I guess NASA's contribution to battery technology, satellite crop analysis and improved ventilators (that were used during COVID) weren't enough impact in the last couple years
You're right, she's 83 years old. I'm sure she saw many bad things in life and didn't speak up. Therefore, I think we can all agree it's best to ignore her now.
As someone who learned to code before ChatGPT and is mentoring a student learning, I have a lot of thoughts here.
First, use it appropriately. You will use it when you get a job. As far as coming up with citations? ChatGPT deep research is actually researching articles. It will include them. You need to learn how to use these tools, and it's clear that you don't and are misinformed about how they work.
Second, it's amazing that you're coding without it. Especially for the fundamentals, it is crucial to learn those by hand. You may not get the highest grade, but on a paper test or when debugging ChatGPT's broke output, you will have an edge.
Lastly as a cautionary tale, we have an intern at $dayjob who can only code with ChatGPT. They will not be getting a return offer, not because they code with ChatGPT, but because they can't complete the tasks due to not understanding the fundamentals. That said, it's much better than if they never used ChatGPT at all. You need to find the balance
You're assuming RAM is the limitation, with disk swapping. What if we run out of disk space?