Not to mention that the “more and better teachers” mantra should be applied all the way down to primary education.

Unfortunately our societies prioritise these things differently.

I’m not excluding hiring good teachers and TAs from the picture. I’m not excluding paying them a good enough wage to attract talent either. But that’s another conversation.

In my university days lectures were paired with seminars. And those had a max size of about 30, and a TA who would explain and help apply the lecture knowledge. The lecturer would visit seminars on rotation and ensure the quality of TAs. And the kicker? The whole gang would be there for the (free form) exam, including the grading.

In short: it can be done because that’s where we come from, actually.

And personally I hate multi choice tests, there is no opportunity to see the thought process of the student, or find and be lenient towards those that got the theory, but forgot to carry a 1 somewhere. They simplified the grading, sure, now you can have a machine do it, but thats about it.

Here’s a novel idea, maybe it needs less students per teacher. Or more teachers per student, however you want to call it.

I would laugh too if this wasn’t going to be a major influence on US policy towards Ukraine in the coming months.

I think you nailed it. In the grand scheme of things, critical thinking is always required.

The problem is that, when it comes to LLMs, people seem to use magical thinking instead. I’m not an artist, so I oohd and aahd at some of the AI art I got to see, especially in the early days, when we weren’t flooded with all this AI slop. But when I saw the coding shit it spewed? Thanks, I’ll pass.

The only legit use of AI in my field that I know of is an unit test generator, where tests were measured for stability and code coverage increase before being submitted to dev approval. But actual non-trivial production grade code? Hell no.

You know, I was happy to dig through 9yo StackOverflow posts and adapt answers to my needs, because at least those examples did work for somebody. LLMs for me are just glorified autocorrect functions, and I treat them as such.

A colleague of mine had a recent experience with Copilot hallucinating a few Python functions that looked legit, ran without issue and did fuck all. We figured it out on testing, but boy was that a wake up call (colleague in question has what you might call an early adopter mindset).

A 100% accurate AI would be useful. A 99.999% accurate AI is in fact useless, because of the damage that one miss might do.

It’s like the French say: Add one drop of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage. Add one drop of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage.

No argument from me. But we’re talking about a byproduct of a commercial endeavour, without financial gain there would be less reason to do it in the first place.

If nothing else, at least they make less money and I have a better experience online.

Sure, but look at it this way. Fingerprints are benefiting the advertisers, and their purpose is to better target ads. Well I say fingerprint the hell out of everything, but I’ll make sure no ads get through. If we all do that, what’s the added value of fingerprinting then?

PiHole

AdAway

Burn the ads down.

That’s it, I’ll start calling them the North and South Mexican continents.

The Grand Seduction (2003)

Really nice French-Canadian comedy.

LE: Seems there’s an English language remake from 2013 with Brendan Gleeson as well.

Private companies and consultants make millions on tax advice. Wrongly filed tax returns result in fines. Need I continue?

Apparently the new slogan is “Vox Populi No DEI”.

The content filtering approach to government, or, if you will, a filterocracy.