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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • There are two answers. First, the algorithm obviously sucks. Maybe they have it programmed in a way that attracts other people to watch a ton of stuff, but it definitely doesn’t match your interests and personality. The second point is that as YouTube has changed how they pay content creators, they have disincentivized various types of videos. Depending on the content creator and the topic, it might make sense to have a relatively short video or possibly a quite long one, and yet it seems those are not getting the type of payment that they used to.

    Another point that I have heard various YouTubers mention but I don’t know the details of involves how the algorithm will either hype you a lot or not hype you at all. Various channels used to get large amounts of visits routinely and then in a matter of 2 months those visits dropped to a few percent of what they once were. In other words, the algorithm appears to be very polarizing in certain cases.





  • There was a time not long before the railroads when time zones didn’t even exist and times were tracked locally. That’s what it was like for most of human history.

    Of course we don’t have to behave tomorrow the same way that we behaved yesterday, but on the other hand, the system works fairly well for almost everyone almost all of the time. If we were to switch to what you’re proposing, there would actually have to be a lot of work done to recreate currently existing functionality, because people wouldn’t have any idea when it’s light or dark outside or when businesses are open. Of course we could do all of that. But again, why should most of us waste our time when we’re almost never troubled by time zone changes?

    The other point is that although we do have to deal with time zone changes, in reality the situation is much simpler than it was 20 years ago, because a lot of our software is very savvy and automatically converts things for us.










  • There is plenty wrong with generative AI as a tool if you think of it in those terms.

    I would say that if the depth of analysis is limited to “AI” or “genAI” then use of it in schools is overwhelmingly bad. If that’s the limit of our ability to frame the issue, then banning AI would appear inevitable, and any graded assignment that might encourage AI use should be banned.

    But if you want to break things down, you can find specific tools (i.e., calculators, grammar checkers) that could be labeled as AI or specific uses of genAI (i.e., brainstorming) that have use. And it is this latter approach – clearly identifying positive uses – that is difficult for students, media writers, and apparently policy makers to do.


  • Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.

    What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn’t understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.



  • The funny thing is that if AI coding were that good, we would already see widespread adoption in open source projects. But we haven’t, because it sucks. Of course commercial software development companies are free to lie about how much they use AI, or get creative with their metrics so they can get their KPI bonuses. So we can’t really believe anything they say. But we can believe in transparency.

    As always, there are so many people selling snake oil by saying the word AI without actually telling you what they mean. Quite obviously there are a great many tools that one could call AI that can be and are and have been used to help do a ton of things, with many of those technologies going back decades. That’s different from using ChatGPT to write your project. Whenever you hear someone write about AI and not give clear definitions, there’s a good chance they’re full of s***.



  • I’ve been in your position and in the other person’s position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It’s possible you hadn’t considered a certain approach, and it’s probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it’s often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.

    And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that’s just how it is on forums.

    The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it’s setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they’re doing it wrong.