The lead says "how I approach IIS targets during bug bounty" (emphasis mine), so (assuming the author is being truthful) I'm guessing the tone of the title is just for fun.
Excluding supergeniuses, pure mathematics—even at a very basic, undergraduate level—simply can't be understood passively. Even with an infinitely patient AI teacher who could answer any question on-demand, it'd still require a massive amount of work to actually understand anything in research-level mathematics. Basically every single word in a mathematical definition is a term of art, and (IME) if one doesn't grok each of those words at a fairly deep level, the new definition never really makes too much sense. And this applies recursively: each of the words has some thoroughly inscrutable definition of their own.
Of course it'd be super helpful to have, say, a teacher who could tailor explanations to anyone's precise background (e.g. where possible, using examples that come from the student's field of study when explaining some abstract concept). Or, if some definition comes with some precondition that has no obvious purpose, perhaps an omniscient teacher could explain why it's there with concrete counterexamples.[0] But even granting all this, I think that mathematical intuition is necessarily based on a lot of hard work actually exploring definitions on one's own, with pencil-and-paper and a lot of thought. That is to say, even though the process could probably be sped up a lot with a nigh-omniscient teacher[1], I doubt that a student wouldn't still need years of training to even have a clue what's going on.
(I'm saying all this, by the way, as someone who is terrible at all this and has very little mathematical maturity[2]—I'm speaking from my own frustrating experience....)
[0] c.f. Lakatos' excellent book Proofs and Refutations
[1] without the "curse of knowledge," or else we're back to square one of "answers that are correct but useless"
The advantage(?) of take-home exams à la Caltech is that they can be open everything and 3–5 hours long :-P (For what it's worth, being able to listen to music during an exam, ctrl+F a digital textbook, etc. was super awesome; it would deeply sadden me if that becomes infeasible in the future once enough students stop caring about the Honor Code....)
They were finals, not ordinary tests or midterms. Junior and senior year, I think one was Chemical Engineering, but I can't remember the exact name or number.
Things may have changed, but I don't recall any group exams during my time at Caltech, and conversely I do recall a strong sense of pride in the Honor Code. Also, if your professor allows collaboration, then it's definitionally not cheating: There is a vast moral difference between "the professor made the assignments difficult with the specific expectation that people will collaborate" and "the professor doesn't want collaboration but people did it anyway".
Frankly, this comment feels almost entirely foreign to my experience—I suppose things could've changed over the years (although my impression is that things have gotten much worse recently, not better), or it could be major-specific, or I just got lucky with the specific people I happened to hang out with?
I'm not the other commenter (and I believe you that it's not AI), but I'd guess it's mostly the first line: a short affirmation followed by "The problem is ...." feels like the sort of formula the LLMs love to use. (Not trying to imply that there's anything inherently wrong with it, of course.)
While we're at it, I'm under the impression that the recent LLMs have also co-opted "genuinely", which I'll never forgive them for—first they stole my em-dashes, and now they're stealing my adverbs too?!
It's just that, in my (uninformed) opinion, Anthropic is incentivized a priori to claim things like this about their models. Like, it's probably really good marketing to say "our product is so smart, and we're so concerned about ethics, that made sure a psychiatrist talked to it". I guess it's ultimately a judgment call, but to me the conflict of interest seems big enough that I'm really wary of this sort of argument. (I'm reminded of when OpenAI claimed GPT-5(?) was "PhD-level"—I can personally attest that, at least in my field, this is totally inaccurate.)
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