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- Hacker News
- I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.by firefoxd
- Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
- This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
by Aboutplants - Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
by oxag3n - Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
by akudha - Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.by lnsru
- Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
by dchftcs - The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
by alsetmusic