There are also a lot of recurring problems, obscure bugs, performance enhancements that someone has already solved. Software development should care about completing a task, not inventing the wheel (or an image upload) the millionth time.
I have a suspicion that the reason universities crack down on plagiarism this hard (to the point of outright making up offenses like ‘self plagiarism’), is that it’s the only form scientific misconduct that is easy to prove and investigate.
If you are wondering if it’s true, just look at how long it took for Hendrik Schon to get caught. And even then, the smoking gun was reusing (fake) graphs in a publication.
They crack down on plagerism because they’re trying to teach and assess you, not whoever you copied from. If they wanted copied answers, they could just photocopy the answers for you and save everyone a lot of effort.
The real world may be different, but the idea is to get the knowledge and, more importantly, the way of thinking about your particular subject, into your head. Once you know that, you know what to copy.
I was trying to make a larger point about the concept of plagiarism as a form of scientific misconduct. In a teaching setting you are just perpetrating exam fraud and should get nailed to the wall.
Ah, fair enough, I think I misunderstood your point.
Yes, plagiarism as scientific rather than academic misconduct is cracked down on hard. As you said, it’s easy to prove, and, I suspect they don’t like the idea of having their own work copied without attribution.
Loitering munitions are basically our version of t-800. It’s also not fun thinking if you have ever contributed to any computer vision open source projects and wondering if your code somehow ended up inside a loitering munitions drone because Iran who don’t bother to respect the GPL decided to use those open source libraries in their drone’s targeting system and deploy them in Ukraine. Maybe I’m just overthinking things, but would you lose some sleep knowing your code become a critical part of an autonomous system that can decide to kill people on their own without a direct human input?
I don’t think it’s exactly the same. Now if the hammer has a mind of its own and can loiter in an alley and can decide to kill a passerby or not based on its own judgement. e.g. the owner told the hammer to kill passerby wearing blue shirt, and the hammer does it but has 0.1% chance of killing people wearing yellow shirt due to computer vision quirks. Does the responsibility of killing people wearing yellow shirt fell partially to the blacksmith? Did the blacksmith can sleep soundly knowing people wearing yellow shirt might not need to die if his programming is a little bit more better, even though he never sold the hammer for the purpose of killing people in the first place (it’s his customer that abuse it).
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