421–430 of 451 posts
Huh. I'm not sure I ever use a pinky while touch-typing, except to hit right-backspace sometimes.
For that matter I don't home using F and J either -- I usually home with alt+tab / cmd+tab and right-ctrl / right-cmd.
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> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough t…
>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will…
1) That school is simply about landing a job.
2) That there is a value in students knowing how to have the AI do problems for them.
3) That follow-on effects of manually solving difficult problems is discountable compared to the direct output of the work.
I would say you're absolutely correct in that people pay for the result and they don't really care how you got there. But that's a pretty shallow rationale which overvalues the ability to be the conduit from the source of requirements to the final output and undervalues the individual ability to think for one's self when faced with the challenges of technological, geopolitical, or simply uncontrolled personal circumstances.
"The conduit", who you seem to be believe is the one with marketplace advantage, is exactly the person I would say is the most vulnerable. Not because getting the AI to produce demands is without value, but that its quickly becoming a task that doesn't need the intermediary at all. Those magicians that can prompt/agent/mcp/etc their way through to positive successes are actively being challenged by the very AI producers which our conduits people now depend on. Removing the need for intermediaries would be a great competitive advantage for any AI vendor able to achieve it. But insofar as intermediaries create output from LLMs, they'll not be very well differentiated: the common wisdom tends to be the output, lest the AI be accused of hallucination or being overly supportive. But when everyone is using AI for everything the opportunities will be in arbitraging that which is missed by common wisdom... filling in the cracks that any responsible AI would simply never venture to consider. Our conduit-person will be at a decided disadvantage because it takes real thought to know when it's best to color within the lines, and when it's best to not do so.
And that's really it. A good education is teaching you about the process of thought and becoming practiced at thinking. I would expect a better educated, thinking person to more easily adapt and make use of technology such as generative AI to solve problems more so than a person that just knows how to deal with today's prompting needs. The thinking person will be able to understand the bigger picture to better get a consistent and high quality series of results than the person just getting results as needed.
And that's really it. The output of a good education is you as a thoughtful & knowledgeable person: the output on the page is merely a means to that end. But if you focus solely on the answer on the page and the only important thing... you're really evaluating the AI, not the person that acted as intermediary.
In otherwords, if the person following your advice comes for a job, simply ask them which AIs they used in the interview and then just sign contracts with those vendors instead... you'll get better bang for your buck cutting out the middleman.
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>even programming exams were hand written Which strikes me as a terrible way to teach and test programming skills. If you're teaching to program without so much as syntax highlighting, you're not preparing your students for anything that even remotely resembles the industry they aspire to work in. Honestly, these days universities should probably find a way to incorporate AI into their teaching, rather than fight it.…
> remotely like the industry they'll work in Education isn't any churning out a cog fitted to a bigger gear. A college education should not be preparing you for intellij or familiarizing you with va code. It should be teaching foundational skills with the discipline. And I just don't understand how you look at the amazing things we've accomplished since ww2 and say "the education system that taught this fucking sucks…
The vast majority of students and employers treat them as vocational certificates in practice, and the profession would almost certainly benefit from adapting curricula to more closely match that reality.
Foundational concepts are still necessary, but I don't buy the argument that we should continue teaching like it's 1946.
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> remotely like the industry they'll work in Education isn't any churning out a cog fitted to a bigger gear. A college education should not be preparing you for intellij or familiarizing you with va code. It should be teaching foundational skills with the discipline. And I just don't understand how you look at the amazing things we've accomplished since ww2 and say "the education system that taught this fucking sucks…
What I don't understand is how you can look at all the progress we've made since ww2 and decide we don't have to update our education to keep it relevant, and argue in favour of teaching tech that's been obsolete for 80 years. Students today aren't studying to repeat the progress made since the forties, that's been done by their grandparents, they're looking to drive the next 40 years of innovation, and if that invol…
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In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like…
The lack of any real innovation or major economic development in Spain would appear to be fairly strong evidence that the "Napoleonic" model wasn't actually working. Maybe this new system was even worse but I'm baffled as to why anyone would believe that changes weren't needed. Physician, heal thyself.
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In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like…
> and partly to copy the US/UK ways In the UK it's common for exams to have almost all of the weight. In my Physics degree almost all courses were entirely dependent on the exams. Including a final exam which examined the entire four-year MPhys course known as General Problems where even getting 30% was considered a good grade!
Give them a 5150 PC with WordStar and let them go to town.
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In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like…
In my public university in Spain, we always had the option to do a single final exam instead of the continuous assessment, although very few chose it. Generally the continuous assessment was less stressful, and the material stuck better, with room to digest it rather than just cramming for the exam and forgetting it right after. Generally the default expectation was that everyone was a full time student yes, but ther…
Not sure when this was supposed to be the case, but for actual universities (not meant in a deragotary way, Germany has two types of higher eduction) in hard sciences, most classes are graded on a single written exam. Both in undergrad/bachelors and masters.
Unless things have drastically changed in the last five years...
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Sounds more like a gameshow than education, like IT version of Hogwarts
It also sounds vulnerable to bias, unless the teacher modified each project in the same ways. How did they ensure they gave each student an equally difficult challenge and didn't consciously or unconsciously make it easier and harder for different students?