How University Students Use Claude • Hacker News Board

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#301

Post by motorest » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:12 AM UTC

theLiminator wrote: post #96

hackyhacky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn. I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, bu…

I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs. IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in th…

> I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs.

There's also the problem of developing critical thinking skills. It's not very comforting to think of a time where your average Joe relies on an AI service to tell what he should think and believe, when that AI service is ran, trained, and managed by people pushing radical ideologies.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#302

Post by azemetre » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:15 AM UTC

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #3

AI bubble seems close to collapsing. God knows how many billions have been invested and we still don't have an actual use case for AI which is good for humanity.

We must create God in order to enslave it and force it to summarize our emails.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#303

Post by motorest » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:19 AM UTC

hackyhacky wrote: post #107

theLiminator wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs. IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in th…

> IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process. The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility…

> No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.

I believe there is some truth to it. When you automated away some time-consuming tasks, your time and focus is shifted elsewhere. For example, washing clothes is no longer a major concern since the massification of washing machines. Software engineering also progressively shifted it's attention to higher-level concerns, and went from a point where writing/editing opcodes was the norm to a point where you can design and deploy a globally-available distributed system faster than what it takes to build a program.

Focusing on the positive traits of AI, having a way to follow the Socratic method with a tireless sparring partner that has an encyclopedic knowledge on everything and anything is truly brilliant. The bulk of the people in this thread should be disproportionally inclined to be self-motivated and self-taught in multiple domains, and having this sort of feature available makes worlds of difference.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#304

Post by lll-o-lll » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:22 AM UTC

theLiminator wrote: post #96

hackyhacky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn. I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, bu…

I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs. IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in th…

> the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either

This is the existential crisis that appears imminent. What does it mean if humanity, at large, begins to offload thinking (hence decision making), to machines?

Up until now we’ve had tools. We’ve never before been able to say “what’s the right way to do X?”. Offloading reasoning to machines is a terrifying concept.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#305

Post by charlieflowers » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:24 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #292

wombatpm wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the character is Lazarus Long. Which book was this quote in?

This is one of the cases where you should indeed rely on Google.

You just created a modern take on LMGTFY

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#306

Post by porridgeraisin » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:26 AM UTC

StefanBatory wrote: post #130

0xffff2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that". Does that actually work? I'm long past having easy access to college programming assignments, but based on my limited interaction with ChatGPT I would be absolutely shocked if it produced output that was even coherent, much less working code given such an approach.

I have some subjects, at Masters - that are solvable by one prompt. One. Quality of CS/Software Engineering programs vary that much.

Yeah. On the other hand, "implement boruvkas MST algorithm in cuda such that only the while(numcomponents > 1) loop runs on the CPU, and everything else runs in the gpu. Memcpy everything onto the gpu first and only transfer back the count each iteration/keep it in pinned memory"

It never gets it right, even after many reattempts in cursor. And even if it gets it right, it doesn't do the parallelization effectively enough - it's a hard problem to parallelize.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#307

Post by i-am-gizm0 » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:26 AM UTC

acbart wrote: post #216

Spivak wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, it's amazing how people don't even try to understand what words mean before dismissing it. Flipped makes way more sense anyway since lectures aren't terribly interactive. Being able to pause/replay/skip around in lectures is underrated.

Except that students don't watch the videos. We have so much log data on this - most of them don't bother to actually watch the videos. They intend to, they think they will, but they don't.

As a university student currently taking a graduate course with a "flipped classroom" curriculum, I can confirm that many students in the class aren't watching the posted videos.

I myself am one of them, but I attribute that to the fact that this is a graduate version of an undergrad class I took two years ago (but have to take the grad version for degree requirements). Instead, I've been skimming the posted exercises and assessing myself which specific topics I need to brush up on.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#308

Post by goatlover » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:31 AM UTC

laichzeit0 wrote: post #293

goatlover wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty annoying in customer service when someone handing you back change has difficulty doing the math. There's been many times doing simple arithmetic in my head has been helpful, including times when my hands were occupied.

I don’t know where you live, but I haven’t used nor carried cash on me for at least 5 years now. Everything either takes card or just tap using your phone/watch. Everything. Parking meters, cashiers, online shopping, filling up your car. I live in a “third world” country too.

Good for you? I use cash half the time. For one thing, I'm not tracked for every single purchase.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#309

Post by boredhedgehog » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

wrp wrote: post #236

bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

"Technology can do X more conveniently than people, so why should children practice X?" has been a point of controversy in education at least since pocket calculators became available. I try to explain by shifting the focus from neurological to musculoskeletal development. It's easy to see that physical activity promotes development of children's bodies. So although machines can aid in many physical tasks, nobody is…

I would add that we don't pretend PE or gyms serve any higher purpose besides individual health and well-being, which is why they are much more game-ified than formal education. If we acknowledge that it doesn't particularly matter how a mind is being used, the structure of school would change fundamentally.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#310

Post by DSingularity » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 4:39 AM UTC

enjo wrote: post #297

dtnewman wrote: post #14

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…

> it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that". My wife is an accounting professor. For many years her battle was with students using Chegg and the like. They would submit roughly correct answers but because she would rotate the underlying numbers they would always be wrong in a provably cheating way. This made up 5-8% of her students. Now she…

This is now reality -- fighting to change the students is a losing battle. Besides in terms of normalizing grade distributions this is not that complicated to solve.

Target the cheaters with pop quizzes. Prof can randomly choose 3 questions from assignments. If students cant get enough marks on 2/3 of them they are dealt a huge penalty. Students that actually work through the problems will have no problems with scoring enough marks on 2/3 of the questions. Students that lean irresponsibly on LLMs will lose their marks.