To clarify, I am pro-university. I'm just saying that institutions do not always behave in ways that are purely for educational benefit, such as with legacy admissions or grade inflation. I don't think the blame falls solely on students for viewing university degrees as a necessary step for something else. I would sure bet admissions committees will use AI to screen applicants, if they aren't doing so already.
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
I came across this while trying to find context around the “trip” move in Super Mario 64. Although I’ve been playing the game since it first came out, I only just found out that when you crouch and hit the punch button, Mario does a sweeping kick. (You can run, crouch, and punch to enter into a slide, too.) A developer in this interview says the move was meant to counter short enemies, but those never made it into the game.
I was referring to this bullet under Lessons Learned: "Manuscript translation is feasible but rough. A 14th-century Sephardic manuscript hand is readable at ~70–80% accuracy. The output is a useful rough draft, not a polished translation. Plan for a longer discrepancy report and more editorial review." Some of the samples I looked at had question marks or original Hebrew text throughout, which I took to mean marked uncertainties.
I think there's more to it than that. It's a combination of extracting the text from the PDFs, resolving persistently tricky issues (especially numbers), and flagging issues for human review at scale. You can view lessons from the author on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/sweisman/translation-pipeline
I entered an interview with a hiring manger where they had received a "summary" of my resume that contained information blatantly not in my experience. The recruiter claimed they mixed my name up with another applicant, but the summary the hiring manager showed me had parts that were correct.
Awesome site. I wonder how much of this is tied to the pre-mobile, desktop era. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s where a lot of early Web nostalgia comes from.
The difference for me has been the Apple Pencil. Now I don’t view the iPad as trying to replicate the mouse and keyboard experience, because it’s something different. For notes, brainstorming, research ideas—something where I don’t want a keyboard—the iPad with Pencil has been excellent.
I'm not sure this is the best defense of the publishing industry. That $35 ticket price for a hardcover can be avoided by buying used, renting, or an ebook (if cheaper). It's true that a physical copy grants you perpetual ownership, but the general public doesn't seem to value this that much, especially for a new copy. With the barriers to editing, formatting, promotion, and distribution never being lower, publishers need to make a better case for their form of the product other than "it's not that expensive historically."
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
I think this also creates a vulnerability where, the more time and effort is spent to craft the “correct” solution, it becomes easier to dismiss topics out of hand. Even if our modeling tools have changed, emotions and the human mind have not.
There isn’t one singular “German.” Sure, there’s a standard form in the country Germany, but the language family is more diverse than that. My point is that the English terminology fuses the language family with the modern country of Germany.
For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article
on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
You can write your posts in Markdown, use Obsidian to sync them across devices, and render the pages in Quarto. This might not let you publish from mobile, but you can at least write them anywhere you want.
I saw a comment recently that described the shift to a "consumer economy." Relative to boomers, millennials have increased access to goods and services like high-definition televisions, computers, international travel, and luxury foods (e.g., avocado toast). But in terms of wealth and assets, millennials have reduced or less feasible access to things like home ownership or college degrees (not to mention childcare or healthcare), compared to boomers. Though the causes of this shift are up for debate, it does seem that boomers had an easier path to ownership or growth, while millennials and beyond face more rent-seeking obstacles.
This is a great summary! I've joked with a coworker that while our capabilities can sometimes pale in comparison (such as dealing with massively high-dimensional data), at least we can run on just a few sandwiches per day.
"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.
The difference between meta and outputs reminds me of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Similar to the metricization of research and science, for example.
That’s my point. There’s not really a singular “Brit” unless you designate one group to decide, and various other groups may also want to be considered British or not. Since I’m from the US, I won’t say more, because I’m sure there’s more to this I’m missing.
Right. If employers set RTO as the default, you may be able to negotiate remote time instead of a pay raise. They’re less willing to pay you more to commute and would rather see the commute as the expectation.
That’s the point—- definitions of culture and identity can change over time. Since I’m from the US, I don’t have much more to say about lands belonging to people, but my comment about Japan is meant to highlight problems with the idea of islands being naturally “for” people.
From the linked DHH writing: “There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.”
To clarify, who are the Brits exactly? Do the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh count, and who gets to say that? Also, the Ainu were there before the Japanese.
The section “Breaking up is hard to do” covers this without inflammatory rhetoric. By first declaring Tylenol to cause autism, it can be ruled out as a recommendation for reducing fever. With no alternatives to reducing fever, vaccines can now be not recommended, and therefore not covered by insurance, if there’s any chance of fever complications. The announcement is not really about autism, but providing a justification to portray the fever risk as unavoidable.