I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.
Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.
Incredible: Claude 4.5 was able to answer that quickly and gave the right answer (all NFL teams’ names end whit an s).
But ChatGPT kind of had a meltdown (the Miami Dolphins especially tripped it a few times) and gave a doubly incorrect answer: it said one without telling which team it is.
I recently supervised a Hackclub Counterspell event at our office. I was there only in the capacity of being an adult in the room, for health and safety and safeguarding reasons.
The entire event had been organised by a single teenager, with mini workshops, hack time and a global show and tell.
Kids that attended were not only coders, but musicians and artists as well.
The whole event was amazing, with more pizza than I thought it possible to eat.
The kids produced some genuinely interesting games, learned some new skills, and had a great time socially.
I fully intend to support more events in the future.
> Edit: if you disagree then tell me why I have a religiously strong opinion on spaces vs tabs
Because you did not think this through logically I assume.
There is only one answer: indent using tabs, align using spaces.
This way the text never looks "broken" on any other machine, and personal preference for how deep indentations should be can be applied.
I think people mostly form strong religious opinions because they want to belong to a group or feel a sense of purpose. Do you feel that when defending your stance on tabs vs spaces?
But I fail to see how this is related to programmers being creatives
Personally I don't think there is such a thing as "creatives". All humans are creative - that's what we do, we solve problems by coming up with solutions. Whether that is to create a painting, or coming up with a joke/punchline or writing a novel, or creating a product with code - that's a matter of aptitude/interest and environmental exposure.
While I sort of agree with you, I'm a software engineer with a background and hobbies in the arts. My wife and I are part time performing magicians, and I used to play various instruments in rock bands, I produced an indie album a few years ago etc. I'm saying this because I hang around people who are hyper-creative.
I compare those hyper-creative people to other people that I know and I work with and it becomes very apparent that what we tend to think of as "creativity" is not something that even the majority of people possess.
I definitely agree that everyone is "creative" to an extent within their respective interests and productive pursuits. But I think we might be conflating creativity with productivity. Everyone produces, or at least is capable of producing things. But what we tend to think of as "creativity" involves abstract thinking and piecing together things that are non-obvious.
In that sense, hackers and engineers do tend to often exhibit this form of creativity. I mean using something in a way that it was not original intended is an example of that "outside of the box" abstract thinking.
But my point, as anectodal as it is, in my 40+ years on this planet I've encountered far more people who are incapable of abstract thinking and coming up with novel ways to combine things than I have people who do possess this ability.
Now it might be a muscle, it might boil down to interests and personal ambitions. But, and I think you'd even agree with this, that's a hypothesis. I don't personally see evidence in support of that. The people who can't think abstractly are even some really decent programmers that I've met. They can produce shippable code and solve problems, but they can't think in terms of design patterns and abstractions... they need concrete examples for everything. The second you start to abstract a solution and talk in terms of generics you lose them. And I'm not putting them down, they're still great people to have on your team. Great work ethic and love what they do. They just can't think abstractly and are therefore not "creative" in the way that I interpret that word.
No, the answer is that I should never have to think about whether a coworker uses spaces vs tabs. That's a sign that either your text editor/IDE is misconfigured or that your project needs a tool like Prettier.
Also it was a joke. I just thought using the concept of religion might make people consider the spiritual side of a profession that is otherwise mechanical. But no worries. Jokes are always funniest when you're forced to explain them, right?
I will dive into the webpage a bit better later on, but at a glance I don't seem to be able to find how to 'help' as an adult. Would love to either organize or help something in my town.
I could only find a slack channel to join but no other public info. Was this how you got in touch with them? Or did I miss something?
it's only organized by teenagers who are a part of hack club :)
hack clubbers will then reach out to adults in their city for help organizing the event, but most of the work is done by the teenager.
Anecdotally, as an educator, I am already seeing a digital divide occurring, with regard to accessing AI. This is not even at a premium/pro subscription level, but simply at a 'who has access to a device at home or work' level, and who is keeping up with the emerging tech.
I speak to kids that use LLMs all the time to assist them with their school work, and others who simply have no knowledge that this tech exists.
What are some productive ways students are using LLMs for aiding learning? Obviously there is the “write this paper for me” but that’s not productive. Are students genuinely doing stuff like “2 + x = 4, help me understand how to solve for x?”
I challenge what I read in textbooks and hear from lecturers by asking for contrary takes.
For example, I read a philosopher saying "truth is a relation between thought and reality". Asking ChatGPT to knock it revealed that statement is an expression of the "correspondence theory" of truth, but that there is also the "coherence theory" of truth that is different, and that there is a laundry list of other takes too.
My son doesn't use it but I use to help him with his homework. For example, I can take a photograph of his math homework and get the LLM to mark the work, tell me what he got wrong, and make suggestions on how to correct it.
Absolutely. My son got a 6th grade AI “ban” lifted by showing how they could use it productively.
Basically they had to adapt a novel to a comic book form — by using AI to generate pencil drawings, they achieved the goal of the assignment (demonstrating understanding of the story) without having the computer just do their homework.
Huh the first prompt could have been "how would you adapt this novel to comic book form? Give me the breakdown of what pencil drawings to generate and why"
At the time, the tool available was Google Duet AI, which didn’t expose that capability.
The point is, AI is here, and it can be a net positive if schools can use it like a calculator vs a black market. It’s a private school with access to some alumni money for development work - they used this to justify investing in designing assignments that make AI a complement to learning.
I recently saw someone revise for a test by asking chatgpt to create practice questions for them on the topics they were revising. I know other people who use it to practice chatting in a foreign language they are trying to learn.
The anology I would use is extended phenotype evolution in digital space as Richard Dawkins would say. Just as crabs in oceans use shells to protect themselves.
And it disproportionately hit the poorest in society the most. My kid had his own room to work in, his own computer to work on, and WFH parents to help him out. He was not, massively, negatively impacted.
In my work, I was in touch with families with multiple children at home, no computers, maybe one or two phones, and no broadband connection. The kids, for all intents and purposes, just lost two years of education.
I'm thinking of going back into teaching because of ChatGPT.
I created an entire scheme of work for my wife today, including all the lesson plans, and next I'll work on some student resources and quizzes. It took about thirty minutes. She'll need to check them over to make sure they're okay, but still a massive time saver.
I've taken photos of my son's revision activities and had ChatGPT mark them. It's surprisingly accurate given his awful handwriting.
Report writing becomes a thing of the past, as I can upload a CSV of grades along with a sentence or two of description, and have it generate unique reports for each student.
This would all allow me to do what I used to love. I can just spend my time with students in the classroom, engaging them, teaching them, discussing with them. I won't be bringing home mounds of paperwork, that eats into my evenings and weekends. I'll go into work each day feeling fresh and ready to actually educate kids.
ChatGPT takes away the busy work from both teachers and students.
Why would anyone pay you to be a teacher when they could just use ChatGPT directly. Prompt it to develop a lesson plan to learn whatever, create the learning materials, and then evaluate their mastery of it. And be endlessly available, nights and weekends, for further discussion and help with any difficulties?
>further discussion and help with any difficulties
This is the part where you "draw the rest of the teacher"(1)
The part where all the magic happens. Public school teachers' day jobs anymore are rather focused on curriculum delivery and exam prep. They cherish the chances to actually engage in teaching -- not (necessarily) lecturing, not traffic-policing the classroom, not admin overhead, but connecting with a student and their understanding of a thing, and navigating the ways to conceptualize and illustrate it, and the ecstasy of the Click, and the pride of watching them sail forth into brilliance. That's the whole part of teaching that anyone ever became a teacher for (I hope, but not optimistically) -- namely, the part involving teaching.
If this seems unclear, it could be a semantic thing. Here, "teaching" refers to the actual essence of the profession, its locus of fundamental distinction from other professions, and the true target of a passion or fascination for teaching. Much as everything a doctor or developer does at their job cannot accurately be described as "practicing medicine" or "developing software". Some of the activities that are not the essential teaching or developing or practicing medicine are necessary, or at least ancillary, but there's not-insignificant amounts of stuff occupying the "not exactly what I got into this for"-to-"actively a waste of time" range.
I'm not trying to say that a One True Pure Essence of the Sacred Art of Teaching exists and is the sole motivator for all teachers everywhere forever, or anything. It's just that it seems like you thoroughly gathered up all the parts that are distinctly not seen as teaching proper (at least in my world, which I hope isn't an unusual perspective) and said something like, look, GPT can do all the support-work/busy-work/paper-work. What do we need the teacher for anymore? After all, GPT has got to be faster than the teacher at coming up with different ways to phrase explanations too, right? And so it is, I don't doubt that. But good teaching goes way deeper, and I have my doubts that an LLM is near the point of being able to act upon a nuanced theory-of-mind of a student's current understanding of a concept in context of their previous experience and learning/personality style and aptitudes. For example.
Maybe we overlap the same page, so let me not be uncharitable: There are surely many people employed as teachers who seldom teach anything to anyone (as opposed to, say, merely informing them of it). I would agree that their work is well within GPT's wheelhouse, and all speed to them on the way out, along with the content marketers who write pretend-useful articles all day, et al.
When I “scan for correctness” a code change (ex code review), I do my best to look for code correctness. Often that change has to go through product review for visual correctness. A lot of my scanning is brief and determining logic with the variables I know. However I often exclude the cases that have already been tested through e2e and unit tests. These tests are valuable to ensure regressions don’t occur.
Please tell me what validation and regression testing can you guarantee by having an LLM generate a lesson plan? Why is it important to have your own unique generated lesson plan, even if that lesson plan is just a common template with synonyms swapped out?
You’ve eliminated a bunch of extra work for yourself but have no long standing regression check from the output of this generator.
These “actually LLMs are great for X topic” comments are just here for evangelism then? What do students gain from having you generate partially random lesson plans? Please don’t tell me “time savings”.
- Don't care that it was a bomb at the box office, I really enjoyed Heaven's Gate.
Ok, with English as a second language and not familiar with Kris body of works I read this as a quote from a song. Took me way too long to realize the intended meaning. As a line of song lyrics it rocks hard but doesn't really roll off the tongue.
You should definitely take a look at Struckd Studio which is now part of Unity Play - https://play.unity.com/en
It's still a little buggy in places, but nothing that can't be overcome.
You can drag and drop in 3D assets and many of them come with built in and easily changeable behaviors. Then there is a node based programming language that you can use to make alterations.
It's web based, but also has iOS and Android apps available for editing and playing the games.
edit - I'm an educator working in the CS ecosystem, and am playing with Struckd with the intention of making a suite of learning resources.
I mean, it depends. It's mostly dangerous to kids, because it's detrimental to brain development. Not exactly vitamins for anyone though.
Also something to remember about ingestion is that, lead only forms salts in acidic environments, and, your stomach is quite acidic, which is why it's such a problem. Combine that with lead accumulating in your body and, well, it's best to avoid it, and it's simple enough to avoid it.
Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.