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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

Can you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?

A proctored exam doesn't need to have perfect lock-down. The proctor should notice the thumb-drive. They might miss it, but the risk will deter most.

Lots of ways to disable USB ports in bios and at the operating system level, additionally have a proctor watching to be sure everyone is in a word processor. Heck, ewaste grade computers can run a basic word processor, fill all USB ports except the mouse and keyboard with epoxy. Mount the computer in such a way the rear ports are inaccessible without it being very obvious what someone is doing and fill just the front ports (if they exist) with epoxy. Lots of ways to go about it.

These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive

Probably safer to use typewriters.

It can fit on augmented reality glasses, eventually.

Pretty sure that augmented reality glasses, and things in the category of the meta glasses with built-in camera are already banned in most academic test environments, by a blanket policy prohibiting the use of any camera in the room.

Right, they're easy to detect today, that's not going to last long. The whole point is to prevent cheating, well, cheats aren't going to follow the rules. Written tests/in person tests aren't a complete answer to this.

If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.

If we get to the point where even that doesn’t work then we’ll be at the point where a camera in the room with an AI analyzing eye movements should be able to detect it. And no matter how advanced they get they’ll still need to radiate heat, so a thermal camera should work. If that fails, industrial CT scanners are getting cheaper and cheaper.

Heck if it gets too bad there’s always mm wave body scanners and a set of cheap glasses kept at school.

About 95% joking, but in that case, have everyone lock their phones in a tiny locker shelf thing and wand everyone with a nonlinear junction detector. If we get to the point in technology and battery capability where camera glasses are compact enough to be indistinguishable from ordinary metal eyeglass frames, we'll probably also have really good low cost portable tech to detect any on-body electronics (vs the flesh and clothing and metal accessories like belt buckles on a human body).

> If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.

We had a 'fix' for this back when they checked your TI83. It's a 2 line basic program to display "MEMORY CLEAR" the exact same way as if somebody had spent the time to find the actual memory clear function in the settings.

It’s a cat and mouse game. But I’m saying look for the display hardware, batteries and cameras that won’t be so easily hidden.

Also I was in high school in the prime time for this hack and I never saw someone actually use it despite the stories.

And just like with the TI calculators, the school can resort to handing out standardized glasses to those who need them and ban bringing your own.

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