Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 880 posts

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#571

Post by jll29 »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #431
rohansood15 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students want the diploma because it has value. It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving. If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.

> If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed. Amen. I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.

An apprentice, after five years of work, can be a master, just by practcising.

That's why the universities of Oxford and Cambridge give Master's degree to everyone that gets a Bachelor's degree after five years, without further examination or coursework (note that these are MAs only, not MRes, MPhil or MBA degrees, which typically require 1-2 years of studies, exams and theses).

Historically, the academic Master was seen as equivalent to a Master in a craft (e.g. philosophy carpentry).

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#572

Post by 6510 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #419
rohansood15 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students want the diploma because it has value. It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving. If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.

Soon? I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school. I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.

HR seems a lot like real estate appraisal as~in appraisers know nothing about construction.

One could in theory establish the value of a thing or person by comparing it with similar things but if everyone does that the process becomes senseless.

If a working car is worth 5000, the same car from the same year with a defect that costs 1000 to fix should be worth 4000. If the repair costs 6000 there is no car.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#573

Post by mschuster91 »

dullcrisp wrote: post #428
mschuster91 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken. Meh, academic degrees don't come for free, someone has to pay for universities, staff and other expenses. In the US it's everyone for themselves by student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcies, in Europe it's the tax payers. The problem is, the ones profiting from…

So like a payroll tax specific to jobs that require higher education?

No, only for jobs that claim to require higher education but do not. Basically, an "abuse tax" to reimburse the government (or the students) for having to spend money on something clearly not needed.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#574

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

godelski wrote: post #398
MengerSponge wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s) Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could i…

> then she could issue a degree in piano. It's worth noting, plenty of universities do this. You can get a degree "in piano".

You can get a BMus in Piano Performance, which is a standard music degree with a piano performance specialisation. It's not a special thing of its own kind, and it's normal for performers in music college to specialise in one instrument, usually with a second as an elective.

Being able to play moderately hard pieces from dots and sight-reading are the entry level requirement. It's taken for granted you can already do that.

The degree part means learning music history, theory, and performance styles, working on performance projects, solo and with other musicians.

The analogy with ChatGPT is that it's taking over the entry-level part of the process. You can't expect to get onto a music degree if you only know how to prompt ChatGPT to produce a MIDI file for your entrance exam.

And in CS, you can't produce good code if you barely know what a server is.

It's all very Dunning Kruger. If you use an LLM to produce course work to get your piece of paper at the end, you don't even know what prompts you should use to do an unfamiliar job, never mind having the skills to do it yourself.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#575

Post by [deleted] »

MengerSponge wrote: post #387
bumby wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. * according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey

We (America) made university educations super expensive. Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.

[deleted]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#576

Post by seabass »

kevinventullo wrote: post #224
necovek wrote: post #54

I've already asked a number of colleagues at work producing insane amount of gibberish with LLMs to just pass me the prompt instead: if LLM can produce verbose text with limited input, I just need that concise input too (the rest is simply made up crap).

Something I’ve found very helpful is when I have a murky idea in my head that would take a long time for me to articulate concisely, and I use an LLM to compress what I’m trying to say. So I type (or even dictate) a stream of consciousness with lots of parentheticals and semi-structured thoughts and ask it to summarize. I find it often does a great job at saying what I want to say, but better. (See also the famous Pa…

Your original here is distinctly better! It shows your voice and thought patterns. All character is stripped away in the "compressed" version, which unsurprisingly is longer, too.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#577

Post by mewpmewp2 »

jameshart wrote: post #329
sn9 wrote: post #221

> 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; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

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.

But going to school to prepare for life is like going to gym to lift weights to prepare for a marathon.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#578

Post by Aerroon »

simonask wrote: post #549
Aerroon wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these complaints will fall onto deaf ears for at least two reasons: 1. Students are a captive audience. They don't want to be there. It's the law that makes them be there. Even once you're beyond mandatory education this holds true: they were just carried into further education by momentum. They didn't realize they had a real choice or what alternatives were available. 2. A lot of the skills you build in clas…

But this is exactly the problematic viewpoint. You thought that the point of letting you write essays in your native language was to enable you to write essays. It isn't, it never was.

But what was the point then?

During the final exam, a national exam (all the students did it at the same time in the country) you were given blank pieces of paper, a pen, 10 different topics to choose from, and 6 hours.

You pick a topic, write a draft, then write the essay. ~700 words.

Bonus points if you use relevant literature or science quotes in it. Quotes you had to memorize, without knowing the topics.

None of the topics resonated with you? Tough luck, buddy.

Don't have any 'novel' ideas? Figure something out!

Cited something the reader didn't know about? Should've known better!

Quoted someone the person grading doesn't know? Better hope they're in a good mood!

There's a reason they got rid of this style of exam a few years later. Doesn't change that this one thing dominated my native language and literature classes.

My biggest takeaway from it is how much I hate my native language class and literature class, but that might've happened even without the essay.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#579

Post by [deleted] »

blintz wrote: post #366

Call it the iron law of LLMs: "No worthy use of an LLM involves other human beings reading its output." If you use a model to generate code, let it be code nobody has to read: one-off scripts, demos, etc. If you want an LLM to prove a theorem, have it generate some Coq and then verify the proof mechanically. If you ask a model to write you a poem, enjoy the poem, and then graciously erase it.

[deleted]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#580

Post by sethammons »

scarface_74 wrote: post #408
fallinditch wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the little sister is acting rationally. Yes it's a bit lazy but then: when was the last time you used a calculator for a calculation that you could have done in your head? Do you actually need to be able to do mental arithmetic, do you actually really need to be able to work out what 24 + 7 is in your head? I don't know what the answer is. I'm old school, if it was up to me I'd bring back slide ru…

Even with a calculator and more so with ChatGPT, you still need to know whether an answer passes the sniff test.

24 plus 7 is 41 or 94 or 3 and 4/7 are all obviously wrong, but only if you have developed number sense. I've had students who wouldn't bat an eye at any of those solutions.
Post reply on HN