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slidehero

133 karma · joined July 2, 2024

Developer of AI tools for teachers. slidehero.ai@gmail.com
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slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
this is so false that Dunning and Kruger invented a name for it
slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
> isn't related to usefulness or economic value

which gets us closer to philosophical questions which I'm personally not that interested in.

>In the same way airplanes fail the 'bird replacement' requirement, AIs currently fail most AGI requirements only on the terms: "fully", "all" and "any".

I'm not sure we want a machine that fully succeeds that test.

Planes pass the 'bird replacement' test on the only criteria that matters to us ... flying.

If we wanted nest making planes I think we'd have them by now. Nest making doesn't rate highly on the problems we're looking to solve though.

I don't want a machine that is moody, or depressed or has schizophrenia, which are all pat of the human condition.

We don't need the human "intuition magic dust" to do 99.99999% of useful work.

They're machines designed to do the work we don't want to. That's as "general" as their intelligence needs to be.

I'd prefer if my clothes folding machine did not have an existential crisis.

slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
>If there's big limitations on the overlap forever, then there will never be AGI.

maybe. we'll see.

slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
>I'm confused, is your argument something like "It's too easy so AGI doesn't need to be able to do it"?

Do you possess magnetoreception? a stupid pigeon can "see" the earth's magentic field. why are you blind to it? does a lack of magnetoreception make your intelligence any less "general"

no, you're just blind to it because that's just the way it is.

LLMs are blind to character counting because that's the way they are.

It didn't stop ChatGPT from finding the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample.

Human intelligence and machine intelligence are only going to cross over to a certain degree.

same as plane flight and bird flight are only kinda related.

slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
appreciate your response, but it's still birds vs planes.

AI does not need to feel emotions or have a heartbeat to be useful. It only needs to perform a task correctly à la Chinese room.

>therefore cannot fully replicate human-like intelligence

this does not follow. planes don't flap wings therefore they cannot fly?

slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
which just brings us back to the whole birds vs planes thing.

turns out that flapping wings is not the right way to unlock human flight.

computers could count the Rs in strawberry since vacuum tubes. that measure is irrelevant.

slidehero··on GPT-6 Astra
> gaslight about answers to questions like "how many r's in strawberry" or "s's in espresso".

this has been debunked too many times to bother rebutting. they struggle with those things because of the way they are.

it's completely irrelevant.

slidehero··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
>why not the planet?

greed

slidehero··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
>I'm sure people thought calculators and, indeed, computers themselves were very Harry Potter

nobody thought that

slidehero··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
> In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do

that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book.

at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously.

Terrence is impressed. Good enough for me.

slidehero··on AI slop is killing online communities
presumably most people running these bots are doing it for some financial gain. as long gain > cost the issue won't go away.

It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.

slidehero··on Quirks of Human Anatomy
similar story with the appendix.

Initially considered a useless vestige, now thought to be involved with maintaining gut bacteria.

slidehero··on Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port
>I simply see no benefit of a copy of very Windows-y app.

That's cool, sounds like it's not for you then.

There are plenty of people who would appreciate it though.

I've been using N++ for a long time. I have tried just about every editor out there and I always end up back in N++.

It's old. It is missing a lot of the bells and whistles of newer editors, but I'm still most productive in old faithful :)

slidehero··on ARC-AGI-3
had the same thought.

I've been a gamer for just about 40 years. Gaming is my "thing"

I found the challenges fun, but easy. Coming back and reading comments from people struggling with the games, my first thought was - yup definitely not a gamer.

My approach was to poke at the controls to suss the rules, then the actual solutions were really straightforward.

fwiw, I'm pretty dumb generally, but these kinds of puzzles are my jam.

slidehero··on Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)
Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.
slidehero··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
>Do you believe the results would have been the same under a Stalin instead of a Gorbachev?

A little different if you're talking foreign invasion obviously. In Poland's case it was Poles vs Poles and regardless of the level of tyranny, soldiers have trouble shooting their countrymen if they're sitting in a factory.

If the other guy is actively shooting at you though?... The logic is simple to follow.

slidehero··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
>If they had a means to defend themselves, maybe there could have been less lives lost.

dude c'mon, be serious.

the response to "my house is on fire" is not "gee I wonder what would happen if I added more fuel..."

The response is to starve the fire of oxygen. Labour is a government's oxygen.

slidehero··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
>but having known refugees from a tyrannical government

my family escaped Poland as political refugees before the end of communism. Poland famously had bloodless revolution in 1989 exactly this way.

Down tools. stop work and the economy essentially seized up (practically over night).

>Sometimes it will work out, but not without sacrifice.

Sacrifice is always necessary.

If the factories stop, there is no way to move forward, regardless of how tyrannical the government.

slidehero··on My AI-driven identity crisis
> It's _derivative_ work.

fwiw, I mostly agree with you (ai training stinks of some kind of infringement), but legal precedent is not favouring copyright holders at least for now.

In Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta "judges have now held that copying works to train LLMs is “transformative” under the fair use doctrine" [1]

i.e. no infrigement - bearing in mind this applies only in the US. The EU and the rest of the world are setting their own precedents.

Copyright can only be contested in the jurisdiction that the alleged infringement occurred, and so far it seems that fair use is holding up. I'm curious to watch how it all plays out.

It might end up similarly to Uber vs The World. They used their deep pockets to destabilise taxis globally and now that the law is catching up it doesn't matter any more - Uber already won.

[1] https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/a-tale-...

slidehero··on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
>There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different

You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling billions of things equallly.

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
all good :) I appreciate the discussion.
slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
Fair points and I appreciate the heads up. I'll add those things asap.

>If you're inviting teachers to add information about their districts and their students, you MUST take your security, your supply chain, and your disclosures seriously.

Definitely not the case with SlideHero. There is no facility to add student names or any school related information. It's purely a slide deck and activity generator.

>enter PII about minor children, and then get fired and that data will be invisible to my department forever.

That would be very poor judgement on the teacher's part for sure. There are no prompts to enter student data at all in SlideHero, it's really not designed for that.

>Please, be careful.

100% agree, I'll add a note to remind users not to add any identifying information, although they'd almost have to be willfully doing it since thats not in line with the purpose of the app.

Appreciate the concern though and you make valid points, so I appreciate it.

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
>I feel there's some valid criticism in here that is unfortunately presented in maybe a little too aggressive a tone.

It's all good, I'm a school teacher so I have a thick skin :)

>OP, I think this is terrific work;

Thank you!

>I think its pretty nifty too!

:)

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
>This is a great idea.

Thank you.

>I've worked as a teacher and I think people severely underestimate the amount of time teachers have to prepare lessons.

Yes absolutely. I was spending a lot of time in ChatGPT for brainstorming about a year ago and that's where the idea for SlideHero came about.

>That said, I don't think I would use it to create an entire lesson.

Agreed, the purpose of SlideHero is not to "take over" a teachers planning and lesson delivery, I've designed it to be an value add, which is why I devoted a fair amount of effort to the additional activites that come with every presentation.

>If I were still teaching, I would definitely try it out for that.

I'll take that as high praise considering you're not a huge fan of LLMs :)

>I would consider making it easier for teachers to share what they've created with each other.

Yes for sure. That viral hook is soon to come. I have ideas for a marketplace where teachers can list their presentations and make some money selling them too, but I'm getting a little carried away now ... that's for further down the line.

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
>Perhaps if all the prompts were translated to a language of choice

Yes you're probably right.

>But maybe you never even considered making a multi-lingual tool

I think there is a way to produce output that is in the desired language, but I honestly haven't looked too deeply into it. For now I am going to stay focused on English though.

>How do you combine a (full time?) teaching job with building such a tool? It feels way more than some hobby project

With many late nights and coffee, lots of coffee :)

>Congrats on the release!

Thank you I appreciate the kind words.

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
>but already on first glance there was a wrong image

Yeah the images are going to be mostly match, but there is a "swap" button to choose more suitable images where the ai has picked poorly.

>and some pretty ugly use of language

Was this in your native language? I'm not sure how well ChaGPT does outside of English.

>But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare.

Yes absolutely! This is the goal of SlideHero.

>Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used

At the end of the day, it is still up to the teacher to create worthwhile resources, this was true before AI and is still true today :)

Thank you for your feedback.

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
>I've shared this with friends that are teaching, and they're definitely going to try it.

That is so awesome and I'm really happy to hear it - thank you!

>as we know the last 10% is 90% of the work

yes, so true :)

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
Please rememeber that a slideshow is just one tiny piece of the teaching puzzle and SlideHero is not trying to be everything for everyone.

All those things you mention are good, and necessary (adjusted for audience age of course) and a good teacher will add all that value too and that can and should happen outside of SlideHero.

My goal is to reduce teacher load by just enough that teachers see the value in paying me $7/month :)

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
>I'm surprised you're allowed to do that in the first place.

Not just allowed, but expected.

>I didn't have a curriculum I was mandated to follow.

Curriculum documents are not as detailed and prescriptive as you imagine. They absolutely do go into specific detail of what must be covered, but they don't specify the how, when, sequencing etc. The teacher of course has much discretion with regard to how they teach.

>Over here, the material changes yearly, too. But it's not the teachers changing it - it's the textbook authors moving some things around

Every system has its quirks I guess :)

slidehero··on Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
Thank you! I really hope so. I've found it super valuable in my own classes and so far the response from other teachers has been very positive :)
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