse engineer Claude Code, since now they know exactly how it works. Hackers have been quick to exploit vulnerabilities revealed by the leak. And Anthropic’s claim to be all about “Safety First” has been tarnished.

On the other hand, the model weights weren’t exposed, so you can’t just run the leaked code and get Claude’s results. Also, no customer data was revealed. Power users have been able to discern from the source how to run Claude Code most advantageously. This YouTube by Nick Puru discussed such optimizations, which he summarized in this roadmap:

There have actually been a number of unexpected benefits of the leak for Anthropic. Per AI:

Brand resonance and community engagement have surged, with some observers calling the incident “peak anthropic energy” that generated significant hype and validated the product’s technical impressiveness.  The leak has acted as a massive free marketing campaign, reinforcing the narrative of a fast-moving, innovative company while bouncing the brand back among developers despite the security lapse. 

Accelerated ecosystem adoption and bug fixing are also potential benefits, as the exposure allowed engineers to dissect the agentic harness and create open-source versions or “harnesses” that keep users within the Anthropic ecosystem. Additionally, the public scrutiny likely helps identify and patch vulnerabilities faster, while the leaked source maps provide a roadmap for competitors to build “Claude-like” agents, potentially standardizing the market around Anthropic’s architectural patterns.

The leak also revealed hidden roadmap features that build anticipation, such as:

  • Kairos: A persistent background daemon for continuous operation. 
  • Proactive Mode: A feature allowing the AI to act without explicit user prompts. 
  • Terminal Pets: Playful, personality-driven interfaces to increase user engagement.

Because of these benefits, conspiracy theorists have proposed that Anthropic leaked the code on purpose, or even (April Fools!) leaked fake code. Fact checkers have come to the rescue to debunk the conspiracy claims. But in the humans vs. AI competency debate, this whole kerfuffle doesn’t make humans look so great.

How to Install Drywall

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

Nearly every interior wall and ceiling in every home in America is covered with sheetrock = drywall = gypsum board. Sheetrock (a brand name for drywall) consists of an interior layer of rigid gypsum (a mineral composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate) plus some additives, with outside layers of strong paper or fiberglass. It normally comes in 4 ft x 8 ft sheets.

Normal houses have a framework of mainly 2×4 or larger wood lumber. Each wall has vertical 2×4 studs, spaced every 16”. Sheetrock is trimmed to size, and nailed or (these days) screwed into the studs.

That is the theory, anyway.

I have never done this stuff at large scale before, other than clumsily patching occasional small dings in a wall. A little while ago, I got to experience the process, hands-on. I was part of a team that helped someone whose basement had flooded. We cut out the lower ~4 ft of drywall, and replaced it with fresh drywall.

First, how to you cut drywall? A long, straight cut is accomplished by drawing a straight line and cutting along it, all the way through one layer of the facing paper. Then you hang the drywall sheet on the edge of a table, and crack the interior gypsum layer. Then you cut the other side of the paper. The end result of such a cut is like this:

Typically, you install drywall on the ceiling first. Then the top 4 ft of the walls, then the bottom 4 ft of the walls. You butt the pieces close to each other. For the lowest piece of drywall, you insert a curved metal wedge under it, and step on the wedge with your foot to lift that drywall piece to butt its top edge up against the upper piece. If you look carefully near the middle of the following photo, you can see the red wedge I used to jack up that small lower piece of drywall. It’s OK to leave a gap between the floor and the lower edge of the bottom drywall, since that gap will be covered by baseboard.

This was in a bathroom. I cut the lower green pieces with a little hand power saw, and screwed them into the studs, using the green and black driver visible on the stand in the left foreground.

The next two photos are before and after of a bedroom wall, again showing the bottom course of sheetrock we installed.

Filling in Cracks and Holes

As you can see, at this stage, there are like ¼” cracks between the installed sheets of sheetrock, and the mounting screw holes are visible. These imperfections are filled in with goo called joint compound, or “mud.” The mud is applied with a “knife” like this:

Cracks are covered with paper or fiberglass tape, with mud smeared over the tape. Typically, three layers of mud are needed to achieve perfect, smooth coverage. Each layer must dry hard before applying the next layer. Each layer may be sanded lightly as needed.

 A key technique is to tilt the knife so the mud is maybe 1/16” thick over the tape or over a screw, but taper the mud to zero thickness on the wall away from the tape or screw. This feathering is essential; if your mud layer ends with appreciable thickness instead of feathering, you have to do a lot of sanding to get a smooth blending into the plain drywall at that edge. Pro tip: carefully stir more water into the joint compound as needed to keep it wet and flowing, especially for overnight storage. This video from Vancouver Carpenter displays mudding technique.

That is mainly it. For perspective and confidence building, it is helpful to work with an expert, as I was able to do.

What is an AI Skill?

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, then you may have seen the chatter about teaching your artificial intelligence to have various skills. I saw one post by a guy who claimed to have created several skills, each representing a tech billionaire.

At first, I thought “I am behind the 8-ball. What is this new thing?”. Obviously I know what the word “skill” is and how people use it, but I had not encountered its use in the context of AI having it. What does it mean for an AI to have a skill? I somewhat dreaded the the work of learning the new skill of teaching my AI skills.

Then I had lunch with a computer scientist and I learned that skills are nothing new.

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Does Broadband Bring Jobs?

James BaileyLeave a comment

No, according to a new paper from the University of Georgia’s Michael Kotrous.

Many people expected it to, partly by thinking about the jobs that could benefit from faster internet, and partly by looking at the experience of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga was the first major city to get gigabit-speed broadband, and they did see a huge improvement in the labor market right afterwards:

But as the graph shows, the introduction of broadband there coincides with the end of the nationwide Great Recession. Was the boom in jobs after 2009 because of the broadband, or would it have happened anyway as party of the recovery from recession? A synthetic control strategy shows that Chattanooga’s recovery was pretty typical for cities like it, so the broadband angle probably didn’t do much:

This might seem like a historical curiosity about one city, but the federal government is currently trying to spend $42 billion to expand broadband to more places, partly motivated by the idea of bringing jobs. I thought the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program‘s big problem is how slow it is- Congress created with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, but money didn’t start getting sent out until late 2025, and it could be many more years before it leads to any useable broadband. Even then it now seems unlikely to bring jobs, though there could be other benefits.

This paper’s author Michael Kotrous is currently on the economics job market. As his former professor and coauthor, I recommend hiring him if your school gets the chance.