Viewing profile — abathur

One thing I obliquely enjoyed about cutting my teeth on LPC was occasionally having to write things from scratch where we'd just be reusing well-trod FOSS in other languages. Growt…

I guess, but have you actually encountered a teacher grading an assignment solely based on word count? I certainly wish more teachers encouraged parsimony and penalized fluff and b…

I feel like we need a name for css-the-syntax (and maybe -the-semantics) as separate from css-the-body-of-rules/functions/units/etc-defined-by-csswg. There's juice in it, but it's …

But can you trust that the things they say aren't just laundered AI blogspam?

I agree with you that a face-to-face q&a is a reasonably good way to detect low-effort cheating, but I'll still quibble a bit: - I don't think this lowers the cost of detection as …

Grammar and AP style rules, iirc. (I may not. It's been enough years now. I did try and fail to find the syllabus in my box of five-star notebooks. We mostly used reporters noteboo…

There are many disciplines in which students work on effectively distinct projects. For example, the life-changingly-well-designed newswriting course I took in college assigned eve…

Sure--yes--the student will learn something if they actually wrote a 20-page paper on some given topic. But how are you going to evaluate their ability to compose the 20-page argum…

Does crapping on the average school's deep well of expertise for evaluating how effectively AI software solutions address their problems somehow fix the underlying problem (that th…

I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its go…

> Granted, but this reads a bit like a headline from The Onion: "'Hard to imagine a more favourable situation than pressing nails into wood' said local man unimpressed with neighbo…

I think both of those experiments do a good job of demonstrating utility on a certain kind of task. But this is cherry-picking. In the grand scheme of the work we all collectively …

I've been tasked with doing a very superficial review of a codebase produced by an adult who purports to have decades of database/backend experience with the assistance of a well-k…

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laze_(geology) :)

This is the kind of dismissive sneer the HN guidelines advise against. You can write dev docs for humans and still want machine readability (without caring about whether some LLM c…

There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history. See htt…

Yep--I'm agreeing that one's a good comparison to elaborate on. Exploring how it stacks up against an essential use probably won't persuade people who perceive it as wasteful.

Agriculture feeds people, Simon. It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential. If you're go…

I'll cop to not reading the whole list before commenting, but I skimmed this and didn't really notice anything about speed or performance. When using tools that can emit 0 to milli…

This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.

The em is more than a synonym for semicolon.

Chet seems like good folks from everything I've seen.

It seems reasonable to me. Sorry you got that reaction. Just from the mailing list thread size alone, it looks like you put quite a lot of work into it. I wasn't readily able to fi…

When you say library system, do you mean something more or less like a separate search path and tools for managing it? I've written a little about how we can more or less accomplis…

Was this meant for someone else? I did not dispute that this was likely rare in medieval Europe (for the same reason you cite).