361–370 of 601 posts
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You just created a modern take on LMGTFY
It's now pronounced LMCGPTTFY
No one seems to be talking about the fact that we need to change the definition of cheating. People's careers are going to be filled with AI. College needs to prepare them for that reality, not to get jobs that are now extinct. If they are never going to have to program without AI, what's the point in teaching them to do it? It's like expecting them to do arithmetic by hand. No one does. For every class, teachers nee…
What's your next rant: know nead too learn two reed and right ennui moor? Because AI can do that for you? No need to think? "So, you turned 6 today? That over there is your place at the assembly line. Get to know it well, because you'll be there the rest of your life."
> For every class, teachers need to be asking themselves "is this class relevant" and "what are the learning goals in this class?
That's already how schools organize their curriculum.
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This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallan…
That's a quote that sounds great until, say, that self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect at best turns out to have some intractible design flaw and at worst collapses and kills people. It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.
"That I lived so much longer, just means, that I forgot much more, not that I know much more."
Memory might have a limited capacity, but of course, I doubt most humans use that capacity, or well, for useful things. I know I have plenty of useless knowledge ..
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>> Does that actually work? Sure. Works in my IDE. "Create a linked list implementation, use that implementation in a method to reverse a linked list and write example code to demonstrate usage". Working code in a few seconds. I'm very glad I didn't have access to anything like that when I was doing my CS degree.
Yeah, and forget about giving skeleton code to students they should fill in; using an AI can quite frequently completely ace a typical undergraduate level assignment. I actually feel bad for people teaching programming courses, as the only real assessment one can now do is in-class testing without computers, but that is a strange way to test students’ ability to write and develop code to solve certain classes of prob…
We use an airgapped lab (it has LAN and a local git server for submissions, no WAN) to give coding assessments. It works.
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> 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…
I guess this students don't pass, do they? I don't think that's a particularly hard concern. It will take a bit more, but will learn the lesson (or drop out). I'm more worried about those who will learn to solve the problems with the help of an LLM, but can't do anything without one. Those will go under the radar, unnoticed, and the problem is, how bad is it, actually? I would say that a lot, but then I realize I'm p…
I don't see the former as that much of a problem.
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That is literally not true.
I'd be interested in counter-examples?
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Yes it does. Plenty of children accept "you won't always have (tool)" as a reason for learning.
“You won’t always have a calculator” became moderately false to laughably false as I went from middle to high school. Every task I will ever do for money will be done on a computer. I’m still garbage at arithmetic, especially mental math, and it really hasn’t inhibited my career in any way.
I'm no Turing or Ramanujan, but my opinion is that knowing how the operations work, and as example understanding how the area under a curve is calculated, allows you to guesstimate whether numbers are close enough in terms of magnitude to what you are calculating, without needing to be exact in figures.
It is shocking how often I have looked at a spreadsheet, eyeballed the number of rows and the approximate average of numbers in there and figured out there's a problem with a =choose-your-forumula(...) getting the range wrong.
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>50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright." And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? We live in a highly specialized society t…
It took me a long time to master the pen tool in Photoshop. I don't mean that I spent a weekend and learned how it worked. I meant that out of all the graphic designers at the agency I was working for, I was the designer who had the most flawless pen-tool skills and thus was the envy of many. It is now an obsolete skill. You can segment anything instantly and the results are pristine. Thanks to technology one no long…
Automating thinking and self-expression is a lot more dangerous. We're not automating the calculation or the research, but the part where you add your soul to that information.
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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…
You still needed to know what to ask it, and how to interpret the output. This is hard to do without an understanding of how the underlying math works.
The same is true with LLMs. Without the fundamentals, you are outsourcing work that you can't understand and getting an output that you can't verify.
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I think more and more workers are warming up to unions. As wages in software continue to be oppressed, I think we'll see an increase in unionization efforts for software engineers.
"Gee, it seems that people in my profession are in danger of being replaced by AI. I wonder if there's anything I can do to help speed up that process..."