281–290 of 652 posts
Is there a way to download and read this as a document instead of web pages? They're hard to navigate.
Was thinking the same, the image slide-ins are broken in firefox and unreadable (white text on white background)
The format is very interesting. Can you speak to the tech stack behind how you made it ?
In general I've been very pleased. You don't have the fine scale control you do on a platform like Vev, but for someone like me that is probably a good thing because it keeps me from mucking around quite as much as I otherwise would with design decisions that I don't really understand.
The price is a bit steep for a self-funded operation and we're constrained a bit by the need to use their starter tier, but I feel like we are definitely getting our money's worth and customer support from Shorthand has been exemplary.
Have you noticed a difference in how your students approach LLMs after taking your course? A possible issue I see is that it is preaching to the choir; a student who is enclined to use LLMs for everything is less likely to engage with the material in the first place.
If you allow feedback, I was interested in lesson 10 on writing, as an educator who tries to teach my science/IT/maths students the importance of being able to communicate.
I would suggest to include a paragraph to explain why being able to write without LLMs is just as important in scientific disciplines, where precision and accuracy are more essential than creativity and personalisation.
(while I work at OAI, the opinion below is strictly my own) I feel like the current version is fairly hazardous to students and might leave them worse off. If I offer help to nontechnical friends, I focus on: - look at rate of change, not current point - reliability substantially lags possibility, by maybe two years. - adversarial settings remain largely unsolved if you get enough shots, trends there are unclear - ig…
This course mentions the famous Apple advertisement. Unfortunately it slightly oversells and while I'm sure that's not because this fragment was written by an LLM it is exactly the sort of over-simplification which leads to LLMs generating wild bullshit when they interpolate this "fact" with other "facts" they've been fed, and we ought to strive to do better when writing for humans. "Describe how prior to 1984, there…
In the original drafts I had a long section on this, including some of the history of the GUI, the development of the mouse, etc. It was way too much for the main text when the point is just to set up a metaphor for students who have seen a Mac 128.
That said, we can and should do better in the instructor guide. Thanks for the reminder. I'll add some context there.
I'm uncomfortable with the use of profanity as a core element of this campaign branding, especially given that it seems to be an educational outreach effort. While this seems targeted at college age and above, I think it would be highly relevant content for a teen audience as well. While I swear in privacy on occasion I think it has no place in the classroom. I really don't care for it in the workplace either but I g…
But the bullshit is a term of art here, after the seminal 1986 article "On Bullshit" by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt (later published as a little book). We strongly feel that it is exactly the right term for what LLMs are doing, and we make the case for that in lesson 2 of the course. (https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-2-the-nature-of-bulls...)
We're also concerned about accessibility for high school teachers etc., and thinking about what to do in that direction.
I'm curious: do you find "bs" to be any less offensive?
(while I work at OAI, the opinion below is strictly my own) I feel like the current version is fairly hazardous to students and might leave them worse off. If I offer help to nontechnical friends, I focus on: - look at rate of change, not current point - reliability substantially lags possibility, by maybe two years. - adversarial settings remain largely unsolved if you get enough shots, trends there are unclear - ig…
What are “parrot people”? And what do you mean by “doomers are probably wrong?”
In fact the most annoying thing about this article is that it is a string of very confidently made, black and white statements, offered with no supporting evidence, and some of which I think are actually wrong… i.e. it suffers from the same kind of unsubstantiated self confidence that we complain about with the weaker models
Fantastic work. Quick suggestion: a link at the bottom of the page to the next and previous lesson would help with navigation a ton.
Absolutely. Great point. I just finished updating accordingly. My design options are a bit limited so I went with a simple link to the next lesson.