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CheatGPT

blog.humphd.org

261–270 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#261

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

> "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" If you can remember, 5-10 years after you solved it.

Its an interview question. If you draw a blank on that, rephrase the question for yourself to something like this: "When you think of bugs you've recently fixed in your code, what comes to mind? Which bug had the most interesting story?". If that feels illegal to you, you can check with your interviewer: "I can't remember many weird old bugs, but can I tell you about a bug I fixed the other week?".

Interviews aren't like tests in school. The point isn't to demonstrate knowledge. The point is to demonstrate to the interviewer that you're someone they'd want to work with. What are they looking for? They want someone they can trust technically, and someone they would enjoy working alongside.

This question is great because its an opportunity to demonstrate both of those skills, by asking you to tell a story (social skills) about an experience you had programming. Use it!

Re: CheatGPT

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.” Not to be intentionally obtuse, but what are the obvious equity issues?

Language ability, manner of speaking, physical stature and presentation, reputation from previous interactions with staff, you name it—all worsened by the fact that many of these are probably going to be done by course staff. It's not clear to me that any other form of assessment has as much potential for subconscious bias. Orchestras started using privacy screens for auditions for a reason. And I'm not familiar with…

But then why say "equity"? Blind grading can, of course, eliminate bias and achieve equality. But to achieve equity, you need to know the race, sex, religion, etc in order to "positively" discriminate.

Re: CheatGPT

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use this for that: https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain (GPT + WolframAlpha + Whisper)

I tested several AI chats, and none of them could correctly answer the question: "what is heavier, 1 kilogram of nails or 1 kilogram of feathers?". Does this one know? (I don't have openai key, can't test it myself). EDIT: turns out, the latest version of chatGPT knows the answer. They also fixed the answer to another famous trick question("The son of my father, but not my brother. Who is that?")

here ChatGPT awnser to the prompt in quotes:

Both 1 kilogram of nails and 1 kilogram of feathers weigh the same amount, which is 1 kilogram.

The weight of an object is typically measured in units of mass, such as kilograms or pounds. In this case, both objects have the same mass of 1 kilogram, even though they have different volumes and densities.

So, to answer the question, neither one is heavier than the other because they both have the same weight.

Re: CheatGPT

#264

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

One of the smartest I ever felt was hearing some teammates a cube wall over saying "this one customer from poland says he's crashing a lot" (in our ui). I was like "is he in the polish locale/language? They asked.... yes... "I bet polish has different seperators and our split("/")[1] is crashing"... they checked, had him change to english, crash went away. I felt real yoda like. We had customer on chat so much easier to debug.

Re: CheatGPT

#265

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

God I hope so, the last time I went job hunting I spend a couple of months doing the leet coding stuff, and I got "pretty good", but I'm certain it would have taken me another couple of months to pass the gauntlet somewhere.

Re: CheatGPT

#266
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“enough friction and a timesink” Have you taught students before? Many will spend inordinate amounts of time to not learn the material. Often times it seems there is no friction too great if it allows one to not think too hard.

Yes, and I've been one, and know that time is finite and you have more than one class that demands work on a deadline, along with all the other fun stuff college has that pulls you away from your studies, and the not so fun stuff like part time employment. If you leave the system as it is today, its easy to copy and paste code. If you do something akin to what I proposed, you've eliminated copy and paste, and made ch…

Yeah but what you’re talking about is a simple typing exercise.

Re: CheatGPT

#267

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

> "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" If you can remember, 5-10 years after you solved it.

Part of the process is going over your own history and making a collection of stories about what you've done and having that ready. I've shipped over a dozen products in my 25+ years. I can't recall much of any of it off-hand.

Re: CheatGPT

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One time, I was working on a project where the UI kept freezing when a certain button was pressed. I spent hours debugging the code, but couldn't figure out what was causing the problem. Eventually, I discovered that the button's event handler was accidentally triggering an infinite loop that was consuming all the CPU resources, causing the UI to freeze. It was a weird bug because the symptoms were not immediately o…

I mean the first and the third aren't great. So, 33% chance of being boned.

One weird thing about ChatGPT is that it consistently feels like a B+ student, at everything you ask it. Its never top of the class, but its answers seem skilled enough to get by.

I've seen this asking about my own field (CRDTs), asking it to write comedy sketches, and with some of the academics I know asking it the sort of essay students they'd ask their students.

I wonder if its somehow doing this on purpose - like if its pitching its answers to be the most "middle of the pack" from all of its training data.

Re: CheatGPT

#269
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it just moves the definition of “learning” to a higher level of abstraction: so you know what AI tools to use, how to prompt them, and how to understand their output? I’m reminded of the time when graphing calculators were going to destroy math programs because nobody would “really know” how to do the work. And yet here we are, and math is fine, and calculators are just another tool.

I hear this argument a lot and I think that it's fallacious. Let's go ahead and extend it to another AI tool - in this case let's talk about stable diffusion. Let's say you teach a class on fine Art and painting, if you allow your students to use stable diffusion for all their drawings, would you make the case that they have learned how to paint? Likewise you can't really make the case that somebody understands how t…

> would you make the case that they have learned how to paint

Well, you’re assuming that “painting” is the physical act of moving a brush on canvas.

But that’s already not true. Plenty of people graduate art school with degrees, despite doing everything on a computer. Are they “painters”? Well, no, but they are artists.

And if you’re talking about a program for artists, where the work is judged on artistic merit (composition, concept, etc), I don’t think it matters what mediums are used.

But if we’re narrowly focused on something more like sign painting, where what matters is brush technique and conforming to customer expectations, sure, AI will reduce the need for such people and will allow those who exist to “cheat”. But who cares?

Re: CheatGPT

#270
post #29
post #21

Perhaps this is another of the early (?) nails in the coffin for traditional higher education. If it becomes harder to assess if someone learned something (with a grade), the results of that assessment (GPA) become less valuable. Software has traditionally been at the forefront of allowing people with non-traditional backgrounds (bootcamps, other degrees, self-taught) to work in the highest echelon of jobs, because o…

I think it just moves the definition of “learning” to a higher level of abstraction: so you know what AI tools to use, how to prompt them, and how to understand their output? I’m reminded of the time when graphing calculators were going to destroy math programs because nobody would “really know” how to do the work. And yet here we are, and math is fine, and calculators are just another tool.

Most math classes are taught without graphing calculators and when they are used it is minimal. This is fundamentally different. This literally is being people trying to substitute actually know or successfully being evaluated to do anything. The advocates of “bringing down higher education with AI” also consider competence to be “ableism”.
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