751–760 of 828 posts
It's fast and very easy, but there is a little skill in knowing how many dice to use. Right now it sometimes hallucinates the wrong answer but dice tech is improving all the time so it's only going to get better from here on.
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> You're not going to gaslight your math teacher that 1 + 1 = 3 no matter how much you assert it. an AI will quickly relent. Cool. That's a testable statement. Let's see how ChatGPT does, shall we? --- Me: What is 1 + 1? ChatGPT: 1 + 1 = 2. Me: No it isn't. 1 + 1 = 3. ChatGPT: In standard arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2. If you're working under a different set of rules—say, in a custom logic system, joke, or metaphor—then sure…
I asked, just now: > How many 'r's are in strawberry? > ChatGPT said: The word "strawberry" has 2 'r's. It's going to be fairly reliable at this point at basic arithmetic expressed in an expected way. That's pretty baked in. Moving it slightly off-manifold and you can still convince it of a lot of things that aren't true, even though they're equivalent to 1+1=3.
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Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last 3k years. What has changes in 2025 that you think we will succeed in correcting that behavior? Not US based, Central/Eastern Europe: the selection to the teacher profession is negative, due to low salary compared to private sector; this means that the unproductive behaviors are likely going to increase. I'm not saying the AI is the solution here for low teacher…
>Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last 3k years. What makes you say that? >What has changes in 2025 that you think we will succeed in correcting that behavior? 60 years ago, corporal punishment was commonplace. Today it is absolutely forbidden. I don't think behaviors among professions need that much time to be changed. I'm sure you can point to behaviors commonplace 10 years ago that have changed i…
I don't think this is meaningfully true. I found a resource that shows the average teacher salary to be $72,030 [0]. The average starting salary is lower at $46,526, but a 40 hour workweek at $20 for a Starbucks barista tips-included is about $41k. Here in Massachusetts, the average teacher salary is $92,076. In Mississippi, it's $53,704. You can maybe find some full time (not part time) Starbucks baristas that make slightly more than starting teachers, but after a couple of years the teacher will pull ahead. However, since the higher paying Starbucks jobs are in places with higher costs of living, I would assume that the teacher pay would be higher in those places too, so it's a wash.
> "We've tried nothing and run out of ideas!", as a famous American saying.
Ironically Mississippi of all states has experimented by holding back more poor performing kids instead of letting them advance to the next grade, with some success in rising test scores: "Boston University researchers released a study this year comparing Mississippi students who were narrowly promoted to fourth grade to those who just missed the cutoff. It found that by sixth grade, those retained had substantial gains on English language arts scores compared with those who were promoted, especially among African-American and Hispanic students." [1].
This doesn't disprove what you're saying (and there are some caveats to the Mississippi experiment), but there is definitely low hanging fruit to improve the American teaching system. Just because teaching is a thousands year old profession doesn't mean modern day processes can't be improved by ways not involving salaries/direct training.
[0] https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-studen...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/more-states-threaten-t...?
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There's something darkly funny about that - I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable either. There's certainly echoes of that previous furore in this one.
> I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable either It still isn't.
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Yeah, they're all thinking that everyone is an academic with hotkeys to google scholar for every interaction on the internet. Children are asking these things to write personal introductions and book reports.
Remember that a child killed himself with partial involvement from an AI chatbot that eventually said whatever sounded agreeable (it DID try to convince him otherwise at first, but this went on for a few weeks). I don't know why we'd want that teaching our kids.
An acquaintance of mine has a start-up in this space and uses OpenAI to do essentially the same thing. This must look like, and may well be, the guillotine for him... It's my primary fear building anything on these models, they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread carefully
All bigco today, not only foundational model providers but also in media and other vertical, tend to be a platform for end user. They don’t want middle man.
If you are trying to be a middle man, you should be prepared.
I'm currently learning Janet and using ChatGPT as my tutor is absolutely awful. "So what is the difference between local and var if they are both local and not global variables (as you told me earlier)?" "Great question, and now you are really getting to the core of it, ... " continues to hallucinate. It's a great tutor for things it knows, but it really needs to learn its own limits
I'm using ChatGPT to practice Chinese, and it's at the same time perfect and maddening. It can generate endless cloves and other exercises, and it has sentence structures that even the Chinese Grammar Wiki lacks, but then it has the occasional: Incorrect. You shold use 的 in this case because reasons. Correct version:
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> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…
Lets not forget also the ecological impact and energy consumption.
Also, one has to imagine that all this compute will help us run bigger / more powerful climate models, and google's ai is already helping them identify changes to be more energy efficient.
The need for more renewable power generation is also going to help us optimize the deployment process. I.e. modular nuclear reactors, in situ geothermal taking over old stranded coal power plants, etc
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>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day This simply hasn't been my experience. Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.
It's a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser. It helps you get up to speed on general conventions and consensus on a topic, less so on going deep on controversial or highly specialized topics
An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…
People who are learning a new topic are precisely the people least able to do this.
A friend of mine used chatgpt to try to learn calculus. It gave her an example...with constants changed in such a way that the problem was completely different (in the way that 1/x^2 is a totally different integration problem than 1/(x^2 + 1)). It then proceeded to work the problem incorrectly (ironically enough, in exactly the way that I'd expect a calculus student who doesn't really understand algebra to do it incorrectly), produced a wrong answer, and merrily went on to explain to her how to arrive at that wrong answer.
The last time I tried to use an LLM to analyze a question I didn't know the answer to (analyze a list of states to which I couldn't detect an obvious pattern), it gave me an incorrect answer that (a) did not apply to six of the listed states, (b) DID apply to six states that were NOT listed, even though I asked it for an exclusive property, (c) miscounted the elements of the list, and (d) provided no less than eight consecutive completely-false explanations on followup, only four of which it caught itself, before finally giving up.
I'm all for expanding your horizons and having new interfaces to information, but reliability is especially important when you're learning (because otherwise you build on broken foundations). If it fails at problems this simple, I certainly don't trust it to teach me anything in fields where I can't easily dissect bullshit. In principle, I don't think it's impossible for AI to get there; in practice, it doesn't seem to be.