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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

471–480 of 880 posts

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials? You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.

I don't know where you live, but in the "developed" parts of the world this is illegal. There will either be some government agency or some council of credential-giving institutions and they will give you a license to issue degrees, or most likely they will not give it to you.

In the US, you can just make up degrees — but you have to be honest that you’re unaccredited.

Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program.

https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and...

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#472
post #277
post #151

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I liked the puzzle and I think I could DM it.

Hardest part is ‘combining emotions on the mesh’ and all the realizations involved. You can do your own thing with the setup alone though.

Yeah this was the part I found a little silly, mostly because I just couldn't visualize what that mesh looked like or how I would describe how to operate it.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the attribution itself is a certain form of cowardice. If one is actually confident that a summary is correct they'd incorporate it directly. Leaving in the "Copilot says" is an implicit attempt to weasel out of taking responsibility for it.

It's probably just transparency, because the summary will be written in a different voice and sound AIish either way. If I were to include AI generated stuff into my communication I'd also make it clear as people might guess it anyway.

But if you haven't personally verified the summary is accurate then you should not share it. And if you have verified it, you don't need to disclose.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#474

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Yes, but piano lessons are not a music degree. Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal education either. I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the concerns about AI.

But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.

Not only is that not true at all. There are many other jobs you can land other than performing with a formal music degree. Of course with the right experience you might get away with not getting that formal education but you open so many doors by going through school and getting the "useless" piece of paper.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#475

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> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (…

> I'm there for the degree Would you hire someone without a degree? When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees? I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the o…

I am generally education blind. Mostly I would say graduate school experience has been a net negative on my teams overall, if anything.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#476

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I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well: Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you . The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.

If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas. Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), be…

There are jobs that turns you down if you don't have that diploma. No amount of real world experience will get you past that bar. If it's not there, they wont even look at the rest of your application.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#477
post #462
post #425

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> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving. No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward. As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took…

And companies value it because it signals that the holder of that paper can do the work and isn’t completely stupid.

In reality, holding a piece of paper has nothing in common with relevant ability. Some graduates will exit university as competent people, some won't.

This isn't exactly news, or even a recent phenomenon. My peers who finished their CS degree circa 2004 ish were a broad mix of utter idiots who shouldn't get a job in that field, or damn sharp (if green) technically-minded people, or somewhere in between.

The industry will sort them out; the ones that can, do, the ones that can't, will do something else of use, or find another job.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#479

Here’s something I sometimes do to avoid boring content when using LLMs: I type out what it gives me and tweak it as I go instead of copy/pasting directly. It helps me spot the bits that feel flat or don’t add much, so I can cut or rework them—while still getting the benefit of the LLM’s idea generation.

I think you're missing the point. You should be providing the ideas in any piece of text you write. The boring prose style is not the major objection being expressed here.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#480

This is a lot of words of complaining instead of just changing the assignment specification to ask students to provide a prompt that they’d use, instead of asking them to regurgitate information. You get what you ask for mate, I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. If your assignment can be easily performed by an LLM, it’s a bad assignment. Teachers are just now finding out the hard way that these assignments…

Yeah. I wrote so many hamburger essays that 1) were terrible & 2) got As, I wouldn't blame a student for generating that crap. I have written approximately 0 hamburger essays post-high school. They don't want good, they want their made-up rules to be followed

> you're not always going to have a calculator in your pocket was the old fib, now it's s/calculator/llama/

So much of education when I was growing up was pointless box-checking, I'm a little satisfied that, finally, LLMs might swing the pendulum back towards valuable work. If any assignment an LLM could handle is limited to 10%, and 90% of the final grade is determined by oral exams, that seems positive.

Is "2x4" equal to 4 + 4, or 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 ? There's only one correct answer! "You ... pick up that can" wow such learning

If LLMs love to produce 3-bullet-point-bold-font copypasta, it's probably because it's the exact varietal of crap that garnered so many upvotes on Quora. Why would I be asked to write a 500-word essay when 50 words would suffice? Maybe let's move beyond regurgitation & rote drudgery

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