[HN Gopher] I'd rather read the prompt
___________________________________________________________________
I'd rather read the prompt
Author : claytonwramsey
Score : 1305 points
Date : 2025-05-04 19:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (claytonwramsey.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (claytonwramsey.com)
| kookamamie wrote:
| We offloaded our memory to Google and then our writing to LLMs.
|
| There's too much information in the World for it to matter, I
| think is the underlying reason.
|
| As an example, most enterprise communication nears the levels of
| noise in its content.
|
| So, why not let a machine generate this noise, instead?
| bost-ty wrote:
| I hear you. But in this case, it seems like the author was
| mostly referencing academic uses of LLMs for either writing
| assignments or reviewing (academic) papers. Enterprise
| communications have their own carefully set requirements, but
| often they aren't meant to be instructive to the person writing
| them (assignments) or enhancing an existing corpus of knowledge
| (academic papers, optimistically).
| Tteriffic wrote:
| If you ask, just show me the prompts, you will invariable just
| get llm generated sets of prompts.
| necovek wrote:
| The request is not the one that would happen in real life, it's
| rather trying to point out where the actual _value_ is.
| jama211 wrote:
| As long as they provide the prompt and output combo, and the
| output solves the requirements of the assignment, I don't see
| the difference. Half the students are probably asking the llm
| for prompt help also anyway.
|
| I'd argue that making students give generic regurgitated info
| as an assignment is the actual issue. Make a good assignment...
| bost-ty wrote:
| I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the
| individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like
| this week), it's that the thought that went into making the
| prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the
| output the LLM generates afterwards.
|
| In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the
| code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't
| know what I want, if I don't have any ideas, and I don't have a
| structure or plan, _that 's_ the sort of code I get out.
|
| I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used LLMs
| lately to get academic or creative writing done, as I haven't
| tried using any models lately for anything beyond helping me
| punch through boilerplate/scaffolding on personal programming
| projects.
| Herring wrote:
| In my experience Gemini can be really good at creative writing,
| but yes you have to prompt and edit it very carefully (feeding
| ideas, deleting ideas, setting tone, conciseness, multiple
| drafts, etc).
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1andqk8/gemini...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I use Gemini pretty much exclusively for creative writing
| largely because the long context lets you fit an entire
| manuscript plus ancillary materials, so it can serve as a
| solid beta reader, and when you ask it to outline a chapter
| it is very good at taking the events preceding and following
| into account. It's hard to overstate the value of having a
| decent beta reader that can iteratively review your entire
| work in seconds.
|
| As a side note, I find the way that you interact with a LLM
| when doing creative writing is generally more important than
| the model. I have been having great results with LLMs for
| creative writing since ChatGPT 3.5, in part because I
| approach the model with a nucleus of a chapter and a concise
| summary of relevant details, then have it ask me a long list
| of questions to flesh out details, then when the questions
| stop being relevant I have have it create a narrative outline
| or rough draft which I can finish.
| Herring wrote:
| Interesting. I think I'm a better editor so I use it as a
| writer, but it makes sense that it works the other way too
| for strong writers. Your way might even be better, since
| evaluating a text is likely easier than constructing a good
| text (Which is why your process worked even back with 3.5).
| robotbikes wrote:
| I have a horrible time editing my own work. Decision
| paralysis and what not, but I did have the idea that a
| good way to practice would be editing the content of LLM
| generated fictional narratives. I think the point that
| many are making that LLMs are useful as cognitive aids
| that augment thinking rather than replacements for
| thinking. They can be used to train your mind by
| inspiring thoughts you wouldn't have came up with on your
| own.
| vunderba wrote:
| This is the _CRUX_ of the issue. Even with SOTA models (Sonnet
| 3.5, etc) - the more open-ended your prompt - the more banal
| and generic the response. It 's GIGO turtles all the way down.
|
| I pointed this out a few weeks ago with respect to why the
| _current state_ of LLMs will never make great campaign creators
| in Dungeons and Dragons.
|
| We as humans don't need to be "constrained" - ask any competent
| writer to sit quietly and come up with a novel story plot and
| they can just do it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677863
|
| That being said - they can still make _AMAZING_ soundboards.
|
| And if you still need some proof, crank the temperature up to
| 1.0 and pose the following prompt to _ANY_ LLM:
| Come up with a self-contained single room of a dungeon that
| involves an unusual puzzle for use with a DND campaign.
| Be specific in terms of the puzzle, the solution, layout
| of the dungeon room, etc. It should be totally different
| from anything that already exists. Be imaginative.
|
| I guarantee 99% of the returns will return a very formulaic
| physics-based puzzle response like "The Resonant Hourglass", or
| "The Mirror of Acoustic Symmetry", etc.
| Nezteb wrote:
| Out of curiosity, I used your prompt but added "Do not make
| it a very formulaic physics-based puzzle."
|
| The output is pretty non-sensical:
| https://pastebin.com/raw/hetAvjSG
| HPsquared wrote:
| It is totally different from anything that exists. It
| fulfils the prompt, I suppose! It has to be crazy so you
| can be more certain it's unique. The prompt didn't say
| anything about it being _good_.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I liked the puzzle and I think I could DM it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hardest part is 'combining emotions on the mesh' and all
| the realizations involved. You can do your own thing with
| the setup alone though.
| Nezteb wrote:
| Yeah this was the part I found a little silly, mostly
| because I just couldn't visualize what that mesh looked
| like or how I would describe how to operate it.
| johnfn wrote:
| > I guarantee 99% of the returns will return a very formulaic
| physics-based puzzle response like "The Resonant Hourglass"
|
| Haha, I was suspicious, so I tried this, and I indeed got an
| hourglass themed puzzle! Though it wasn't physics-based -
| characters were supposed to share memories to evoke emotions,
| and different emotions would ring different bells, and then
| you were supposed to evoke a certain type of story. Honestly,
| I don't know what the hourglass had to do with it.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Temperature 1.0 results are awful regardless of domain. 0.7
| to 0.8 is the sweet spot. No one seems to believe this till
| they see for themselves.
| WatchDog wrote:
| When using Claude Sonnet 3.7 for coding, I often find that
| constraints I add to the prompt, end up producing unintended
| side effects.
|
| Some examples:
|
| - "Don't include pointless comments." - The model doesn't
| keep track of what it's doing as well, I generally just do
| another pass after it writes the code to simplify things.
|
| - "Keep things simple" - The model cuts corners(often
| unnecessarily) on things like type safety.
|
| - "Allow exceptions to bubble up" - Claude deletes existing
| error handling logic. I found that Claude seems to prefer
| just swallowing errors and adding some logging, instead of
| fixing the underlying cause of the error, but adding this to
| the prompt just caused it to remove the error handling that I
| had added myself.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| # The Synesthetic Challenge Chamber
|
| ## Room Layout
|
| The room is a simple 30-foot square with a single exit door
| that's currently sealed. In the center sits a large stone
| cube (roughly 5 feet on each side) covered in various
| textured surfaces - some rough like sandpaper, others smooth
| as glass, some with ridged patterns, and others with soft
| fabric-like textures.
|
| Around the room, six distinct scent emitters are positioned,
| each releasing a different aroma (pine, cinnamon, ocean
| breeze, smoke, floral, and citrus). The room is otherwise
| empty except for a small stone pedestal near the entrance
| with a simple lever.
|
| ## The Puzzle Concept
|
| This puzzle operates on "synesthetic translation" -
| converting sensory experiences across different senses. The
| core concept is entirely verbal and tactile, making it fully
| accessible without visual components.
|
| ## How It Works
|
| When players pull the lever, one of the scent emitters
| activates strongly, filling the room with that particular
| aroma. Players must then approach the central cube and touch
| the texture that corresponds to that smell according to a
| hidden synesthetic logic.
|
| The connection between smells and textures follows this
| pattern: - Pine scent - ridged texture (like tree bark) -
| Cinnamon - rough, granular texture (like spice) - Ocean -
| smooth, undulating surface (like waves) - Smoke - soft,
| cloudy texture (like mist) - Floral - velvet-like texture
| (like petals) - Citrus - bumpy, pitted texture (like orange
| peel)
|
| After correctly matching three smell-texture pairs in
| sequence, the door unlocks. However, an incorrect match
| causes the lever to reset and a new random smell to emerge.
|
| ## Communication & Accessibility
|
| The DM describes the smells verbally when they're activated
| and can describe the various textures when players explore
| the cube by touch. The entire puzzle can be solved through
| verbal description, touch, and smell without requiring sight.
|
| For extra accessibility, the DM can add: - Distinct sounds
| that play when each scent is released - Textured surfaces
| that have subtle temperature differences - Verbal clues
| discovered through successful matches
|
| ## What Makes This Unique
|
| This puzzle uniquely relies on cross-sensory associations
| that aren't commonly used in dungeons. It: - Doesn't rely on
| visuals at all - Uses smell as a primary puzzle component
| (rare in D&D) - Creates unusual connections between different
| senses - Has no mathematical, musical, or traditional riddle
| elements - Can be experienced fully regardless of vision
| status - Creates interesting roleplaying opportunities as
| players discuss how different scents "feel" texturally
|
| For the DM, it's easy to describe and implement while still
| being conceptually unique. Players solve it through
| discussion, exploration, and experimentation rather than
| recalling common puzzle patterns.
| echelon wrote:
| > I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used
| LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done
|
| I commented in another thread. We're using image and video
| diffusion models for creative:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY
|
| Still not a fan of LLMs.
| buu700 wrote:
| I think the author has a fair take on the types of LLM output
| he has experience with, but may be overgeneralizing his
| conclusion. As shown by his example, he seems to be narrowly
| focusing on the use case of giving the AI some small snippet of
| text and asking it to stretch that into something less
| information-dense -- like the stereotypical "write a response
| to this email that says X", and sending that output instead of
| just directly saying X.
|
| I personally tend not to use AI this way. When it comes to
| writing, that's actually the exact inverse of how I most often
| use AI, which is to throw a ton of information at it in a large
| prompt, and/or use a preexisting chat with substantial relevant
| context, possibly have it perform some relevant searches and/or
| calculations, and then iterate on that over successive prompts
| before landing on a version that's close enough to what I want
| for me to touch up by hand. Of course the end result is clearly
| shaped by my original thoughts, with the writing being a mix of
| my own words and a reasonable approximation of what I might
| have written by hand anyway given more time allocated to the
| task, and not clearly identifiable as AI-assisted. When working
| with AI this way, asking to "read the prompt" instead of my
| final output is obviously a little ridiculous; you might as
| well also ask to read my browser history, some sort of
| transcript of my mental stream of consciousness, and whatever
| notes I might have scribbled down at any point.
| satisfice wrote:
| If you present your AI-powered work to me, and I suspect you
| employed AI to do any of the heavy lifting, I will
| automatically discount any role you claim to have had in that
| work.
|
| Fairly or unfairly, people (including you) will inexorably
| come to see anything done with AI as ONLY done with AI, and
| automatically assume that anyone could have done it.
|
| In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter
| and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre works
| that roughly similar. Hidden in plain sight forever. There
| would no point in reading it, because it is probably the same
| slop I could get by writing a one paragraph prompt. It would
| be too expensive to discover otherwise.
| buu700 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not a student, nor do I disagree with
| academic honor codes that forbid LLM assistance. For
| anything that I apply AI assistance to, the extent to which
| I could personally "claim credit" is essentially
| immaterial; my goal is to get a task done at the highest
| quality and lowest cost possible, not to cheat on my
| homework. AI performs busywork that would cost me time or
| cost money to delegate to another human, and that makes it
| valuable.
|
| I'm expanding on the author's point that the hard part is
| the input, not the output. Sure someone else could produce
| the same output as an LLM given the same input and
| sufficient time, but they don't have the same input. The
| author is saying "well then just show me the input"; my
| counterpoint is that the input can often be vastly longer
| and less organized or cohesive than the output, and thus
| less useful to share.
| bsder wrote:
| > someone could write the next Harry Potter and it will be
| lost in a sea of one million mediocre works that roughly
| similar.
|
| To be fair, the first Harry Potter is a kinda average
| British boarding school story. Rowling is barely an
| adequate writer (and it shows badly in some of the later
| books). There was a reason she got rejected by so many
| publishers.
|
| However, Netscape was going nuts and the Internet was
| taking off. Anime was going nuts and produced some of the
| all time best anime. MTV animation went from Beavis and
| Butthead to Daria in this time frame. Authors were engaging
| with audiences on Usenet (see: Wheel of Time and Babylon
| 5). Fantasy had moved from counterculture for hardcore nerd
| boys to something that the bookish female nerds would
| engage with.
|
| Harry Potter dropped onto that tinder and absolutely caught
| _fire_.
| satisfice wrote:
| I was surprised to find how not true that is when I
| eventually read the books for myself, long after they
| became a phenomenon. The books are well-crafted mystery
| stories that don't cheat the reader. All the clues are
| there, more or less, for you to figure out what's
| happening, yet she still surprises.
|
| The world-building is meh at best. The magic system is
| perfunctory. But the characters are strong and the plot
| is interesting from beginning to end.
| lmm wrote:
| > In such a world, someone could write the next Harry
| Potter and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre
| works that roughly similar. Hidden in plain sight forever.
| There would no point in reading it, because it is probably
| the same slop I could get by writing a one paragraph
| prompt. It would be too expensive to discover otherwise.
|
| This has already been the case for decades. There are
| probably brilliant works sitting out there on AO3 or
| whatnot. But you'll never find them because it's not worth
| wading through the junk. AI merely accelerates what was
| already happening.
| palata wrote:
| > the exact inverse of how I most often use AI, which is to
| throw a ton of information at it in a large prompt
|
| It sounds to me that you don't make the effort to _absorb_
| the information. You cherry-pick stuff that pops in your head
| or that you find online, throw that into an LLM and let it
| convince you that it created something sound.
|
| To me it confirms what the article says: it's not worth
| reading what you produce this way. I am not interested in
| that eloquent text that your LLM produced (and that you
| modify just enough to feel good saying it's your work); it
| won't bring me anything I couldn't get by quickly thinking
| about it or quickly making a web search. I don't need to talk
| to you, you are not interesting.
|
| But if you spend the time to actually absorb that
| information, realise that you need to read even more,
| actually make your own opinion and get to a point where we
| could have an actual discussion about that topic, then I'm
| interested. An LLM will not get you there, and getting there
| is not done in 2 minutes. That's precisely why it is
| interesting.
| buu700 wrote:
| You're making a weirdly uncharitable assumption. I'm
| referring to information which I largely or entirely wrote
| myself, or which I otherwise have proprietary access to,
| not which I randomly cherry-picked from scattershot Google
| results.
|
| Synthesizing large amounts of information into smaller more
| focused outputs is something LLMs happen to excel at. Doing
| the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a
| point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to deliver
| business value.
| palata wrote:
| > Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to
| prove a point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to
| deliver business value.
|
| You prove my point again: it's not "just to prove a
| point". It's about internalising the information,
| improving your ability to synthesise and be critical.
|
| Sure, if your only objective is to "deliver business
| value", maybe you make more money by being uninteresting
| with an LLM. My point is that if you get good at doing
| all that without an LLM, then you become a more
| interesting person. You will be able to have an actual
| discussion with a real human and be interesting.
| buu700 wrote:
| Understanding or being interesting has nothing to do with
| it. We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one
| hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run
| the code on servers. Using the right tool for the job is
| just doing my job well.
| palata wrote:
| > We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one
| hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run
| the code on servers
|
| We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding. We
| don't use calculators for writing. We don't use API
| requests for writing (except when we make an LLM write
| for us).
|
| > Using the right tool for the job is just doing my job
| well.
|
| I don't know what your job is. But if your job is to
| produce text that is meant to be read by humans, then it
| feels like not being able to synthesise your ideas
| yourself doesn't make you excellent at doing your job.
|
| Again maybe it makes you productive. Many developers, for
| instance, get paid for writing bad code (either because
| those who pay don't care about quality or can't make a
| difference, or something else). Vibe coding obviously
| makes those developers more productive. But I don't
| believe it will make them learn how to produce good code.
| Good for them if they make money like this, of course.
| buu700 wrote:
| _We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding._
|
| No one said anything about vibe coding. Using tools
| appropriately to accomplish tasks more quickly is just
| common sense. Deliberately choosing to pay 10x the cost
| for the same or equivalent output isn't a rational
| business decision, regardless of whether the task happens
| to be writing, long division, or anything else.
|
| Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against doing things
| manually as a learning exercise or creative outlet.
| Sometimes the journey is the point; sometimes the
| destination is the point. Both are valid.
|
| _I don 't know what your job is._
|
| Here's one: prepping first drafts of legal docs with AI
| assistance before handing them off to lawyers for
| revision has objectively saved significant amounts of
| time and money. Without AI this would have been too time-
| consuming to be worthwhile, but with AI I've saved not
| only my own time but the costs of billable hours on phone
| calls to discuss requirements, lawyers writing first
| drafts on their own, and additional Q&A and revisions
| over email. Using AI makes it practical to skip the first
| two parts and cut down on the third significantly.
|
| Here's another one: doing security audits of customer
| code bases for a company that currently advertises its
| use of AI as a cost-saving/productivity-enhancing
| mechanism. Before they'd integrated AI into their
| platform, I would frequently get rave reviews for the
| quality and professionalism of my issue reports. After
| they added AI writing assistance, nothing changed other
| than my ability to generate a greater number of reports
| in the same number of billable hours. What you're
| suggesting effectively amounts to choosing to deliver
| less value out of ego. I still have to understand my own
| work product, or I wouldn't be able to produce it even
| with AI assistance. If someone thinks that somehow makes
| the product less "interesting", well then I guess it's a
| good thing my job isn't entertainment.
| palata wrote:
| Don't get me wrong: I don't deny that LLMs can help
| tricking other humans into believing that the text is
| more professional than it actually is. LLMs are
| engineered exactly for that.
|
| I'd be curious to know whether your legal documents are
| as good as without LLMs. I wouldn't be surprised at all
| if they were worse, but cheaper. Talking about security
| audits, that's actually a problem I've seen: LLMs makes
| it harder to detect bad audits, and in my experience I
| have been more often confronted to bad security audits
| than to good ones.
|
| For both examples, you say "LLMs are useful to make more
| money". I say "I believe that LLMs lower the quality of
| the work". It's not incompatible.
| buu700 wrote:
| There's no "tricking" involved, and no basis for your
| assumption that LLMs lower the quality of work. I would
| suggest that what you and the author are observing is
| actually the opposite effect: LLMs broadly help _improve_
| the quality of work, all else being equal. The caveat is
| that when all else is not equal, this manifests in bad
| work being improved to a level that 's still bad. The
| issue here is students using advanced tooling as an
| excuse to be lazy and undercut their own learning
| process, not the tool itself. LLMs are just this
| generation's version of Wikipedia and spell check.
|
| As much as the author rightfully complains about the
| example in the post, a version that only said "explain
| the downsides of Euler angles in robotics and suggest
| some alternatives" would obviously be far worse. In this
| case, the AI helped elevate clear F-level work to maybe a
| C. That's not an indictment of AI; it's an indictment of
| low-quality work. LLMs lower the bar to produce passable-
| looking bad work, but they also lower the bar to produce
| excellent work. The confirmation bias here is that we
| don't know how many cases of B-level work became A papers
| with AI assistance, because those instances don't stand
| out in the same way.
|
| In the audit example, LLMs aren't doing the audit. They
| synthesize my notes into a useful starting point to
| nullify writer's block, and let me focus more of my time
| on the hard or unique aspects of a given report. It's
| like having an intern write the first draft for me,
| typically with some mistakes or oversights, occasionally
| with a valuable additional insight thrown in, and often
| with links to a few helpful references for the customer
| that I wouldn't necessarily have found and included on my
| own. That doesn't lower the quality; it improves it.
|
| As far as the legal example, it really depends on the
| complexity of a given instance and the guidance you've
| provided to your lawyers. A good lawyer won't sign off on
| something that fails to meet the requested quality bar
| (if anything, the financial incentive would be for them
| to err on the side of conservatism and toss out the draft
| you'd provided). But of course this all depends on you
| having a clear enough understanding of what you're trying
| to accomplish, and enough familiarity with legal
| documents and proficiency with language to shape
| everything into a passable first draft. AI speeds this
| up, but if you don't know what you're doing then the AI
| won't solve that for you. It's a tool like any other, and
| can be used properly or improperly.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding.
| We don't use calculators for writing. We don't use API
| requests for writing (except when we make an LLM write
| for us).
|
| We do however use them to summarize and transform data
| all the time. Consider the ever present spreadsheet. Huge
| amounts of data are thrown into spreadsheets and formulas
| are applied to that data to present us with graphs and
| statistics. You could do all of that by hand, and you'd
| probably have a much better "internalization" about what
| the data is. But most of the time, hand crafting graphs
| from raw data and internalizing it isn't useful or
| necessary to accomplish what you actually want to
| accomplish with the data.
| palata wrote:
| You seem to not make the difference between _maths_ and,
| say, _literature_ or _history_.
|
| Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a Harry
| Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in such a
| way that _everybody will always agree on_?
|
| And to go further, do you actually use LLMs to generate
| graphs and statistics from spreadsheet? Because that is
| probably a bad idea given that there are tools that
| _actually do it right_.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a
| Harry Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in
| such a way that everybody will always agree on?
|
| No, but I also don't think a human can do that either.
| Subjective things are subjective. I'm not sure I
| understand how this connects to the idea you expressed
| that doing various tasks with automation tools like LLMs
| prevent you from "internalizing" the data, or why not
| "internalizing" data is necessarily a bad thing. Am I
| just misunderstanding your concern?
| palata wrote:
| Yeah I think you don't understand my point.
|
| Many of the posts I find here defending the use of LLMs
| focus on "profitability". "You ask me to give you 3 pages
| about X? I'll give you 3 pages about X and you may not
| even realise that I did not write them". I completely
| agree that it can happen and that LLMs, _right now_ , are
| useful to hack the system. But if you specialise in being
| efficient at getting an LLM to generate 3 pages, you may
| become useless faster than you think. Still, I don't
| think that this is the point of the article, and it is
| most definitely not my point.
|
| My point is that while you specialise in hacking the
| system with an LLM, you don't learn about the material
| that goes into those 3 pages.
|
| * If you are a student, it means that you are losing your
| time. Your role as a student is to learn, not to hack.
|
| * More generally as a person, "I am a professional in
| summarising stuff I don't understand in a way that
| convinces me and other people who don't understand it
| either" is not exactly very sexy to me.
|
| If you want to get actual knowledge about something, you
| have to actually work on getting that knowledge. Moving
| it from an LLM to a word document is not it. Being
| knowledgeable requires "internalising" it. Such that you
| can talk about it at dinner. And have an opinion about it
| that is worth something to others. If your opinion is
| "ChatGPT says this, but with my expertise in prompting I
| can get it to say that", it's pretty much worthless IMHO.
| Except for tricking the system, in a way similar to "oh
| my salary depends on the number of bugs I fix? Let me
| introduce tons of easy-to-fix bugs then".
| sigotirandolas wrote:
| For creative and professional writing, I found them useful for
| grammar and syntax review, or finding words from a fuzzy
| description.
|
| For the structure, they are barely useful: Writing is about
| having such a clear understanding, that the meaning remains
| when reduced to words, so that others may grasp it. The LLM
| won't help much with that, as you say yourself.
| riknos314 wrote:
| 100% agree.
|
| LLMs may seem like magic buy they aren't. They operate within
| the confines of the context they're given. The more abstract
| the context, the more abstract the results.
|
| I expect to need to give a model at least as much context as a
| decent intern would require.
|
| Often asking the model "what information could I provide to
| help you produce better code" and then providing said
| information leads to vastly improved responses. Claude 3.7
| sonnet in Cline is fairly decent at asking for this itself in
| plan mode.
|
| More and more I find that context engineering is the most
| important aspect of prompt engineering.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used
| LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done
|
| They're great at proofreading. They're also good at writing
| conclusions and abstracts for articles, which is basically
| synthesising the results of the article and making it sexy (a
| task most scientists are hopelessly terrible at). With caveats:
|
| - all the information needs to be in the prompt, or they will
| hallucinate;
|
| - the result is not good enough to submit without some re-
| writing, but more than enough to get started and iterate
| instead of staring at a blank screen.
|
| I want to use them to write methods sections, because that is
| basically the exact same information repeated in every article,
| but the actual sentences need to be different each time. But so
| far I don't trust them to be accurate with technical details.
| They're language models, they have no knowledge or
| understanding.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| Point two is critical. I have found that the best way for me
| is to avoid using copy-and-paste. Instead, I put the browser
| on the right corner of the screen and my text editor on the
| left, then transcribe the text word by word by typing it
| using the keyboard. In this way, my natural laziness is less
| likely to accept words, expressions, and sentences that are
| perhaps okay-ish but not 100% following my taste.
| kergonath wrote:
| Good process, I will try this as well.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I use an LLM to brainstorm for a creative writing project.
| Mostly I ignore its suggestions! but, somehow having the
| chatter helps me see what _I_ am trying to say
| expensive_news wrote:
| I have mixed feelings. Generally I don't think that LLM output
| should be used to create anything that a human is supposed to
| read, but I do carve out a big exception for people using LLMs
| for translation/writing in a second language.
|
| At the same time, however, the people who need to use an LLM
| for this are going to be the worst at identifying the output's
| weaknesses, eg just as I couldn't write Spanish text, I also
| couldn't evaluate the quality of a Spanish translation that an
| LLM produced. Taken to an extreme, then, students today could
| rely on LLMs, trust them without knowing any better, and grow
| to trust them for everything without knowing anything, never
| even able to evaluate their quality or performance.
|
| The one area that I do disagree with the author, though, is
| coding. As much as I like algorithms code is written to be read
| by computers and I see nothing wrong with computers writing it.
| LLMs have saved me tons of time writing simple functions so I
| can speed through a lot of the boring legwork in projects and
| focus on the interesting stuff.
|
| I think Miyazaki said it best: "I feel... humans have lost
| confidence". I believe that LLMs can be a great tool for
| automating a lot of boring and repetitive work that people do
| every day, but thinking that they can replace the unique
| perspectives of people is sad.
| scsh wrote:
| I actually feel very strongly that code is very much written
| for us humans. Sure, it's a set of instructions that is
| intended to be machine read and executed but so much of _how_
| code is written is very much focused on the human element
| that's been a part of software development. OOP, design
| patterns, etc. don't exist because there is some great
| benefit to the machines running the code. We humans benefit
| as the ones maintaining and extending the functionality of
| the application.
|
| I'm not making a judgement about the use of LLMs for writing
| code, just that I do think that code serves the purpose of
| expressing meaning to machines as well as humans.
| nojs wrote:
| > it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is,
| inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the
| LLM generates afterwards
|
| I think you are overestimating the people who submit this slop.
| It's more like "here's my assignment, what's the answer"
| altilunium wrote:
| Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem, hard to
| create, but easy to verify. If you have enough skill to
| distinguish good output from garbage, you can produce
| reasonably good results.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem,
| hard to create, but easy to verify.
|
| Doesn't this match pretty much all human creation? It's
| easier to judge a book that to write it, it's easier to watch
| a rocket going up in the space than to build it, it's easier
| to appreciate some Renaissance painting or sculpture than to
| actually make it.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are
| far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a
| large language model can transform them into.
|
| Really? The example used was for a school test. Is there really
| much original thought in the answer? Do you really want to read
| the students original thought?
|
| I think the answer is no in this case. The point of the test is
| to assess whether the student has learned the topic or not. It
| isn't meant to share actual creative thoughts.
|
| Of course, using AI to write the answer is contrary to the actual
| purpose, too, but it isn't because you want to hear the students
| creativity, but because it is failing to serve its purpose as a
| demonstration of knowledge.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| > Do you really want to read the students original thought?
|
| Why else would you become a teacher, if you didn't care about
| what your students think?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Because you want to pass on knowledge? I am not saying there
| aren't ANY situations where a teacher cares about what their
| students think, but the example given isn't really one of
| those times. The question is not one that has many
| opportunities for original thought; it is a basic question
| that everyone who knows the answer will answer similarly. The
| entire purpose is to ascertain if the person understands what
| was taught, it isn't meant to engender a novel response.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| How do you know if you have passed on your knowledge
| without knowing what your students think/know?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, but my contention was more with the word
| "original", because they aren't really original thoughts.
| The teacher just wants to make sure the student's
| thoughts contain the information they are teaching. The
| teacher isn't looking for actual original thought in this
| test.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Teaching isn't blatting someone's mind with the Correct
| Answers and checking whether the overwrite took. Instead,
| you empirically build a model of the student's own world
| model, then examine the model to see where it fails to
| conform to reality, and construct ways to fix it. The
| example from TFA was consistent with "this is university
| coursework", which is fertile ground for a tutor to
| identify such errors! It's not like the student should be
| receiving a yes/no response and nothing else; there will
| presumably be comments on the incorrect answers.
| necovek wrote:
| It's not a "test", it's an "assignment". Assignment is a
| way to practice what you've learned, and a (good) teacher
| would want to get your original thoughts so they could
| adjust their instruction and teaching material to what they
| believe you missed in order to improve your mental model
| around the topic (or in other words, to _teach_ you
| something).
|
| Perhaps the problem is that they are "graded", but this is
| to motivate the student, and runs against the age-old
| problem of gamification.
| staunton wrote:
| > Because you want to pass on knowledge?
|
| Arguably, that's not what teachers mainly do (to an ever
| increasing proportion).
|
| Most knowledge is easily available. A teacher is teaching
| students to think in productive ways, communicate their
| thoughts and understand what others are trying to tell
| them. For this task, it's essential that the teacher has
| some idea what the students are thinking, especially when
| it's something original.
| andy99 wrote:
| I used to teach, years before LLMs, and got lots of copy-pasted
| crap submitted. I always marked it zero, never mentioning
| plagiarism (which would require some university administration)
| and just commenting that I asked for X and instead got some
| pasted together nonsense.
|
| As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it
| actually being competitive on assignments. If students are
| attentive enough to paraphrase it into their own voice I'd call
| it a win; if they just submit the crap that some data labeling
| outsourcer has RLHF'd into a LLM, I'd just mark it zero.
| selfselfgo wrote:
| When I was kid in school I would write original essays, and I
| mean truly original creative ideas. But of course any new idea
| has a chance of failure, so these essays were mostly bad and
| got bad grades. At a loss for what to do I quickly stopped
| reading the books I was assigned basing my essays on Wikipedia
| summaries and other people's reviews. I saw my first few As and
| even A+s and I realized if I write something original of even
| just average intelligence roughly 50% of people will be too
| dumb to understand it. For an idea to truly be considered
| intelligent in literature it has to be appealing to people have
| no actual memory of the things they've read. Even for a
| knowledgeable intelligent person they have a sea of similar
| information clouding their view.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Or you're just a bad writer. I certainly could not understand
| your main point, particularly the sentence "For an idea to
| truly be considered intelligent in literature it has to be
| appealing to people have no actual memory of the things
| they've read." which is ungrammatical.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Are you just assuming that a student who you think used an LLM
| would be unwilling to escalate?
|
| I would have thought that giving 0s to correct solutions would
| lead to successful complaints/appeals.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| If it's copy pasted it's obvious, and the assignment isn't to
| turn in a correct solution, but to turn in evidence that you
| are able to determine a correct solution. Automated answers
| deserve 0 credit.
| gyomu wrote:
| Yeah, the author here is as much a part of the problem. If you
| let students get away with submitting ChatGPT nonsense, of
| course they're going to do that - they don't care about the
| 3000 words appeal to emotion on your blog, they take the path
| of least resistance.
|
| If you're not willing to cross out an entire assignment and
| return it to the student who handed it in with "ChatGPT
| nonsense, 0" written in big red letters at the top of it, you
| should ask yourself what is the point of your assignments in
| the first place.
|
| But I get it, university has become a pay-to-win-a-degree
| scheme for students, and professors have become powerless to
| enforce any standards or discipline in the face of
| administrators.
|
| So all they can do is give the ChatGPT BS the minimum passing
| grade and then philosophize about it on their blog (which the
| students will never read).
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah this is what I did the one time I invigilated/marked a
| Matlab exam. Very obvious cheating (e.g. getting the right
| answer with incorrect code). But no way was I going through the
| admin of accusing them of cheating. They just got a 0.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I fully support the author's point but it's hard to argue with
| the economics and hurdles around obtaining degrees. Most people
| do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent
| job, that's just the economics of it. And unfortunately the
| employers these days are encouraging this kind of copy/paste
| work. Look at how Meta and Google claim the majority of the new
| code written there is AI created?
|
| The world will be consumed by AI.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game
| your metric.
|
| Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to
| college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever.
|
| Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give
| everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree.
|
| And since most people are only interested in the job, not the
| learning that underpins the degree, well, you get a bunch of
| students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate
| at the end.
|
| When people are only there to play the game, then you can't
| expect them to learn.
|
| However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in
| front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. If you are
| in college I recommend you take advantage of the chance to
| interact with the knowledge on offer. College may be offered to
| all, but only a lucky few see the gold on offer, and really
| learn.
|
| That's the thing about the game. It's not just about the final
| score. There's so much more on offer.
| squigz wrote:
| > you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass
| mark and the certificate at the end.
|
| This is because that is what companies care about. It's not a
| proxy for cleverness or intelligence - it's a box to check.
| Nathanba wrote:
| right and getting a family is also just a box to check and
| eating food is a box to check and brushing my teeth is just
| a box to check and on it goes for every single thing in
| life. If we all just checked boxes then we'd not be human
| anymore.
| bruce511 wrote:
| That's entirely the point. If you see the degree only as a
| stepping stone to the company job, then that's all you see
| and that's all you get.
|
| If you accept that the degree/job relationship is the
| start, not end, of the reason for being there, then you see
| other things too.
|
| There are opportunities around the student which are for
| them, not for their degree, not for their job. There are
| things you can learn, and never be graded. There are toys
| to play with you'll never see again. There are whole
| departments of living experts happy to answer questions.
|
| For example, (this is pre google) I wrote a program and so
| needed to understand international copyright. I could have
| gone to the library and read about it. Instead I went to
| the law faculty, knocked on the door, and found their
| professor who specialized in intellectual property.
|
| Since the program I wrote was in the medical space, I went
| to the medical campus, to the medical research library, and
| found tomes that listed researchers who might benefit. I
| basically learned about marketing.
|
| If all you care about is the company job, then all you'll
| see is the degree.
| cwalv wrote:
| > However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in
| front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow.
|
| Learning is not just a function of aptitude and/or effort.
| Interest is a huge factor as well, and even for a single
| person, what they find interesting changes over time.
|
| I don't think it's really possible to have a large cohort of
| people pass thru a liberal arts education, with everyone
| learning the same stuff at the same time, and have a majority
| of them "suck the marrow" out of the opportunity.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I did a comp science degree, so I can't speak for the
| liberal arts. However I imagine the same experience could
| apply.
|
| For us the curriculum was the start of the learning, not
| the end. We'd get a weekly assignment that could be done in
| an afternoon. Most of the class did the assignments, and
| that was enough.
|
| There was a small group of us that lived (pretty much) in
| the lab. We'd take the assignment and run with it, for
| days, nights, spare periods, whatever. That 10 line
| assignment? We turned it into 1000 lines every week.
|
| For example the class on sorting might specify a specific
| algorithm. We'd do all of them. Compete against each other
| to make the fastest one. Compare one dataset to another.
| Investigate data distributions. You know, suck the marrow.
|
| (Our professors would also swing by the lab from time to
| time to see how things were going, drop the odd hint, or
| prod the bear in a direction and so on. And this is all
| still undergrad.
|
| I can imagine a History major doing the same. Researching
| beyond the curriculum. Going down rabbit holes.
|
| My point is though is that you're right. You need to be
| interested. You need to have this compulsion. You can't
| tell a person "go, learn". All you can do is offer the
| environment, sit back, and see who grabs the opportunity.
|
| I get that you cant imagine this playing out. To those
| interested only in the degree, it's unimaginable. And no,
| as long as burning-desire is not on the entry requirements,
| it most certainly will not be the majority.
|
| In truth the lab resources eoild never have coped if the
| majority did what we did.
| cwalv wrote:
| > I did a comp science degree, so I can't speak for the
| liberal arts.
|
| By 'liberal arts' I meant the common 4 year, non-
| vocational education. My major was CS too, but well over
| half of the time was spent on other subjects.
|
| > I get that you cant imagine this playing out. To those
| interested only in the degree, it's unimaginable
|
| I can easily imagine what you describe playing out. I
| just wouldn't call it 'sucking the marrow' (unless you
| were equally avid in all your classes, which time likely
| would not permit).
|
| But as you allude to in your last point, the system isn't
| really designed for that. It's nice when it does
| effectively support the few who have developed the
| interest, and have extra time to devote to it, as it did
| for you.
|
| I'd rather see systems that were designed for it though.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to
| getting a decent job
|
| Then fail to actually learn anything and apply for jobs and try
| to cheat the interviewers using the same AI that helped them
| graduate. I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first
| batch of developers who cannot function without it. I don't
| even mind that you use an LLM for parts of your job, but you
| need to be able to function without it. Not all data is allowed
| to go into an AI prompt, some problems aren't solvable with the
| LLMs and you're not building your own skills if you rely on
| generated code/configuration for the simpler issues.
| mezyt wrote:
| > I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of
| developers who cannot function without it.
|
| Playing the contrarian here, but I'm from a batch of
| developers that can't function without a compiler, and I'm at
| 10% of what I can do without an IDE and static analysis.
| necovek wrote:
| That's really curious: I've never felt that much empowered
| by an IDE or static analysis.
|
| Sure, there's a huge jump from a line editor like `ed` to a
| screen editor like `vi` or `emacs`, but from there on, it
| was diminishing returns really (a good debugger was usually
| the biggest benefit next) -- I've also had the "pleasure"
| of having to use `echo`, `cat` and `sed` to edit complex
| code in a restricted, embedded environment, and while it
| made iterations slower, not that much more slower than if I
| had a full IDE at my disposal.
|
| In general, if I am in a good mood (and thus not annoyed at
| having to do so many things "manually"), I am probably only
| 20% slower than with my fully configured IDE at _coding_
| things up, which translates to less than 5% of slow down on
| actually delivering the thing I am working on.
| skydhash wrote:
| I think there's a factor of speed there, not a factor of
| insight or knowledge. If all you have is 'ed' and a
| printer, then I think most of the time you will spend is
| with the printout. 'vi' eliminates the printout and the
| tediousness of going back and forth.
|
| Same with more advanced editors and IDEs. They help with
| tediousness, which can hinders insight, but does not help
| it if you do not have the foundation.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| I've seen this comparison a few times already, but IMHO
| it's totally wrong.
|
| A compiler translates _what you have already implemented_
| into another computer runnable language. There is an actual
| grammar that defines the rules. It does not generate new
| business logic or assumptions. You have already done the
| work and taken all the decisions that needed critical
| thought, it's just being translated _instruction by
| instruction_. (btw you should check how compilers work,
| it's fun)
|
| Using an LLM is more akin to copying from Stackoverflow
| than using a compiler/transpiler.
|
| In the same way, I see org charts that put developers above
| AI managers, which are above AI developers. This is just
| smoke. You can't have LLMs generating thousands of lines of
| code independently. Unless you want a dumpster fire very
| quickly...
| mezyt wrote:
| Yeah ok. I was viewing AI as "a tool to help you code
| better", not as "you literally can't do anything without
| it generating everything for you". I could do some
| assembly if I really had to, but it would not be
| efficient at all. I wonder if there's actually
| "developers" who are only prompting an LLM and not
| understanding anything in the output ? Must be generating
| dumpster fires as you said.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Apples and oranges (or stochastic vs deterministic)
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Look inside a compiler, you'll find some AI.
| procaryote wrote:
| You won't find an LLM.
|
| What would you consider AI in it?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think, rather than saying they can't do their job without
| an LLM, we should just say some can't do their jobs.
|
| That is, the job of a professional programmer includes having
| produced code that they understand the behavior of. Otherwise
| you've failed to do your due diligence.
|
| If people are using LLMs to generate code, and then actually
| doing the work of understanding how that code works... that's
| fine! Who cares!
|
| If people are just vibe coding and pushing the results to
| customers without understanding it--they are wildly unethical
| and irresponsible. (People have been doing this for decades,
| they didn't have the AI to optimize the situation, but they
| managed to do it by copy-pasting from stack overflow).
| closewith wrote:
| > That is, the job of a professional programmer includes
| having produced code that they understand the behavior of.
|
| I have met maybe two people who truly understood the
| behaviour of their code and both employed formal methods.
| Everyone else, including myself, are at varying levels of
| confusion.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| If you want to put the goalposts there, why program
| instead of building transistor networks?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Lots and _lots_ of developers can 't program at all. As in
| literally - can't write a simple function like "fizzbuzz"
| even if you let them use reference documentation. Many don't
| even know what a "function" even is.
|
| (Yes, these are people with developer jobs, often at
| "serious" companies.)
| staunton wrote:
| I've never met someone like that and don't believe the
| claim.
|
| Maybe you mean people who are bad at interviews? Or people
| whose job isn't actually programming? Or maybe "lots" means
| "at least one"? Or maybe they _can_ strictly speaking do
| fizzbuzz, but are "in any case bad programmers"? If your
| claim is true, what do these people do all day (or, let's
| say, did before LLMs were a thing...)?
| sarchertech wrote:
| Yeah I've been doing this for a while now and I've never
| met an employed developer who didn't know what a function
| is or couldn't write a basic program.
|
| I've met some really terrible programmers, and some
| programmers who freeze during interviews.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I've definitely worked with a person who struggled to
| write if statements (let alone anything more complex).
| This was just one guy, so I wouldn't say "lots and lots"
| like the other poster did, but they do exist.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| By "lots" I estimate about 40 percent of the software
| developer workforce. (Not a scientific estimate.)
|
| > Maybe you mean people who are bad at interviews?
|
| No, the opposite. These developers learn the relevant
| buzzwords and can string them together convincingly, but
| fail to actually understand what they're regurgitating.
| (Very similar to an LLM, actually.)
|
| E.g., these people will throw words like "Dunder method"
| around with great confidence, but then will completely
| melt down for fifteen minutes if a function argument has
| the same name as a module.
|
| When on the job these people just copy-paste existing
| code from the "serious company" monorepo all day, every
| day. They call it "teamwork".
| procaryote wrote:
| This is half the point of interviewing. I've been at places
| that just skip interviewing is the person comes highly
| recommended, has a great CV, or whatever.
|
| Predictably they end up with some people on the range from
| "can't code at all" to "newbie coder without talent"
| procaryote wrote:
| LLMs have been popular for like 2 years... if you can't code
| without one, you couldn't code 2 years ago. Given 2 years you
| might be able to learn to.
| echelon wrote:
| > I fully support the author's point
|
| I don't. I think the world is falling into two camps with these
| tools and models.
|
| > I now circle back to my main point: I have never seen any
| form of create generative model output (be that image, text,
| audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original
| prompt. The resulting output has less substance than the prompt
| and lacks any human vision in its creation. The whole point of
| making creative work is to share one's own experience
|
| Strong disagree with Clayton's conclusion.
|
| We just made this with AI, and I'm pretty sure you don't want
| to see the raw inputs unless you're a creator:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY
|
| I think the world will be segregated into two types of AI user:
|
| - Those that use the AI as a complete end-to-end tool
|
| - Those that leverage the AI as tool for their own creativity
| and workflows, that use it to enhance the work they already do
|
| The latter is absolutely a great use case for AI.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yes, depending on the model being used, endless text of this
| flavor isn't all that compelling to read:
|
| "Tall man, armor that is robotic and mechanical in
| appearance, NFL logo on chest, blue legs".,
|
| And so on, embedded in node wiring diagrams to fiddly configs
| and specialized models for bespoke purposes, "camera"
| movements, etc.
| necovek wrote:
| TBH, this video is not that compelling either, though --
| obviously -- I am aware that others might have a different
| opinion.
|
| Seeing this non-compelling prompt would tell me right off
| the bat that I wouldn't be interested in the video either.
| necovek wrote:
| > We just made this with AI, and I'm pretty sure you don't
| want to see the raw inputs unless you're a creator:
|
| I am not a creator but I am interested in generative AI
| capabilities and their limits, and I even suffered through
| the entire video which tries to be funny, but really isn't
| (and it'd be easier to skim through as a script than the full
| video).
|
| So even in this case, I would be more interested in the
| prompt than in this video.
| palata wrote:
| > The latter is absolutely a great use case for AI.
|
| The video is not exactly great, IMO.
| palata wrote:
| > Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to
| getting a decent job, that's just the economics of it.
|
| Because those who recruit based on the degree aren't worth more
| than those who get a degree by using LLMs.
|
| Maybe it will force a big change in the way students are
| graded. Maybe, after they have handed in their essay, the
| teacher should just have a discussion about it, to see how much
| they actually absorbed from the topic.
|
| Or not, and LLMs will just make everything worse. That's more
| likely IMO.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Prompts are source
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I don't know anything about the subject area, so I don't know if
| this captures enough to get a good grade. But I'm curious if
| anyone could tell whether the last answer were AI generated if I
| copied and pasted. These are the iterations I go through when
| writing long requirement documents/assessments/statements of work
| (consulting).
|
| Yes I know the subject area for which I write assessments and
| know if what is generated is factually correct. If I'm not sure,
| I ask for web references using the web search tool.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c46d-0728-8010-a83d-609fe547c1...
| StefanBatory wrote:
| To me, this part
|
| > I didn't realize how much that could throw things off until I
| saw an example where the object started moving in a strange way
| when it hit that point.
|
| Would feel off, because why change the person? And even if it's
| intented, then I'd say it's not formal to do in an assignement.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| These are art students not English writers. If I were a
| teacher I would think this is more authentic. LLMs don't make
| this kind of mistake in its default house style.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Hmm, fair enough.
|
| Also the point about default LLM settings not doing that is
| a good point.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I mean this is not blind obviously, but it feels unnaturally
| enthusiastic/conversational to me. Maybe for like an video
| script it would fit, but for a requirements document or
| something it is a little oddly 'sauced up', as if someone put
| an extra pass through it to try to make it entertaining to
| read.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I was trying to make it sound like a college student with no
| strong writing experience.
|
| I use to work at AWS (Professional Services) and there are a
| few different writing styles depending on what your audience
| was. I learned how to write in the different "house styles"
| before LLMs were a thing. So I know when something doesn't
| sound right.
|
| I use LLMs all of the time to write. I'm 99% certain that no
| one can tell the difference between my writing 100% without
| an LLM to my writing with one
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| An exception to test the rule with: people are generating
| lifelike video based on the pixel graphics from old video games.
| I have no interest in seeing a prompt that says "Show me a
| creature from Heroes of Might and Magic 3, with influences from
| such and so", but it's incredible to see the monsters I've spent
| so much time with coming to life.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcITgZgN8nw&lc=UgxrBrdz4BdEE...
|
| Maybe the problem is that the professor doesn't want to read the
| student work anyway, since it's all stuff he already knows. If
| they managed to use their prompts to generate interesting things,
| he'd stop wanting to see the prompts.
| derefr wrote:
| > They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly
| fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style.
|
| No, this is just the de-facto "house style" of ChatGPT / GPT
| models, in much the same way that that that particular Thomas
| Kinkade-like style is the de-facto "house style" of Stable
| Diffusion models.
|
| You can very easily tell an LLM in your prompt to respond using a
| different style. (Or you can set it up to do so by telling it
| that it "is" or "is roleplaying" a specific type-of-person --
| e.g. an OP-ED writer for the New York Times, a textbook author,
| etc.)
|
| People just don't ever bother to do this.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I tried changing the house style.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c9f4-ed48-8010-bc3e-58299140c8...
|
| In the real world I would at least remove the em dashes. It's a
| dead give away for LLM generated text.
| riwsky wrote:
| Like "dead give away" instead of "dead giveaway"?
| derefr wrote:
| That was not a good attempt at changing the style.
|
| You can't just say "don't sound like an LLM." The LLM does
| not in fact _know_ that it is "speaking like an LLM"; it
| just thinks that it's speaking the way the "average person"
| speaks, according to everything it's ever been shown. If you
| told it "just speak like a human being"... that's what it
| already thought it was doing!
|
| You have to tell the LLM a specific way to speak. Like
| directing an image generator to use a specific visual style.
|
| You _can_ say "ape the style of [some person who has a lot
| of public writing in the base model's web training corpus --
| Paul Graham, maybe?]". But that coverage will be spotty, and
| it's also questionably ethical (just like style-aping in
| image generation.)
|
| But an LLM will do even better if you tell it to speak the in
| some "common mode" of speech: e.g. "an email from HR", or "a
| shitpost rant on Reddit" or "an article in a pop-science
| magazine."
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I was surprised to see such world-weary criticism of the
| bullet-points-with-bold style in TFA-- it's long been what I've
| reached for when writing for a technical audience, whether
| that's in a wiki page, a design doc, a README, a PR, or even a
| whole book.
|
| I feel like for most of my audiences it provides the proper
| anchor points for effective skimming while still giving me room
| to include further detail and explanation so that it's there as
| desired by the reader.
|
| (And responding to my sibling comment, I also use em dashes and
| semicolons all the time. Has my brain secretly always been an
| LLM??)
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| One of my issues with LLMs is how much they match the
| academic, technical, and corporate styles of speaking Ive
| learned over the years. Now when I write people ignore me
| because they assume I'm just pasting LLM output.
| landgenoot wrote:
| You are not alone. Nowadays, I'm ashamed of using words
| like "moreover", "firstly", "furthermore". Pre-LLM, people
| used to compliment me on my writing style
| boredatoms wrote:
| For tests, just require everything to be written in-person, by
| hand or mechanical typewriter
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Time to go back to writing essays in exams, live, on paper.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It's challenging. Assignments (and particularly programming
| assignments) were by far the larger and more difficult part of
| my CS degree, and also the place where I learned the most. I
| cannot imagine losing that portion of my education and just
| replacing it with a few exams.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That's how it works in Germany. Usually assignments are
| either optional or you just have to get 50% of the total
| assignment marks over the semester to be admitted to the exam
| (written or often oral, in person). Then your grade is
| entirely based on the exam. Hand-holding throughout the
| semester assignment-to-assignment, checking attendance etc.
| is more an Anglo-specific thing where students are treated as
| kids instead of adults.
| jama211 wrote:
| As someone who did CS 15 years ago, assignments show you
| can actually understand and build programs. Exams show you
| bothered to re-read the lecture notes the day before and
| can regurgitate information on command that you could just
| as easily forget the next day. Not to mention they're
| hugely stressful and some students can't cope with them
| well even if they'd make excellent programmers.
|
| I can't imagine disincentivising actually getting stuck
| into programming and incentivising being good at
| regurgitating info in an exam room being a good thing for
| CS students.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| If the exam is made well, it's not just regurgitation.
| It's not multiple choice, but I agree this doesn't test
| programming skills. But programming is also a quite small
| slice of the CS curriculum. It has so many other things
| like linear algebra, real analysis, formal logic, graph
| theory, automata, coding theory like Reed Solomon,
| compression, complexity, operating systems like
| scheduling and virtual memory, how flip-flops and adders
| and CPUs work. A self taught web developer who can
| program well still wouldn't know most of these.
| Programming knowledge is neither fully necessary nor
| sufficient for a CS degree. I hear American colleges are
| more vocational, but in most of Europe it's understood
| that you gain practical experience either in internships,
| side jobs, doing hobby projects or simply after
| graduation at your first job.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I don't think there's anything childish about assigning
| large-scale programming assignments. I had to do everything
| from implement a compiler to building a ray tracer as an
| undergrad, and it set me up very well for an independent
| career as a software developer at a research lab.
|
| As a professor today, assignments are the place where I'm
| happy to throw my students into the "deep end" (go learn a
| new language and a set of library toolkits while also
| learning this skill.) Exams just don't provide that
| experience. Worse, students tend to cram for exams which is
| the worst way to retain information. I can't even imagine
| thinking that the two are comparable in terms of retention
| and skill-building.
| person3 wrote:
| It is challenging. In my CS degree grading for programming
| questions fell into two areas
|
| 1. Take home projects where we programmed solutions to big
| problems. 2. Tests where we had to write programs in the exam
| on paper during the test.
|
| I think the take home projects are likely a lot harder to
| grade without AI being used. I'd be disappointed if schools
| have stopped doing the programming live during tests though.
| Being able to write a program in a time constrained
| environment is similar to interviewing, and requires
| knowledge of the language and being able to code algorithms.
| It also forces you to think through the program and detect if
| there will be bugs, without being able to actually run the
| program (great practice for debugging).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wonder if you could invent a teaching language so the LLM
| wouldn't know about it. A little drastic, but still.
| helloplanets wrote:
| Pretty sure you could just give an LLM the given docs /
| course material and it would be able to write the language
| to a reasonable standard. Especially if it had sensible
| error messages.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I agree, and it was the same for me. I just don't think it's
| possible in the same way. Or if it is, perhaps it's okay to
| use ChatGPT for that stuff.
| natebc wrote:
| Honestly I think we'll get back there. I remember ... fondly(?)
| exams from my history courses in undergrad in the mid 90s. 3-4
| questions, 3 hours, anything less than what would amount to a
| pretty decent length and moderately thorough term paper would
| fail and have to be made up with an absolutely BRUTAL multiple
| choice + fill in the blank exam at the end of the term.
|
| Those classes are what taught me how to study and really
| internalize the material. Helped me so much later in college
| too. I really can't imagine how kids these days are doing it.
| jama211 wrote:
| You might be the only person in history who remembers fondly
| being stressfully forced to write essays in exams.
| jama211 wrote:
| Or how about we actually collectively learn a lesson from this
| - if your assignments just ask people to generically
| regurgitate info, don't be surprised that 90% of students lose
| interest and see it for what it is, pointless busywork.
|
| I genuinely believe I had many excellent learning experiences
| at university, and I can assure you none of them were the times
| I had to re-write course info and hand it back to them in order
| to check off a box.
|
| Maybe, if one student does something they might be wrong, but
| if 90% of students do something, perhaps the assignment is
| wrong? Doubling down and saying "we'll force them to do it by
| hand then!" Is rather blindly missing the point here no?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I had a lot of great experiences at university too, and was
| disheartened to see others thought those same things were all
| pointless busywork.
| xmorse wrote:
| I am thinking about creating a proof-of-writing signature.
| Basically an editor with an "anti-cheat", you can't paste text
| into it. It signs your text with a public key.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| There is no way to design such a system that is not cheatable.
| At the very least, someone could simply type out text from
| another window or device. On any normal operating system or
| browser, the user will be able to bypass whatever mechanism you
| have in place anyway.
| hoppp wrote:
| You can still just type the Ai response. Often when I generate
| larger code I type it instead of copy paste, that helps me
| understand it and spot issues faster
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| We're going to invent kernel level anticheat for text editors
| rather than just do in person exams.
| staunton wrote:
| And what will we do next after that gets cheated?
| mopenstein wrote:
| Can't a raspberry pi (or similar) emulate a USB keyboard? Feed
| it any text and the key strokes will look real to your editor.
|
| I guess you could require a special encrypted keyboard in your
| plan.
| ashwinsundar wrote:
| For everyone pointing out that this idea can be cheated by just
| typing AI-generated text into the editor - add an AI-detector
| to the editor. Gamify the whole thing by making a leaderboard
| of people with the lowest AI-detector-similarity score across
| things that they have "written"
|
| In a class setting, maybe make the AI-detection an element of
| take-home assignments - whoever gets the lowest AI-similarity
| score gets a few points of extra credit or something
|
| As for computer science courses, I'm guessing it's hard to not
| write simple code that appears AI-generated...so maybe that
| kind of work needs a written summary to go along with the code
| as well
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I think people who don't like writing shouldn't be forced to
| write, just like people who don't like music shouldn't be forced
| to play music. Ditto for math.
|
| Forcing people to do these things supposedly results in a better,
| more competitive society. But does it really? Would you rather
| have someone on your team who did math because it let them solve
| problems efficiently, or did math because it's the trick to get
| the right answer?
|
| Writing is in a similar boat as math now. We'll have to decide
| whether we want to force future generations to write against
| their will.
|
| I was forced to study history against my will. The tests were
| awful trivia. I hated history for nearly a decade before
| rediscovering that I love it.
|
| History doesn't have much economical value. Math does. Writing
| does. But is forcing students to do these things the best way to
| extract that value? Or is it just the tradition we inherited and
| replicate just because our parents did?
| topkai22 wrote:
| Many of the things we teach in school aren't just for the
| direct knowledge or skill. We largely don't need to do
| arithmetic any more, but gaining the skill at doing it really
| improves our ability to deal with symbolic manipulation and
| abstraction.
|
| I remember another parent ranting about their 3rd grade kids
| "stupid homework" since it had kids learning different ways of
| summing numbers. I took a look at the homework and replied
| "wow, the basics out set theory are in here!" We then had a
| productive discussion of how that arithmetic exercise led to
| higher math and ways of framing problems.
|
| Similarly, writing produces a different form of thought than
| oral communication does.
|
| History is a bit different, but a goal of history and
| literature is (or it least should be) to socialize students and
| give them a common frame of reference in society.
|
| Finally there is the "you don't know when you'll need it
| defense." I have a friend who spent most of the last 20 years
| as a roofer, but his body is starting to hurt. He's pivoting to
| CAD drafting and he's brushing off a some of those math skills
| he hated learning in school. And now arguing with his son about
| why it's important.
|
| Those are the fundamental defenses- that we are seeking not
| skills but ways of viewing the world + you don't know what
| you'll need. There are obviously limits and tradeoffs to be
| made, but to some degree yes, we should be forcing students
| (who are generally children or at least inexperienced in a
| domain) to things they don't like now for benefits later.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Then your friend spent 20 years not needing math skills. If
| someone spent years doing something useless to them for two
| decades, we wouldn't call them efficient. But for some
| bizarre reason, we celebrate it as a point of honor in
| academia.
|
| One counter argument to yours is that when you do need the
| skills, you can learn them later. It's arguably easier than
| it has been at any point in human history. In that context,
| why front load people with something they hate doing, just
| because their parents think it's a good idea? Let them wait
| and learn it when they need it.
| jama211 wrote:
| They said they dusted off the skills - as in they were glad
| to have them. This reads a bit aggressive and judgey tbh
| necovek wrote:
| "Forcing" is a bit strong IMHO -- I believe we've instead lost
| track of what is "passable", and everyone in higher education
| should be able to reach that and score a passing grade (D? C?).
|
| Maybe professors are too stringent with their evaluation, or
| maybe they are not good at teaching people what a passable
| writing style is, or maybe students simply don't want to accept
| that if they don't excel at writing, a D or a C is perfectly
| fine. Perhaps teachers that look for good writing should have
| separate tests which evaluate students in both scenarios: with
| and without LLM help.
|
| The same holds true for math: not everybody needs to know how
| to deduce a proof for every theorem, but in technical sciences,
| showing that ability and capability will demonstrate how much
| they are able to think and operate with precision on abstract
| concepts, very much like in programming. Even if coursework is
| a bit repetitive, practice does turn shallow knowledge into
| operational knowledge.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In most schools a D is not passing or at least doesn't count
| as credit towards graduation. I'm not really sure what the
| point of that grade is to be honest.
| ZeroSolstice wrote:
| Reading, writing and math have been the constants utilized
| throughout life and as such have been core subjects carried
| through educational systems. I'm not quite sure what subjects
| and topics we would be teaching future generations that didn't
| include reading, writing, math and science. At the very least
| writing should be included in more subjects. The hidden feature
| of including writing in all subjects, as you might have seen in
| your history endeavor's, is improvements in critical thinking,
| formulating cohesive arguments and a clearer understanding of
| topics.
|
| There are greater difficulties that people will have to do in
| their daily lives than being "forced" to learn how to read,
| write and do arithmetic. Maybe learning the lesson of
| overcoming smaller, difficult tasks will allow them to adapt to
| greater difficulties in the future.
|
| To quote Seneca: A gem can not be polished with
| friction, nor a man perfected without trials.
| doright wrote:
| People just have to want to like things. If they don't like
| something enough then a near-ubiquitous form of outsourcing is
| now available for them to get carried away with.
|
| The "wanting to like things" is a highly undervalued
| skill/trait. It comes down to building a habit through
| repetition - not necessarily having fun or getting results, but
| training your mind like a muscle to think putting in effort
| isn't that bad an activity.
|
| For those growing up I think this is not something that is
| taught - usually it is already there as a childlike sense of
| wonder that gets pruned by controlling interests. If education
| forcing you to do math removes any enthusiasm you had for math,
| that's largely determined by circumstance. You'd need someone
| else to tell you the actual joys of X to offset that (and I'd
| guess most parents/teachers don't practice math for fun), or
| just spontaneously figuring out how interesting X is totally on
| one's own which is even rarer.
|
| I didn't have either so I'm a mathophobe, but I'm alright with
| that since I have other interests to focus on.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Yes writing in lots of form is thinking, we are loosing the
| ability to think
| ZeroSolstice wrote:
| I found that the book "Writing to Learn" by William Zinsser was
| excellent in convening this process. As noted in the book the
| author advocated for more writing to be included in all
| subjects.
| <https://goodreads.com/book/show/585474.Writing_to_Learn>
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| > A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of
| hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they
| shall receive a degree as testament to their completion of these
| assignments.
|
| I agree with the broader point of the article in principle. We
| should be writing to edify ourselves and take education seriously
| because of how deep interaction with the subject matter will
| transform us.
|
| But in reality, the mindset the author cites is more common. Most
| accounting majors probably don't have a deep passion for GAAP,
| but they believe accounting degrees get good jobs.
|
| And when your degree is utilitarian like that, it just becomes a
| problem of minimizing time spent to obtain the reward.
| jama211 wrote:
| I think the author is conflating assignments with learning. The
| assignments are, by definition, hurdles to be overcome, and
| they will always be treated as such. Learning can happen in
| other better ways, and perhaps if your assignment design is to
| get students to generically regurgitate course material you
| shouldn't be surprised when that's exactly what they do.
|
| I can't be the only student who had both the experience of
| wonderful learning moments, AND could see a badly designed
| assignment a mile off and wasn't motivated to give such a thing
| my full attention no?
|
| As a side note, if you want the prompt, simply ask for it in
| the assignment. Asking students for one thing and then
| complaining when you don't get another is insanity.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Is bringing up Naur's paper and arguing that theory of program is
| all that matters and LLMs cannot do that, just a 2025 version of
| calling LLMs stochastic parrots and claiming they don't model or
| work in terms of concepts? Feels like it.
|
| EDIT: Not a jab at the author per se, more that it's a third or
| fourth time I see this particular argument in the last few weeks,
| and I don't recall seeing it even once before.
| Animats wrote:
| That's because the instructor is asking questions that merely
| require the student to regurgitate the instructor's text.
|
| To actually teach this, you do something like this:
|
| "Here's a little dummy robot arm made out of Tinkertoys. There
| are three angular joints, a rotating base, a shoulder, and an
| elbow. Each one has a protractor so you can see the angle.
|
| 1. Figure out where the end of the arm will be based on those
| three angles. Those are Euler angles in action. This isn't too
| hard.
|
| 2. Figure out what the angles should be to touch a specific point
| on the table. For this robot geometry, there's a simple solution,
| for which look up "two link kinematics". You don't have to derive
| it, just be able to work out how to get the arm where you want
| it. Is the solution unambiguous? (Hint: there may be more than
| one solution, but not a large number.)
|
| 3. Extra credit. Add another link to the robot, a wrist. Now
| figure out what the angles should be to touch a specific point on
| the table. Three joints are a lot harder than two joints. There
| are infinitely many solutions. Look up "N-link kinematics". Come
| up with a simple solution that works, but don't try too hard to
| make it optimal. That's for the optimal controls course.
|
| This will give some real understanding of the problems of doing
| this.
| jfengel wrote:
| A LLM can't do that? I'm a little surprised.
|
| (I know jack all about robotics but that sounds like a pretty
| common assignment, the kind an LLM would regurgitate someone
| else's homework.)
| nikanj wrote:
| The LLM is very happy to give you an answer with high
| confidence.
|
| The answer might be bogus, but the AI will sound confident
| all the way through.
|
| No wonder sales and upper management love AI
| casey2 wrote:
| Most physics teachers who do this are happy with the BS
| answer, maybe 1 in a 10,000 have actually tested their
| problems in reality.
| thegeomaster wrote:
| The LLM provides a correct answer to the questions above: h
| ttps://chatgpt.com/share/68188ed9-e25c-8002-b4f8-460a5d1efe
| ...
| thegeomaster wrote:
| Tested: https://chatgpt.com/share/68188ed9-e25c-8002-b4f8-460
| a5d1efe...
| jama211 wrote:
| Very well said. It's a bad assignment! Is 1 student does
| something like this maybe they're wrong, but if 90% of students
| are doing this, then IMO the assignment is wrong.
| JCharante wrote:
| Or maybe 90% of students are destined for mediocrity.
|
| One of the most fun classes I took in undergrad had people
| complaining about the professor's teaching capabilities
| because it was too hard. We shouldn't cater to the poor
| performers.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Personally, I've used LLM to help me better structure my blog
| post after I write it. Meaning I've already written it, then it
| enhances it. Most of the time, I'm happy with the results at the
| time of editing. But when I come back a week or two to re-read
| it, it looks just like the example the author shared.
|
| The goal is to make something legible, but the reality is we are
| producing slop. I'm back to writing before my brain becomes lazy.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| [Edit: I agree] I've also grown to dislike even this use case.
| I did this back in 2023 but as AI text is spreading, the style
| - yes, even with prompt adjustments it leaks through - is
| recognized by more and more people and it's a very very bad
| look. If I see AI-like text from someone, I take it as an
| insult. It means they don't feel that it's worth their time to
| brush up the text themselves. And sure, it may well be that
| they don't value our interaction enough to spend the time on
| it. But that fact is indeed by itself insulting. So I only send
| AI touched up text to orgs that are so faceless or bureaucratic
| that I don't mind "offending" them.
|
| I've grown to respect typos and slightly misconstructed
| sentences. It's an interesting dynamic that now what appeared
| lazy to 2021 eyes actually indicates effort and what appeared
| polished and effortful in 2021 now indicates laziness.
|
| An example is how the admins of my local compute cluster
| communicate about downtimes and upgrades etc and they are
| clearly using AI and it's so damn annoying, it feels like
| biting into cotton candy fluff. Just send the bullet points! I
| don't need emojis, I don't need the fake politeness. It's no
| longer polite to be polite. It doesn't signal any effort.
| necovek wrote:
| I think the poster you replied to said the same thing.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, ironically I was too eager to comment before finishing
| the read. Let it be a confirmation then.
| nathants wrote:
| the solution is obvious. stop grading the result, and start
| grading the process.
|
| if you can one-shot an answer to some problem, the problem is not
| interesting.
|
| the result is necessary, but not sufficient. how did you get
| there? how did you iterate? what were the twists and turns? what
| was the pacing? what was the vibe?
|
| no matter if with encyclopedia, google, or ai, the medium is the
| message. the medium is you interacting with the tools at your
| disposal.
|
| record that as a video with obs, and submit it along with the
| result.
|
| for high stakes environments, add facecam and other information
| sources.
|
| reviewers are scrubbing through video in an editor. evaluating
| the journey, not the destination.
| necovek wrote:
| Unfortunately, the video is a far cry from carrying all the
| representative information: there is no way you can capture
| your full emotions as you are working through a problem, and
| where did you get your "eureka" moments unless you are
| particularly good at verbalising your through process as you go
| through multiple dead-ends and recognize how they lead you in
| the right direction.
|
| And reviewing video would be a nightmare.
| nathants wrote:
| there are only two options: - have more information - have
| less information
|
| more is better.
|
| you can scrub video with your finger on an iphone. serious
| review is always high effort, video changes nothing.
| necovek wrote:
| Not really: I love reading fiction where I can imagine
| characters the way I want to based on their written
| depictions. When I see a book cover replaced with a recent
| movie adaptation actor, it usually reduces the creative
| space for the reader instead of enlarging it.
|
| Video in itself is _not_ more information by definition.
| Just look at those automatically generated videos when you
| try finding a review on an unusual product.
| nathants wrote:
| are you trying to evaluate the author for some
| certification or test? this is contextual to evaluation.
|
| books are great.
|
| hundreds of hours of video of the author writing that
| book, is strictly more information.
| latentsea wrote:
| > reviewers are scrubbing through video in an editor.
| evaluating the journey, not the destination.
|
| Let's be real... Multi-modal LLMs are scrubbing through the
| journey :P
| nathants wrote:
| just as there are low value students, there are low value
| reviewers. same as it ever was.
|
| not every review is important.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I wish the author had state out right that they were not using
| LLMs much, since their opinion on them and their output has no
| value (its a new technology, and different enough that you do
| have to spend some time with them in order to be able to find out
| what value they have for your particluar work[0].
|
| The is especially the case when you are about to complain about
| style, since that can easily be adjusted, by simply telling the
| model what you want.
|
| But I think there is a final point that the author is also wrong
| about, but that is far more interesting: why we write. Personally
| I write for 3 reasons: to remember, to share and to structure my
| thoughts.
|
| If an LLM is better then me at writing (and it is) then there is
| no reason for me to write to communicate - it is not only slower,
| it is counterproductive.
|
| If the AI is better at wrangling my ideas into some coherent
| thread, then there is no reason for me to do it. This one I am
| least convinced about.
|
| AI is already much better than me at strictly remembering, but
| computers have been that since forever, the issue is mostly
| convinient input/output. AIs makes this easier thanks to speech
| to text input.
|
| [0]: See eg. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-
| cyborgs-on-the....
| patrickmay wrote:
| If an LLM is better at writing than you are, you should work on
| improving your writing.
|
| This is especially true for students.
| staunton wrote:
| Quite likely, further progress will lead to LLMs writing
| "better" than at least 99% of humans.
|
| I think this will be no more of a contest than playing chess
| has been: humans don't stand a chance, but it also doesn't
| matter because being better or worse than the AI is besides
| the point.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| LLMs improve faster than I do.
|
| Anyway its like getting better at running because bicycles
| became a thing: a) pretty soon you are not going to be able
| to keep up and b) you are better of buying one anyway.
| colonial wrote:
| > ... their opinion on them and their output has no value
|
| This is ridiculous. Even if the author has never typed a single
| character into a prompt box, he can still come to perfectly
| valid conclusions about the technology just by observing
| patterns in the outputs that are shoved into his face.
|
| "I wish these astrophysicists had stated up front that they've
| never created a galaxy. How can they have a well-formed opinion
| on cosmic structures if they only ever observe them?"
| oncallthrow wrote:
| LLM cheating detection is an interesting case of the toupee
| fallacy.
|
| The most obvious ChatGPT cheating, like that mentioned in this
| article, is pretty easy to detect.
|
| However, a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce
| their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect.
|
| I think if I was in the teaching profession I'd just leave, to be
| honest. The joy of reviewing student work will inevitably be
| ruined by this: there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or
| not, at which point why bother?
| Retr0id wrote:
| > a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their
| LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect
|
| Do you have any examples of this? I've never been able to get
| direct LLM output that didn't feel distinctly LLM-ish.
| AstroBen wrote:
| this immediately comes to mind https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/04
| /29/supplied_can_ai_change_you...
|
| A study on whether LLMs can influence people on
| r/changemymind
| doright wrote:
| This only came to light after the study had already been
| running for a few months. That proves that we can no longer
| tell for certain unless it's literal GPT-speak the author
| was too lazy to edit themselves.
|
| Teachers will lament the rise of AI-generated answers, but
| they will only ever complain about the _blatantly obvious_
| responses that are 100% copy-pasted. This is only an
| emerging phenomenon, and the next wave of prompters will
| learn from the mistakes of the past. From now on, unless
| you can proctor a room full of students writing their
| answers with nothing but pencil and paper, there will be no
| way to know for certain how much was AI and how much was
| original /rewritten.
| palata wrote:
| Maybe it will get us to rethink the grading system. Do we
| need to grade them, or do we need students to learn
| things? After all, if they grow up to be incompetent,
| they will be the ones suffering from it.
|
| But I know it's easier said than done: if you get a
| student to realise that the time they spend at school is
| a unique opportunity for them to learn and grow, then
| you're job is almost done already.
| Crestwave wrote:
| > This only came to light after the study had already
| been running for a few months. That proves that we can no
| longer tell for certain unless it's literal GPT-speak the
| author was too lazy to edit themselves.
|
| Rule 3 of the subreddit quite literally bars people from
| accusing posts of being AI-generated. I have only visited
| it a few times in recent times, but I noticed quite a few
| GPT-speak posts with comments calling it out getting
| removed and punished.
| lionkor wrote:
| You assume that the teachers job is to catch when someone is
| cheating; its not. The teachers job is to teach, and if the
| kids don't learn because their parents allow them to cheat,
| don't check them at all, and let them behave like shitheads,
| then the kids will fail in life.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In many current-day school systems, the teachers job is to
| get the required percentage of students to pass the state
| assessment for their grade level.
|
| They don't get an exemption if the parents don't care.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > then the kids will fail in life.
|
| Quite the assertion. If anything the evidence is in favor of
| the other direction.
|
| It was eye opening to see that most students cheat. By the
| same token, most students end up successful. It's why
| everyone wants their kids to go to college.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This isn't the way reality works.
|
| Or, bad money chases out good. Idiots that cheat will get the
| recommendations for jobs where by maxing the grade. The
| person that actually works gets set back. Even worse society
| at large loses and actually educated person. And lastly a
| school is going to attempt to protect their name by
| preventing cheating.
| palata wrote:
| > there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or not
|
| Talk to the student, maybe?
|
| I have been an interviewer in some startups. I was not asking
| leetcode questions or anything like that. My method was this: I
| would pretend that the interviewee is a new colleague and that
| I am having coffee with them for the first time. I am generally
| interested in my colleagues: who are they, what do they like,
| where do they come from? And then more specifically, what do
| they know that relates to my work? I want to know if that
| colleague is interested in a topic that I know better, so that
| I could help them. And I want to know if that colleague is an
| expert in a topic where they could help me.
|
| I just have a natural discussion. If the candidate says "I love
| compilers", I find this interesting and ask questions about
| compilers. If the person is bullshitting me, they won't manage
| to maintain an interesting discussion about compilers for 15
| minutes, will they?
|
| It was a startup, and the "standard" process became some kind
| of cargo culting of whatever they thought the interviews at
| TooBigTech were like: leetcode, system design and whatnot.
| Multiple times, I could _obviously_ tell in advance that even
| if this person was really good at passing the test, I didn 't
| think it would be a good fit for the position (both for the
| company and for them). But our stupid interviews got them hired
| anyway and guess what? It wasn't a good match.
|
| We underestimate how much we can learn by just having a
| discussion with a person and actually being interested in
| whatever they have to say. As opposed to asking them to answer
| standard questions.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| On reviewing students' work: people exchange copies, get their
| hands on past similar assignments, get friends to do their
| homework , potentially each of them shadow the other in fields
| they're good at etc.
|
| There always was a bunch of realistic options to not actually
| do your submitted work, and AI is merely makes it easier, more
| detectable and more scalable.
|
| I think it moves the needle from 40 to 75, which is not great,
| but you'd already be holding your nose at student work half of
| the time before AI, so teaching had to be about more than that
| (and TBH it was, when I was in school teachers gave no fuck
| about submitted work if they didn't validate it by some
| additional face to face or test time)
| cwalv wrote:
| > there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or not, at
| which point why bother?
|
| I might argue you couldn't really tell if it was "real" before
| LLMs, either. But also, reviewing work without some
| accompanying dialogue is probably rarely considered a joy
| anyway.
| hoppp wrote:
| If LLMs existed back in the 90s and 00s I would have generated
| all my homework too.
|
| The kids these days got everything...
| jama211 wrote:
| 100%. Students aren't stupid, they can tell the difference
| between a lazily designed assignment that doesn't deserve their
| full attention, and actually engaging learning
| moments/environments that will spark something inside them.
| It's not their fault that the latter is so incredibly rare in
| course design.
|
| Sounds to me like they asked the students to just regurgitate
| genetic course info and then complained when that's what they
| received. This wasn't going to lead to an excellent learning
| moment for these students whether an LLM was used or not.
| tptacek wrote:
| I have a lot of sympathy for the author's position but I may have
| missed the point in the article where he explained why clarity of
| writing and genuineness of human expression was so vital to a
| robotics class. It's one thing for an instructor to appreciate
| those things; another for them to confound their own didactic
| purpose with them. This point seems obvious enough that I feel
| like I must have missed something.
|
| As always, I reject wholeheartedly what this skeptical article
| has to say about LLMs and programming. It takes the (common)
| perspective of "vibe coders", people who literally don't care
| what code says as long as something that runs comes out the other
| side. But smart, professional programmers use LLMs in different
| ways; in particular, they review and demand alterations to the
| output, the same way you would doing code review on a team.
| necovek wrote:
| I think they summed it up well in the section "Why do we write,
| anyway?" -- they nowhere claimed it was vital for students'
| success in a robotic class. On the contrary as they title a
| subsection there with "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing
| *badly*" (emphasis mine) -- so what they are looking for is to
| peer into the author's mind and their original thoughts.
|
| The _implication_ there is that this is _acceptable_ to pass a
| robotics class, and potentially this gives them more
| information about students ' comprehension to further improve
| their instruction and teaching ("...that they have some kind of
| internal understanding to share").
|
| On that second point, I have yet to see someone demonstrate a
| "smart, professional programmer use LLMs" in a way where it
| produces high quality output in their area of expertise, while
| improving their efficiency and thus saving time for them
| (compared to them just using a good, old IDE)!
| tptacek wrote:
| Who have you asked? What has been your experience observing
| professionals using LLMs?
| necovek wrote:
| Is "what has been my experience" not implied in what I am
| still waiting for -- "someone using an LLM to produce high
| quality code in the field of their expertise in less time
| than without an LLM"?
|
| So, observing a couple of my colleagues (I am an
| engineering manager, but have switched back and forth
| between management and IC roles for the last ~20 years),
| I've seen them either produce crap, or spend so much time
| tuning the prompts that it would have been faster to do it
| without an LLM. They mostly used Github Copilot or ChatGPT
| (most recent versions as of last few months ago).
|
| I am also keeping out a keen eye for any examples of this
| (on HN in particular), but it usually turns out things like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43573755
|
| Again, I am not saying it's not being done, but I have
| struggled to find someone who would demonstrate it happen
| in a convincing enough fashion -- I am really trying to
| imagine how I would best incorporate this into my daily
| non-work programming activities, so I'd love to see a few
| examples of someone using it effectively.
| tptacek wrote:
| LLMs don't make bad programmers into good programmers. If
| your team is comfortable merging "crap", you have deeper
| problems.
| necovek wrote:
| If you don't want to engage in an honest discussion,
| please refrain from making assumptions: nobody mentioned
| "merging crap". I stopped clearly at guiding an LLM to
| make a code change, which is at best, a pull request.
| tptacek wrote:
| How is that better? As a team lead, what would you think
| of a team member who consistently generated "crap" pull
| requests?
|
| You see the same thing in every argument with LLM
| skeptics. 'The code is bad. You don't even know what the
| code is doing." _This is obviously false_. A professional
| reads the code they commit and push. A professional doesn
| 't push code they know to be bad.
| necovek wrote:
| "Let's identify specific, clear areas for improvement,
| and if they are not able to improve, let's fire them":
| it's as simple as that.
|
| Teaching a human with motivation, potential and desire to
| learn is both _easier_ , and more rewarding (for most
| humans), than attempting to teach LLM to write good code
| every time -- humans tend to value their personal
| experiences more, whereas LLM relies more on the training
| corpus. So when I've seen people massage LLM output to be
| decent or excellent, it took them more time than it would
| have taken for them to write it from scratch without an
| LLM.
|
| Which makes LLMs mostly a curiosity, and not a
| productivity booster. Can it get there? I hope it can,
| because that would be amazing.
| tptacek wrote:
| None of this responds to what I just wrote. Can you
| engage with the question I asked directly? Thanks!
| necovek wrote:
| You asked: > As a team lead, what would
| you think of a team member who consistently generated
| "crap" pull requests?
|
| This is directly answered with my first paragraph: that's
| exactly what I would think of them, and how I would act
| on it.
|
| Your first question was: > How is that
| better?
|
| In the second paragraph, I explained why it's better to
| do a code review for a crappy pull request that's human-
| produced vs LLM-generated: it is easier, faster, and more
| psychologically rewarding.
|
| If you are talking about a case where an inexperienced
| human uses LLM to start off with a crappy code change,
| but then adapts the output during the review process, and
| potentially learns through it (though research confirms
| people learn better when they produce mistakes
| themselves) -- they still won't be able to use LLM to
| produce comparable code the next time, so they'll have to
| do the review and improve it by hand before putting it up
| for review by somebody else, thus negating any
| productivity gain (which was the original premise), and
| likely reducing the learning potential.
|
| If there was a question I misinterpreted, please
| enlighten me. Thanks! :)
| tptacek wrote:
| Jim and Toby are interviewing Darryl Philbin for the
| position of manager at Dunder Mifflin Scranton. Jim asks
| what Darryl would do to resolve a conflict between two
| employees in the warehouse Darryl already managed. "I'll
| answer that, Jim. I would use it as an opportunity to
| teach... about actions... and consequences of actions".
|
| That's the answer you just gave me. Good note! (Darryl
| didn't get the job.)
|
| You're dodging my point. If you are managing a team where
| people are using LLMs to generate pull requests full of
| "crap" code (your word), you have a mismanaged team, and
| would with or without the LLMs, because on a well-managed
| team people don't create PRs full of crap code.
|
| I'm fine if you want to say LLMs are dangerous tools in
| the hands of unseasoned developers. Fine, you can have a
| rule where only trusted developers get to use them. That
| actually seems pretty sane!
|
| But a trustworthy developer using an LLM isn't going to
| be pushed by the LLM into creating "crap" PRs, because
| the LLM doesn't make the PRs, the developer does. If the
| developer isn't _reading_ the code the LLM is producing,
| they 're not doing their job.
|
| Sometimes you get people saying "ok but reading that code
| is work so how is the LLM saving any time", which is
| something you could also say about adding any human
| developer to a team; their code also has to get reviewed.
|
| So help me understand how your concerns here cohere.
| necovek wrote:
| You seem to be arguing a point I never made: I never
| claimed LLMs are "dangerous", nor that crappy code only
| comes out of LLMs. They are just a tool, and I agree it
| is the responsibility of the developer wielding them to
| produce good work with (or without) them -- this was
| never disputed.
|
| I don't have any issue with someone using an LLM but I
| have not observed any efficiency gain from those who do
| -- that's my entire point, and the biggest selling point
| for using coding assistants. I've either seen them
| produce "crappy code" faster (which, ultimately, they
| could do by hand as well), or be slower than doing their
| work "manually".
|
| At the same time, I disagree about teams producing lousy
| PRs being mismanaged by definition: there are
| circumstances where doing that is warranted (LLM or no
| LLM), as long as the long term direction is improving
| (less crappy code over time). There are plenty of nuances
| there too.
| dcre wrote:
| A couple of examples from influential open source developers:
| Adam Wathan (Tailwind) agreeing with Mitchell Hashimoto that
| LLMs are making them more productive. "in their area of
| expertise" is not obvious from this post alone, but I am
| pretty confident from the way they talk about it that they
| are not exclusively using LLMs on side projects where they're
| inexpert.
|
| https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1911845073286803923
|
| Armin Ronacher also talks about using LLMs quite a bit, but I
| don't have as good of an example from his tweets of him
| straightforwardly saying "yes, they are useful to me!"
| necovek wrote:
| "Saying" vs "demonstrating": I am careful with the words I
| am using.
|
| It's not just nitpicking: maybe it's only their perception
| they are more productive? Or maybe they are. But saying it
| is not convincing enough for me.
| dcre wrote:
| That's a good point, though it's worth thinking about
| what would count as a demonstration. Pointing to a PR
| that an LLM helped with is not enough because you don't
| know how long it would have taken without the use of
| LLMs. The counterfactual never really exists. What is the
| hard evidence vim or emacs makes people more productive?
| Using git over svn? Using search engines? Over time, we
| expect people to use the things that make them more
| productive.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Same with all these AI businesses wrapping business around a
| prompt. Just tell me the prompt.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Write a witty comment in the style of a Hacker News user who just
| read an article titled "I'd rather read the prompt"
| flysand7 wrote:
| Write a troll response in the style of Hacker News troll who
| wants to troll the Hacker news users who just read the article
| titled "I'd rather read the prompt". Make it ironic
| jama211 wrote:
| And low effort! Hahaha
| necovek wrote:
| I've already asked a number of colleagues at work producing
| insane amount of gibberish with LLMs to just pass me the prompt
| instead: if LLM can produce verbose text with limited input, I
| just need that concise input too (the rest is simply made up
| crap).
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are
| like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple
| idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to
| someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it
| back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody
| benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool
| $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercise.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Depends on what you are looking for. I've turned half baked
| ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I've used them
| to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and complete. I've
| used them to get praised for writing comprehensive
| documentation.
|
| Part of my performance review is indirectly using bloat to
| seem sophisticated and thorough.
| generativenoise wrote:
| Would be nice to fix the performance reviews so we don't
| end up in a arms race of creating bloat until it becomes so
| unproductive it kills the host.
|
| Over-fitting proxy measures is one of the scourges of
| modernity.
|
| The only silver lining is if it becomes so wide spread and
| easy it loses the value of seeming sophisticated and
| thorough.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > creating bloat until it becomes so unproductive it
| kills the host
|
| Maybe we should let/encourage this to happen. Maybe
| letting bloated zombie-like organisations bloat
| themselves to death would thin the herd somewhat, to make
| space for organisations that are less "broken".
| justinclift wrote:
| "But at what price?" is probably the right question here,
| and that'd be a case by case basis thing. ;)
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| All FAANG/MAGMA dying is a bonus. The cherry on top. Net
| positive for humanity. A best case scenario.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I am on the mind that every organization should
| eventually die before it becomes a monster. I am also not
| a huge fan of inheritance for the same reason.
| necovek wrote:
| I fully believe you and I am saddened by the reality of
| your situation.
|
| At the same time, I strive really hard to influence the
| environment I am in so it does not value content bloat as a
| unit of productivity, so hopefully there are at least some
| places where people can have their sanity back!
| musicale wrote:
| > comprehensive documentation
|
| Documentation is an interesting use case. There are various
| kinds of documentation (reference, tutorial, architecture,
| etc.) and LLMs might be useful for things like
|
| - repetitive formatting and summarization of APIs for
| reference
|
| - tutorials which repeat the same information verbosely in
| an additive, logical sequence (though probably a human
| would be better)
|
| - sample code (though human-written would probably be
| better)
|
| The tasks that I expect might work well involve repetitive
| reformatting, repetitive expansion, and reduction.
|
| I think they also might be useful for systems analysis,
| boiling down a large code base into various kinds of
| summaries and diagrams to describe data flow, computational
| structure, signaling, etc.
|
| Still, there is probably no substitute for a Caroline
| Rose[1] type tech writer who carefully thinks about each
| API call and uses that understanding to identify design
| flaws.
|
| [1] https://folklore.org/Inside_Macintosh.html?sort=date
| chmod775 wrote:
| Yes, but none of the current LLMs are even remotely
| useful doing that kind of work for even something
| moderately complex. I have a 2k LOC project that no LLM
| even "understands" *. They can't grasp what it is: It's a
| mostly react-compatible implementation of "hooks" to be
| used for a non-DOM application. Every code assistant
| thinks it's a project using React.
|
| Any documentation they write at best re-states what is
| immediately obvious from the surrounding code (Useless: I
| need to explain _why_ ), or is some hallucination trying
| to pretend it's a React app.
|
| To their credit they've slowly gotten better now that a
| lot of documentation already exists, but that was me
| doing the work for them. What I needed them to do was
| understand the project from existing code, then write
| documentation _for me_.
|
| Though I guess once we're at the point AI is that good,
| we don't need to write any documentation anymore, since
| every dev can just generate it for themselves with their
| favorite AI and in the way they prefer to consume it.
|
| * They'll pretend they understand by re-stating what is
| written in the README, then proceed to produce nonsense.
| justinclift wrote:
| I've found "Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Thinking)" to be pretty
| good at moderately complex code bases, _after_ going
| through the effort to get it to be thorough.
|
| Without that effort it's a useless sycophant and is
| functionally extremely lazy (ie takes short cuts all the
| time).
|
| Don't suppose you've tried that particular model, after
| getting it to be thorough?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Delivering a library with an llm to explain the api and
| idiomatic usage seems like an interesting use case.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I'd rather be homeless in Philadelphia than work where you
| work
| cwalv wrote:
| This kind of "perf review" hacking works ~everywhere; how
| well it works correlates with how entrenched the
| organization is (i.e., how hard it is for new players to
| disrupt).
|
| You don't have to play the game the same way to work
| there. But it helps to accept that others will play it,
| and manage your own expectations accordingly.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _But it helps to accept that others will play it_
|
| Feel for you or anyone surrounded by such _others_ but it
| is most definitely not _everywhere_ - that is used to
| justify your presence in a place of work you should not
| be
| palata wrote:
| > This kind of "perf review" hacking works ~everywhere
|
| I don't have tons of examples, but in my experience:
|
| * This worked in toxic environments. They deserve it.
|
| * This doesn't work in a functional environment, because
| they don't have those bullshit metrics.
|
| If you _have_ to rely on those tricks, it 's time to look
| for another job.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Which big, well-paying companies do not have "those
| bullshit metrics"? I know for a fact that Meta, Google,
| Stripe, Airbnb, and Oracle all lean heavily on
| performance review cycles based entirely on ridiculous
| metrics. Getting ahead there _requires_ you to play the
| stupid games GP is suggesting.
| bdangubic wrote:
| If you work there, as OP said, _it 's time to look for
| another job._
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Totally, if you're willing to trade in your half-million
| or more annual compensation for $150k or less. My point
| is that it's an unfortunate game you have to play if
| you're working for places like that.
| bdangubic wrote:
| the coolest thing "the big tech" was able to do is
| convince a whole bunch ridiculously smart people that
| they only place they can make $500k is with them. I
| personally (I am just one person) know more than 10
| people _not_ working for big tech making (some
| significantly) north of $500k as SWEs and doing awesome
| sh*t (unlike I would un-intelligently guess most of big
| tech employees)
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Sure, there are _some_ jobs that match your description,
| likely for people that can brand themselves "AI
| engineers" for a rocketship company like OpenAI. Their
| number is absolutely miniscule compared to the number of
| big-tech jobs.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| And those are all examples of companies nobody should
| work for
| astrange wrote:
| The original post doesn't mention anything quantitative
| ("metrics"). Did this get sidetracked?
|
| > Depends on what you are looking for. I've turned half
| baked ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I've
| used them to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and
| complete. I've used them to get praised for writing
| comprehensive documentation.
|
| This is about giving people a good impression of you so
| they'll write strong peer feedback.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...thinking about it, there are probably situations where
| making something more verbose makes it take less effort to
| read. I can see how an LLM might be useful in that
| situation.
| palata wrote:
| If your organisation is such that you have to do this even
| though you are competent for your job, then they deserve
| it. They lose money because they do it wrong.
|
| If your organisation is functional and you are abusing it
| by doing that, then you deserve to get fired.
| musicale wrote:
| > LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like
| that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an
| LLM,
|
| I think that's the answer:
|
| LLMs are primarily useful for data and text translation and
| reduction, not for expansion.
|
| An exception is repetitive or boilerplate text or code where
| a verbose format is required to express a small amount of
| information.
| derefr wrote:
| There is one other very useful form of "expansion" that
| LLMs do.
|
| If you aren't aware: (high-parameter-count) LLMs can be
| used pretty reliably to teach yourself things.
|
| LLM base models "know things" to about the same degree that
| the Internet itself "knows" those things. For well-
| understood topics -- i.e. subjects where the Internet
| contains all sorts of open-source textbooks and treatments
| of the subject -- LLMs really do "know their shit": they
| won't hallucinate, they will correct you when you're
| misunderstanding the subject, they will calibrate to your
| own degree of expertise on the subject, they will make
| valid analogies between domains, etc.
|
| Because of this, you can use an LLM as an infinitely-
| patient tutor, to learn-through-conversation any (again,
| well-understood) topic you want -- and especially, to shore
| up any holes in your understanding.
|
| (I wouldn't recommend relying _solely_ on the LLM -- but I
| 've found "ChatGPT in one tab, Wikipedia open in another,
| switching back and forth" to be a very useful learning
| mode.)
|
| See this much-longer rambling
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797121 for details
| on why exactly this can be _better_ (sometimes) than just
| reading one of those open-source textbooks.
| jcul wrote:
| Yeah you're totally right with this use case.
|
| It feels like the information is there strewn across the
| internet, in forums, Reddit posts, stack overflow, specs,
| books. But to trawl though it all was so time consuming.
| With an LLM you can quickly distill it down to just the
| information you need.
|
| Saying that, I do feel like reading the full spec for
| something is a valuable exercise. There may be unknown
| unknowns that you can't even ask the LLM about. I was
| able to become a subject expert in different fields just
| but sitting down and reading through the specs / RFCs,
| while other colleagues continued to struggle and guess.
| palata wrote:
| To me:
|
| If an LLM can help you understand an RFC, it's great.
| You're now relying on the RFC.
|
| If an LLM can help you not rely on the RFC, you're doing
| it wrong.
| _AzMoo wrote:
| I use LLMs a huge amount in my work as a senior software
| engineer to flesh out the background information required
| to make my actual contributions understandable to those
| without the same background as me. eg, if I want to write
| a proposal on using SLO's and error budgets to make data
| driven decisions about which errors need addressing and
| which don't, inside a hybrid kubernetes and serverless
| environment, I could do a few things:
|
| * Not provide background information and let people
| figure it out for themselves. This will not help me
| achieve my goals.
|
| * Link them to Google's SRE book and hope they read it.
| Still not achieving my goals, because they won't.
|
| * Spend 3 hours writing the relevant background
| information out for them to read as part of my proposal.
| This will achieve my goals, but take an extra 3 hours.
|
| * Tell the LLM what I'm looking for and why, then let it
| write it for me in 2 minutes, instead of 3 hours. I can
| check it over, make sure it's got everything, refine it a
| little, and I've still saved 2.5 hours.
|
| So for me, I think the author has missed a primary reason
| people use LLMs. It saves a bunch of time.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| This usage had never occurred to me but including
| adequate background information is definitely something I
| struggle with - I'll definitely try this!
| necovek wrote:
| For a teacher, they want to see you spend those 3h to see
| what you come up with, and if there's something they
| should direct your attention to, or something they should
| change in their instruction.
|
| But ultimately, getting the concise summary for a complex
| topic (like SLIs and SLOs are) is brilliant, but would be
| even better if it was full of back-links to deeper dives
| around the Internet and the SRE book.
| mettamage wrote:
| This is how I currently am relearning upper high school
| math. It's tremendously helpful as I am a why guy.
|
| Why is the angle called m? Why is a combination nPr *
| (1/r)? What is 1/r doing there?
|
| I use mathacademy.com as my source of practice. Usually
| that's enough but I tend to fall over if small details
| aren't explained and I can't figure out why those details
| are there.
|
| In high school this was punished. With state of the art
| LLMs, I have a good tutor.
|
| Also it's satisfying to just upload a page in my own
| handwriting and it understands what I did, and is able to
| correct me there.
| necovek wrote:
| The fact that we see lower grades as "punishment" is the
| root of the problem: grades are an assessment of our
| understanding level and competence on a topic.
|
| Now, I know psychologically it's not as simple, and both
| society and ourselves equate academic (and professional,
| later on) success with personal worth, but that's a
| deeper, harder topic.
| valenterry wrote:
| They are also useful for association. Imagine an LLM
| trained on documentation. Then you can retrieve info
| associated with your question.
|
| This can go beyond just specific documentation but also
| include things like "common knowledge" which is what the
| other poster meant when they talked about "teaching you
| things".
| palata wrote:
| In my experience, if the information I need is in the
| documentation, then I don't need the LLM. If it is not in
| the documentation, then the LLM will invent stuff that
| _could be there_ but that isn 't, and it's actually a
| loss of time.
| valenterry wrote:
| > In my experience, if the information I need is in the
| documentation, then I don't need the LLM
|
| _need_ is a strong word. Do you _need_ to be able to do
| ctrl+F? Not really, you can just read it all. But maybe
| it 's easier to do ctrl+F. Same with LLM. Just imagine it
| as a fuzzy ctrl+F. Can be useful.
| palata wrote:
| The thing is, being able to read documentation is a
| skill.
|
| Being really good at ctrl+F / LLM is not the same. I
| learn a lot just browsing through documentation, without
| searching anything in particular.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| IMO the main uses of LLM are guided problem solving and a
| better Google search that you can ask questions in a
| natural way.
|
| Producing text as output is not the way
| tobir wrote:
| Yeah, this is the usual interaction with LLMs when coding:
| Ask GPT/Claude to write me a simple function. It writes 100
| lines of code, trying to infer the rest of your codebase.
| Tell it to only solve my issue and do it in 5 lines of
| code. Get something close to working.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I blame humans. I never understand why unnecessarily long
| writing is required in a lot of places.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Rituals are significant because they are long. A ritual
| that consisted of the words "Rain please" wouldn't convince
| the gods, much less their human followers.
| necovek wrote:
| "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had
| time to make it shorter." -- _attributed to many[1]_
|
| The funny thing is that people use LLMs to do the opposite
| instead of what is implied to be a smarter thing to do with
| the above quote.
|
| [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-
| letter/
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Yep. They're very closely linked.
|
| http://prize.hutter1.net/
|
| Note the preamble, FAQs, and that all of the winning entries
| are now neural networks.
| jameshart wrote:
| Actually, pretty sure Sam Altman gets to _spend_ that money
| on power and compute, not sure they've figured out how to
| turn it into an income stream yet.
| arealaccount wrote:
| I think they actually lose the $0.000001
| kace91 wrote:
| "Someone sent me this ai generated message. Please give me your
| best shot at guessing the brief prompt that originated the
| text".
|
| Done, now ai is just lossy prettyprinting.
| agentultra wrote:
| An incredible use of such advanced technology and gobs of
| energy.
| genewitch wrote:
| What will me make the rocks with lightning in do next?!
| phamilton wrote:
| Jokes aside, this happens all the time.
|
| I have it write doc strings. I later ask it to explain a
| section of code, wherein it uses the doc strings to
| understand and explain the code to me.
|
| A less lossy way to capture this will probably emerge at some
| point.
| roarcher wrote:
| Recently I wasted half a day trying to make sense of story
| requirements given to me by a BA that were contradictory and
| far more elaborate than we had previously discussed. When I
| finally got ahold of him he confessed that he had run the
| actual requirements through ChatGPT and "didn't have time to
| proofread the results". Absolutely infuriating.
| ortusdux wrote:
| https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
| ponector wrote:
| Chatgpt very useful for adding softness and politeness to my
| sentences. Would you like more straight forward text which
| probably will be rude for regular american?
| lttlrck wrote:
| Yes. I can't stand waffle from native or non-native speakers.
| Waste of electrons and oxygen :-) that might just be me
| however. Know your audience ;-)
| phamilton wrote:
| If we can detach content and presentation, then the reader
| can choose tone and length.
|
| At some point we will stop making decisions about what future
| readers want. We will just capture the concrete inputs and
| the reader's LLM will explain it.
| walleeee wrote:
| I don't think form and function can be separated so cleanly
| in natural language. However you encode what's between your
| ears into text, you've made (re)presentational choices.
|
| A piece of text does not have a single inherently correct
| interpretation. Its meaning is a relation _constructed at
| run- (i.e. read-)time_ between the reader, the writer, and
| (possibly) the things the text refers to, that is if both
| sides are well enough aligned to agree on what those are.
|
| Words don't speak, they only gesture.
| phamilton wrote:
| My LLM workflow involves a back-and-forth clarification
| (verbose input -> LLM asks questions) that results in a
| rich context representing my intent. Generating
| comments/docs from this feels lossy.
|
| What if we could persist this final LLM context state?
| Think of it like a queryable snapshot of the 'why' behind
| code or docs. Instead of just reading a comment, you
| could load the associated context and ask an LLM
| questions based on the original author's reasoning state.
|
| Yes, context is model-specific, a major hurdle. And there
| are many other challenges. But ignoring the technical
| implementation for a moment, is this concept - capturing
| intent via persistent, queryable LLM context - a valuable
| problem to solve? I feel it would be.
| walleeee wrote:
| It sounds worthwhile. I just wonder how you envision the
| author encoding their reasoning state. If as (terse)
| text, how would the author know the LLM successfully
| unpacks its meaning without interrogating it in detail,
| and then fine-tuning the prompt? And at that point, it
| would probably be faster to just write more verbose docs
| or comments?
|
| What about a tool that simply allows other developers to
| hover over some code and see any relevant conversations
| the developer had with a model? Version the chat log and
| attach it to the code basically.
| necovek wrote:
| It's no accident most of the software development world
| gravitated toward free and open source tooling:
| proprietary tool-specific code and build recipes have the
| same gotchas as the model-specific context would have
| today.
|
| So perhaps switching to open-source models of sufficient
| "power" will obsolete that particular concern (they would
| be a "development dependency", just like a linter,
| compiler or code formatter are today).
| blt wrote:
| yes
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Something I've found very helpful is when I have a murky idea
| in my head that would take a long time for me to articulate
| concisely, and I use an LLM to compress what I'm trying to say.
| So I type (or even dictate) a stream of consciousness with lots
| of parentheticals and semi-structured thoughts and ask it to
| summarize. I find it often does a great job at saying what I
| want to say, but better.
|
| (See also the famous Pascal quote "This would have been a
| shorter letter if I had the time").
|
| P.s. for reference I've asked an LLM to compress what I wrote
| above. Here is the output:
|
| _When I have a murky idea that's hard to articulate, I find it
| helpful to ramble--typing or dictating a stream of semi-
| structured thoughts--and then ask an LLM to summarize. It often
| captures what I mean, but more clearly and effectively._
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Like the linked article, I'd rather read your original text,
| even if it's less structured and rough
| solaire_oa wrote:
| Agreed, the messiness of the original text has character
| and humanity that is stripped from the summarized text. The
| first text is an original thought, exchanged in a dialogue,
| imperfectly.
|
| Elsewhere in this comment section, it's discussed about the
| importance of having original thought, which the summarized
| text specifically isn't, and has leeched away.
|
| The parent comment has actually made the case against the
| summarized text being "better" (if we're measuring anything
| that isn't word count).
| procaryote wrote:
| Learning to articulate your thoughts is pretty vital in
| learning to think though.
|
| An LLM could make something sound articulate even if your
| input is useless rambling containing the keywords you want to
| think about. Having someone validate a lack of thought as
| something useful doesn't seem good for you in the long term
| seabass wrote:
| Your original here is distinctly better! It shows your voice
| and thought patterns. All character is stripped away in the
| "compressed" version, which unsurprisingly is longer, too.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| What do you mean it's longer? It's shorter.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| This is how I've felt about using LLMs for things like writing
| resumes and such. It can't possibly give you more than the
| prompt since it doesn't know anything more about you than you
| gave it in the prompt.
|
| It's much more useful for answering questions that are public
| knowledge since it can pull from external sources to add new
| info.
| thomasahle wrote:
| The one case where this doesn't work, is if the prompt is, say
| 3 ideas, which the LLM expand to 20, and the colleague then
| trimmed down to 10.
|
| Ideally there's some selection done, and the fact you're
| receiving it means it's better than a mean answer. But
| sometimes they haven't even read the LLM output themselves :-(
| Falimonda wrote:
| And you do what with the prompt once you have it?
| necovek wrote:
| Get all the information of value that was hidden behind 2-10k
| words generated by an LLM.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Even more interesting is why the students think that is the reply
| the teacher is expecting
| revskill wrote:
| It is designed that way intentionally because provider charges
| token for money.
| programjames wrote:
| You _can_ train an LLM to maximize the information content
| bitrate. I just think most companies want to maximize "customer
| satisfaction" or w/e, which is why we get the verbose, bold,
| bullet points.
| afavour wrote:
| ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably
| inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email.
|
| I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I'll ask
| ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me
| to email.
|
| You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately
| copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points
| provided.
|
| Somewhere off in the distance a lake evaporates.
| Swizec wrote:
| Just send the damn bullet points! Everyone will thank you
| afavour wrote:
| Well of course. But well thought out and well written
| communication (which admittedly is rare) is an opportunity to
| actually think through what you're telling people. How does
| point A relate to point B? As you read through what you've
| written do you realize there should be a point A.1 to bridge
| a gap?
|
| It's like math homework, you always had to show your working
| not just give the answer. AI gives us an answer without the
| journey of arriving at one, which removes the purpose of
| doing it in the first place.
| iddan wrote:
| Jokes aside, I'm building a product for this for sales. If this
| is relevant to you: https://closer.so
| seb1204 wrote:
| Exactly what I thought as well, just better worded.
| teekert wrote:
| Except I have never met anyone that likes fluffed up emails,
| nor considers them better in any way than your 4 points. Take
| that from a long-email writer (people beg me for a few bullets,
| somehow I always feel that it does not accurately convey my
| message, I am aware that this is a shortcoming) ;)
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Me either. Which makes it extra perplexing that the
| developers of email clients seem _absolutely convinced_ that
| people do who like them abound!
| perdomon wrote:
| Is the lake evaporation line/idea from literature/film, or is
| it from you personally? I haven't heard it before is why I'm
| asking.
| sensanaty wrote:
| We had a town hall type of thing recently with some of our
| investors, and some of the answers they gave were hilarious, if
| it weren't so depressing that those people are the ones with
| most of the money in this world.
|
| The worst was the answer to the question "How can we utilize AI
| to greater effect in our work?". A nice open-ended question
| where they had a beautiful opportunity to show off how
| knowledgeable and forward thinking they are, right? Especially
| considering they're the ones behind the massive AI push our
| product has gone with as of late.
|
| "You can ask it to write emails for you!" Was the one and only
| thing these multi-milli/billionaires could come up with. Our
| core product itself is literally an email interface, and we
| have an AI email generation feature built in...
|
| I had to turn my webcam off because I genuinely laughed out
| loud at that response for how insanely elementary and useless
| it was as an answer. It also showed me these people do
| literally nothing other than answer emails - and even then
| they're too bloody lazy and give so little of a shit they can't
| even do _that_ part themselves.
| bertil wrote:
| I found it ironic that the author said having bullet points with
| the key topic in bold was a sign to use that format immediately.
| ctkhn wrote:
| > The model produces better work. Some of my peers believe that
| large language models produce strictly better writing than they
| could produce on their own. Anecdotally, this phenomenon seems
| more common among English-as-a-second-language speakers. I also
| see it a lot with first-time programmers, for whom programming is
| a set of mysterious incantations to be memorized and recited.
|
| AI usage is a lot higher in my work experience among people who
| no longer code and are now in business/management roles or
| engineers who are very new and didn't study engineering. My
| manager and skip level both use it for all sorts of things that
| seem pointless and the bootcamp/nontraditional engineers use it
| heavily. Our college hires we have who went through a CS program
| don't use it because they are better and faster than it for most
| tasks. I haven't found it to be useful without an enormous prompt
| at which point I'd rather just implement the feature myself.
| amclennon wrote:
| The "aha" moment for me came when I started writing a ticket
| for a junior engineer to work on. However, to satisfy my own
| curiosity, I gave the ticket to Cursor, and was able to get 90%
| of the way there (implementing a small feature based on a Figma
| design).
|
| As it turns out, a well written ticket makes a pretty good
| input into an LLM. However, it has the added benefit of having
| my original thought process well documented, so sometimes I go
| through the process of writing a ticket / subtask, even if I
| ended up giving it to an AI tool in the end.
| ineptech wrote:
| Relatedly, there was a major controversy at work recently over
| the propriety of adding something like this to a lengthy email
| discussion:
|
| > Since this is a long thread and we're including a wider
| audience, I thought I'd add Copilot's summary...
|
| Someone called them out for it, several others defended it. It
| was brought up in one team's retro and the opinions were divided
| and very contentious, ranging from, "the summary helped make sure
| everyone had the same understanding and the person who did it was
| being conscientious" to "the summary was a pointless distraction
| and including it was an embarrassing admission of incompetence."
|
| Some people wanted to adopt a practice of not posting summaries
| in the future but we couldn't agree and had to table it.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I think the attribution itself is a certain form of cowardice.
| If one is actually confident that a summary is correct they'd
| incorporate it directly. Leaving in the "Copilot says" is an
| implicit attempt to weasel out of taking responsibility for it.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I see it more as a form of honesty, though maybe also
| laziness if they weren't willing to edit the summary, or
| write it themselves.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It's probably just transparency, because the summary will be
| written in a different voice and sound AIish either way.
|
| If I were to include AI generated stuff into my communication
| I'd also make it clear as people might guess it anyway.
| bagacrap wrote:
| But if you haven't personally verified the summary is
| accurate then you should not share it. And if you have
| verified it, you don't need to disclose.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'd push back on this: I wouldn't share something I
| haven't checked, yet my natural writing style is nothing
| like Gemini, so having a whole paragraph in a different
| style in my mail requires a disclaimer (I don't want
| people double guessing what I'm quoting or if I had some
| different intent writing that paragraph)
|
| Rewriting it in my own words would clear the issue, but
| then why am I even using an AI in the first place ?
| jsheard wrote:
| I've noticed that even on here, which is generally extremely
| bullish on LLMs and AI in general, people get _instantly_
| downvoted into oblivion for LLM copypasta in comments. Nobody
| wants to read someone else 's slop.
| jddj wrote:
| I checked your website after this and wasn't disappointed.
| Funny stuff.
| ineptech wrote:
| Hah, thanks! Haven't touched it in a long time, almost forgot
| about the username.
| coliveira wrote:
| It is an admission of incompetence. If you need a summary, why
| don't you add it yourself? Moreover, any person nowadays can
| easily create a chatGPT summary if necessary. It is just like
| adding a page of google search results to your writing.
| prymitive wrote:
| I often find Copilot summaries to be more or less an attempt at
| mainsplaining a simple change. If my tiny PR with a one line
| description requires Copilot to output a paragraph of text
| about it it's not a summary, it's simply time wasted on someone
| who loves to talk.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| How is mansplaining related to this? And saying that
| summaries of already short information are a waste of time is
| not really relevant to someone talking about summaries of
| long and probably repetitive/hard to read discussions.
| duskwuff wrote:
| LLMs aren't even that good at summarizing poorly structured
| text, like email discussions. They can certainly cherry-pick
| bits and pieces and make a guess at the overall topic, but my
| experience has been that they're poor at identifying what's
| most salient. They get particularly confused when the input is
| internally inconsistent, like when participants on a mailing
| list disagree about a topic or submit competing proposals.
| Gracana wrote:
| Maybe your co-worker will see the responses here and learn
| their lesson.
|
| Nobody will call you a lazy and incompetent coward for taking
| the default option: Hit reply-all, write your one-sentence
| response above all 50 quoted emails, hit send.
| agentbrown wrote:
| Some thoughts:
|
| 1. "When copying another person's words, one doesn't communicate
| their own original thoughts, but at least they are communicating
| a human's thoughts. A language model, by construction, has no
| original thoughts of its own; publishing its output is a
| pointless exercise."
|
| LLMs, having being trained using the corpus of the web, I would
| argue communicate other human's thoughts particularly well. Only
| in exercising an avoidance of plagiarism are the thoughts of
| other human's evolved into something closer to "original thought"
| for the would-be plagarizer. But yes, at least a straight
| copy/paste retains the same rhetoric as the original human.
|
| 2. I've seen a few advertisements recently leverage "the prompt"
| as a means to resonate visual appeal.
|
| i.e a new fast food delivery service starting their add with some
| upbeat music and a visual presentation of somebody typing into a
| LLM interface, "Where's the best sushi around me?" And then cue
| the advertisement for the product they offer.
| satisfice wrote:
| I blogged about this just yesterday. The problem of disguised
| authorship ruins your reputation as a thinker, worker, and
| writer.
|
| https://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/487881
| arduanika wrote:
| This is a good post.
|
| Off-topic, but on your parenthetical about SMS "wrong number"
| texts "(That scam doesn't even make sense...)", part of why
| they do it is what's called "warming up" their sending number
| so that it's seen as legit by carriers and SMS filters. They're
| also seeing whether you're a real person who responds, in which
| case they can come back later with a more sophisticated scam
| (or re-sell you number, which is now more valuable, to another
| scammer for that purpose).
|
| But you're right that it doesn't make much sense as a text you
| might receive naturally. Best thing is to not reply so that
| you're not feeding the beast.
|
| Incidentally, I used ChatGPT to refresh my memory about how
| this works, and in its initial response it got it backwards,
| saying that "warming up" is what it does to _your_ number. You
| can 't trust these things one bit! Your post calls it
| "automated irresponsibility", and I like that.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| As someone who is an immigrant that had to go to high school in
| English speaking country and who struggled a lot and couldn't do
| anything about improving essay writing no matter what I did, I
| say all these English teachers deserve this. I wish ChatGPT
| existed during my school years, I would've at least had
| someone(thing) explain me how to write better.
| palata wrote:
| > I would've at least had someone(thing) explain me how to
| write better.
|
| I actually don't think that it is good at that. I have heard of
| language teachers trying to use it to teach the language (it's
| a model language, it should be good at it, right?) and realised
| that it isn't good at that.
|
| Of course I understand the point of your message, which is that
| you feel your teachers were not helpful and I have empathy for
| that.
| jama211 wrote:
| It is excellent at that, have you tried using it as a
| learning tool to improve your writing before? It's exactly
| what it's good at...
| palata wrote:
| I didn't say it is not excellent at writing text. But if
| you want to read well-written text, just open a book.
|
| The point is: how good is it at teaching you how the
| language works? Like the grammar concepts, etc. I don't
| think it excels at that.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I ask Claude to respond like Hemingway would. It works.
| Herring wrote:
| I think half the population of the world wants just the facts,
| the other half wants long flowing beautiful content like on
| apple.com, and neither group knows the other exists. Of course
| this is the right way to do it!
| staunton wrote:
| I'm sure it's beside the point but...
|
| Your benchmark for "long flowing beautiful content" is
| apple.com? It's competing with Hemingway?
| Herring wrote:
| Spoken like a true "just the facts" guy. If this is a
| competition then Hemmingway is losing hands down. Serious
| well-funded marketing departments came up with that long-
| form style, because that's what the vast majority of people
| respond to. I'm just happy they have a tiny "tech specs"
| section for me (and presumably you).
| staunton wrote:
| I just went on apple.com and tried for 8 minutes to find
| "long beautiful flowing content". Most of the actual text
| I came across there were not-so-beautiful legal
| disclaimers...
|
| Can you share a link to what you mean?
| Herring wrote:
| I meant the whole site. I was using the word "content"
| broadly. That website is far from concise. 50 pictures of
| everything.
| jama211 wrote:
| I would argue that pictures are concise, at what they're
| aiming to do.
| neilv wrote:
| > _[...] but not so distinctive to be worth passing along to an
| honor council. Even if I did, I'm not sure the marginal gains in
| the integrity of the class would be worth the hours spent
| litigating the issue._
|
| The school should be drilling into students, at orientation, what
| some school-wide hard rules are regarding AI.
|
| One of the hard rules is probably that you have to write your own
| text and code, never copy&paste. (And on occasions when
| copy&paste is appropriate, like in a quote, or to reuse an off-
| the-shelf function, it's always cited/credited clearly and
| unambiguously.)
|
| And no instructors should be contradicting those hard rules.
|
| (That one instructor who tells the class on the first day, "I
| don't care if you copy&paste from AI for your assignments, as if
| it's your own work; that just means you went through the learning
| exercise of interacting with AI, which is what I care about"...
| is confusing the students, for all their other classes.)
|
| Much of society is telling students that everything is BS, and
| that their job is to churn BS to get what they want. Early "AI'
| usage popular practices so far looks to be accelerating that.
| Schools should be dropping a brick wall in front of that. Well, a
| padded wall, for the students who can still be saved.
| eunos wrote:
| There's also strong inferiority complex. When you read and find
| out the output your motivation to at least paraphrase the prompt
| output instantly dive because it looks so good and proper whereas
| your original writing looks so dumb in comparison
| palata wrote:
| > A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of
| hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they
| shall receive a degree
|
| Yes, totally. Unfortunately, it takes time and maturity to
| understand how this is completely wrong, but I feel like most
| students go through that belief.
|
| Not sure how relevant it is, but it makes me think of two movies
| with Robin Williams: Dead Poet's Society and Will Hunting. In the
| former, Robin's character manages to get students interested in
| _stuff_ instead of "just passing the exams". In the later, I
| will just quote this part:
|
| > Personally, I don't give a shit about all that, because you
| know what? I can't learn anything from you I can't read in some
| fuckin' book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And
| I'm fascinated. I'm in.
|
| I don't give a shit about whether a student can learn the book by
| heart or not. I want the student to be able to think on their
| own; I want to be able to have an interesting discussion with
| them. I want them to _think critically_. LLMs fundamentally
| cannot solve that.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Looks like a "GPT text output condenser" might be a good project
| to work on.
| laurentlb wrote:
| There are many ways to use LLMs.
|
| The issue, IMO, is that some people throw in a one-shot, short
| prompt, and get a generic, boring output. "Garbage in, generic
| out."
|
| Here's how I actually use LLMs:
|
| - To dump my thoughts and get help organizing them.
|
| - To get feedback on phrasing and transitions (I'm not a native
| speaker).
|
| - To improve tone, style (while trying to keep it personal!), or
| just to simplify messy sentences.
|
| - To identify issues, missing information, etc. in my text.
|
| It's usually an iterative process, and the combined prompt length
| ends up longer than the final result. And I incorporate the
| feedback manually.
|
| So sure, if someone types "write a blog post about X" and hits
| go, the prompt is more interesting than the output. But when
| there are five rounds of edits and context, would you really
| rather read all the prompts and drafts instead of the final
| version?
|
| (if you do:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817dd19-4604-800b-95ee-f2dd05add4...)
| palata wrote:
| > would you really rather read all the prompts and drafts
| instead of the final version?
|
| I think you missed the point of the article. They did not mean
| it literally: it's a way to say that they are interested in
| what _you_ have to say.
|
| And that is the point that is _extremely difficult_ to make
| students understand. When a teacher asks a student to write
| about a historical event, it 's not just some kind of ceremony
| on the way to a degree. The end goal is to make the student
| improve in a number of skills: gathering information, making
| sense of it, _absorbing_ it, being critical about what they
| read, eventually building an opinion about it.
|
| When you say "I use an LLM to dump my thoughts and get help
| organising them", what you say is that you are not interested
| in improving your ability to actually _absorb_ information. To
| me, it says that you are not interested in becoming
| interesting. I would think that it is a maturity issue: some
| day you will understand.
|
| And that's what the article says: I am interested in hearing
| what _you_ have to say about a topic that you care about. I am
| not interested into anything you can do to pretend that you
| care or know about it. If you can 't organise your thoughts
| yourself, I don't believe that you have reached a point where
| you are interesting. Not that you will never get there; it just
| takes practice. But if you don't practice (and use LLMs
| instead), my concern is that you will never become interesting.
| This time is wasted, I don't want to read what your LLM
| generated from that stuff you didn't care to absorb in the
| first place.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| * I think you missed the point of the article. They did not
| mean it literally: it's a way to say that they are interested
| in what you have to say.*
|
| Maybe an LLM could have helped the writer say what they meant
| to.
| palata wrote:
| Maybe if people were more used to reading and less to copy-
| pasting into LLMs, they would understand the article.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Exactly it is a tool which needs skill to use. I would add
| extra use of mine:
|
| - To "Translate to language XYZ", and that is not sometimes
| strightforward and needs iterating like "Translate to language
| <LANGUAGE> used by <PERSON ROLE> living in <CITY>" and so on.
|
| And the author is right, I use it as 2nd-language user, thus
| LLM produces better text than myself. However I am not going to
| share the prompt as it is useless (foreign language) and too
| messy (bits of draft text) to the reader. I would compare it to
| passing a book draft thru editor and translator.
| palata wrote:
| For what it's worth, I think that sending a message
| translated to a foreign language you don't master is the
| worst thing you can do.
|
| You speak English? Write and send your message in English.
| The receiver can copy-paste it in a translator. This way,
| they will know that they are not reading the original. So if
| your translated message sounds inaccurate, offensive or
| anything like that, they can go back to your original
| message.
| egglemonsoup wrote:
| FWIW: Your original comment, in the first message you sent
| ChatGPT, was way better than the one you posted. Simple,
| authentic, to the point
| gnatolf wrote:
| I couldn't agree more, this 'polished' style the finished
| comment comes in is super boring to read. It's hard to put
| the finger on it, but overall flow is just too... Samesame? I
| guess it's perfectly _expected_ to be predictable to read ;)
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| And then one of the iterations was asking additional ways
| llms could be used and then adding some of those as content
| which seems odd but plausibly helpful brainstorming. Just
| the phrasing of the original question makes it sound like
| things the user isn't actually doing but wants in their
| comment if that makes sense.
|
| Thanks for the example chat it was a valuable learning for
| me!
| dogleash wrote:
| >- To improve tone, style (while trying to keep it personal!),
| or just to simplify messy sentences.
|
| Ironically enough, as I was reading your post this is what
| convinced me it was written by ChatGPT.
|
| FWIW, the initial draft you gave to chatgpt is better than what
| you posted.
| rafram wrote:
| That's a lot of back-and-forth to produce something that's
| functionally equivalent to your original text, only slightly
| worse.
| qustrolabe wrote:
| It's actually doesn't matter. I hated this hassle of writing
| various texts while studying so much. Like does it really matter
| whether student would generate this text or just go google and
| copy paste some paragraphs from somewhere? And don't even hope
| for them to genuinely write all that stuff themselves because
| it's a huge waste of time even for those who actually cares and
| interested in the subject.
| jama211 wrote:
| Yup, people like to get high and mighty but they've obviously
| forgotten how much of school was pointless assignments designed
| so the teacher could tick off the boxes to their employer that
| they'd done something rather than having any interest in that
| assignment actually inspiring learning. Students aren't stupid,
| they spot this behaviour a mile off and simply respond in kind.
|
| Make better assignments.
| jez wrote:
| Where I especially hold this viewpoint is for end-of-year peer
| performance reviews.
|
| People say "I saved so much time on perf this year with the aid
| of ChatGPT," but ChatGPT doesn't know anything about your working
| relationship with your coworker... everything interesting is
| contained in the prompt. If you're brain dumping bullet points
| into an LLM prompt, just make those bullets your feedback and be
| done with it? Then it'll be clear what the kernel of feedback is
| and what's useless fluff.
| sieve wrote:
| Depends on the situation.
|
| I like reading and writing stories. Last month, I compared the
| ability of various LLMs to rewrite Saki's "The Open Window" from
| a given prompt.[1] The prompt follows the 13-odd attempts. I am
| pretty sure in this case that you'd rather read the story than
| the prompt.
|
| I find the disdain that some people have for LLMs and diffusion
| models to be rather bizarre. They are tools that are
| democratizing some trades.
|
| Very few people (basically, those who can afford it) write to
| "communicate original thoughts." They write because they want to
| get paid. People who can afford to concentrate on the "art" of
| writing/painting are pretty rare. Most people are doing these
| things as a profession with deadlines to meet. Unlike you are
| GRRM, you cannot spend decades on a single book waiting for
| inspiration to strike. You need to work on it. Also, authors
| writing crap/gold at a per-page rate is hardly something new.
|
| LLMs are probably the most interesting thing I have encountered
| since I did the computer. These puritans should get off of their
| high horse (or down from their ivory tower) and join the plebes.
|
| [1] Variations on a Theme of Saki (https://gist.github.com/s-i-e-
| v-e/b4d696bfb08488aeb893cce3a4...)
| YmiYugy wrote:
| Hate the game not the player. For the moment we continue to live
| in a world where the form and tone of communication matters and
| where foregoing the use of AI tools can put you at a
| disadvantage. There are countless homework assignments where
| teachers will give better grades to LLM outputs. An LLM can
| quickly generate targeted cover letters dramatically increasing
| efficiency while job hunting. Getting a paper accepted requires
| you to adhere to an academic writing style. LLMs can get you
| there. Maybe society just needs a few more years to adjust and
| shift expectations. In the meantime you should probably continue
| to use AI.
| Mbwagava wrote:
| Surely this just makes a mockery of the same tone and style
| that indicates someone put effort and thought into producing
| something. This just seems in net to waste everyone's time with
| no benefit to us.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| I can't even think of what the new set of expectations would
| even be of that shift were to occur.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > Either the article is so vapid that a summary provides all of
| its value, in which case, it does not merit the engagement of a
| comment, or it demands a real reading by a real human for
| comprehension, in which case the summary is pointless.
|
| There's so much bad writing of valuable information out there.
| The major sins being: burying the lede, no or poor sectioning,
| and just generally verbose.
|
| In some cases, like in EULAs and patents that's intentional.
| rralian wrote:
| I've used ChatGPT as an editor and had very good results. I'll
| write the whole thing myself and then feed it into ChatGPT for
| editing. And then review its output to manually decide which
| pieces I want to incorporate. The thoughts are my own, but
| sometimes ChatGPT is capable of finding more succinct ways of
| making the points.
| investa wrote:
| I have found that it is no where near a human editor. I use
| LanguageTool to check the basics.
| Tostino wrote:
| I generally make sure I use diff tools for that type of task,
| because LLMs are really good at making subtle changes you don't
| easily notice that are wrong.
| dakiol wrote:
| All it takes is to provide a slightly better prompt ("write the
| answer in a natural prose style, no bullet points, no boring
| style, perhaps introduce a small error). It's not that difficult.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| I mostly use LLMs as a more convenient Google and to automate
| annoying code transformations with a conveniency of a natural
| language interface. Sometimes, I use it to "improve" my writing
| style.
|
| I have to admit I was a bit surprised how bad LLMs are at the
| continue this essay task. When I read it in the blog I suspected
| this might have been a problem with the prompt or the using one
| of the smaller variants of Gemini. So I tried it with Gemini 2.5
| Pro and iterated quite a bit providing generic feedback without
| offering solutions. I could not get the model to form a coherent
| well reasoned argument. Maybe I need to recalibrate my
| expectations of what LLMs are capable, but I also suspect that
| current models have heavy guardrails, use a low temperature and
| have been specifically tuned for problem solving and avoid
| hallucinations as much as possible.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I just want to point out that AI generated material is naturally
| a confirmation bias machine. When the output is obviously AI, you
| confirm that you can easily spot AI output. When the output is
| human-level, you just pass through it without a second thought.
| There is almost no regular scenario where you are retroactively
| made aware something is AI.
| djinnish wrote:
| The vast majority of the time people question whether or not an
| image or writing is "AI", they're really just calling it bad
| and somehow not realizing that you could just call the output
| bad and have the same effect.
|
| Every day I'm made more aware of how terrible people are at
| identifying AI-generated output, but also how obsessed with
| GenAI-vestigating things they don't like or wouldn't buy
| because they're bad.
| Hasnep wrote:
| I've heard this called the toupee fallacy. Not all toupees are
| bad, but you only spot the bad toupees.
| palata wrote:
| This article really resonates with me.
|
| The very first time I enjoyed talking to someone in another
| language, I was 21. Then an exchange student, I had a pleasant
| and interesting discussion with someone in that foreign language.
| On the next day, I realised that I wouldn't have been able to do
| that without that foreign language. I felt _totally stupid_ : I
| had been getting very good grades in languages for years at
| school without ever caring about actually learning the language.
| And now, it was obvious, but all that time was lost; I couldn't
| go back and do it better.
|
| A few years earlier, I had this great history teacher in high
| school. Instead of making us learn facts and dates by heart, she
| wanted us to actually get an general understanding of a
| historical event. Actually internalise, absorb the information in
| such a way that we could think and talk about it. And eventually
| develop our critical thinking. It was confusing at first, because
| when we asked "what will the exam be about", she wouldn't say
| "the material in those pages". She'd be like "well, we've been
| talking about X for 2 months, it will be about that".
|
| Her exams were weird at first: she would give us articles from
| newspapers and essentially ask what we could say about them.
| Stuff like "Who said what, and why? And why does this other
| article disagree with the first one? And who is right?". At first
| I was confused, and eventually it clicked and I started getting
| really good at this. Many students got there as well, of course.
| Some students never understood and hated her: their way was to
| learn the material by heart and prove it to get a good grade. And
| I eventually realised this: those students who were not good at
| this were actually less interesting when they talked about
| history. They lacked this critical thinking, they couldn't make
| their own opinion or actually internalise the material. So
| whatever they would say in this topic was uninteresting: I had
| been following the same course, I knew which events happened and
| in which order. With the other students were it "clicked" as
| well, I could have interesting discussion: "Why do you think this
| guy did this? Was it in good faith or not? Did he know about that
| when he did it? etc".
|
| She was one of my best teachers. Not only she got me interested
| in history (which had never been my thing), but she got me to
| understand how to think critically, and how important it is to
| internalise information in order to do that. I forgot a lot of
| what we studied in her class. I never lost the critical thinking.
| LLMs cannot replace that.
| jama211 wrote:
| Yeah this article misses a big point and you've highlighted it
| well. If you just ask students to regurgitate course material
| generically, it doesn't (and wasn't) leading to good learning
| outcomes whether LLMs existed or not. All the LLM is doing here
| is signalling to the teacher that their assignment design is
| bad, but it seems they're learning the wrong lesson.
|
| There's a lot of "no, it is the children who are wrong" going
| on in academia right now and it's an issue.
| sn9 wrote:
| > I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is
| not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think;
| a language model produces the former, not the latter.
|
| It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent
| professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in
| education and academia.
|
| They see work as the mere production of output, without ever
| thinking about how that work builds knowledge and skills and
| experience.
|
| Students who know least of all and don't understand the purpose
| of writing or problem solving or the limitations of LLMs are
| currently wasting years of their lives letting LLMs pull them
| along as they cheat themselves out of an education, sometimes
| spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to let their brains
| atrophy only to get a piece of paper and face the real world
| where problems get massively more open-ended and LLMs massively
| decline in meeting the required quality of problem solving.
|
| Anyone who actually struggles to solve problems and learn
| themselves is going to have massive advantages in the long term.
| eric_cc wrote:
| Using llm's for papers does not mean your brain is atrophying
| though. There are lots of ways to challenge the mind even if
| you use llm's to write some papers.
| palata wrote:
| > Using llm's for papers does not mean your brain is
| atrophying though.
|
| It means that you are losing your time. If you are a
| university student and use LLMs for your classes while
| "challenging your mind" for stuff outside of class, maybe you
| should just not be studying there in the first place.
| aftbit wrote:
| School isn't a place for smart people, Morty.
| eric_cc wrote:
| Bingo! I agree with where you're going with this line of
| thinking.
| throwing_away wrote:
| If you want the certificate, it must be issued by the
| certificate authority.
|
| If you want to make your own certificates, good luck
| getting them on the trusted list.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The cert authorities are mostly untrustworthy anyhow.
|
| Companies need to bring folks in on a probation period
| and actually test the skills are there.
| strken wrote:
| Yes, I too enjoy that universities never send students to
| pointless filler courses. I really enjoyed writing long
| essays about ethics in software engineering for people
| who'd barely even read them. I especially benefited from
| being told that "tell your boss, tell HR, then make a
| police report and quit if that didn't fix it" is not an
| appropriate response to being asked to break the law at
| work.
|
| While we're talking about things we're grateful for, I am
| so glad that we've structured the education and employment
| systems such that not having a degree puts you at
| significant risk of unemployment, prevents you from ever
| immigrating anywhere for the first decade of your working
| life, and generally marks you as a failure.
| simonask wrote:
| Do you... not understand that the point of giving you a
| class on ethics in software development wasn't so you
| would produce an essay?
| strken wrote:
| Do you...not understand that the class on ethics in
| software development was completely pointless because it
| was neutered by a university administration that was too
| afraid to commit to any real ethical position?
|
| I thought I was pretty clear when I told you I got marked
| down for taking the stance that one should not commit
| crimes when asked to by one's boss.
|
| The problem isn't that I was asked to produce an essay as
| part of the process of teaching me about ethics. The
| problem is that the entire class was pointless busywork
| taught by lecturers who weren't particularly ethical and
| who failed to teach any of us about ethics. ChatGPT could
| have done the entire thing and the class would still have
| failed to leave me with anything other than lingering
| resentment.
| palata wrote:
| > I am so glad that we've structured the education and
| employment systems such that not having a degree puts you
| at significant risk of unemployment
|
| It's not like this in every country, though.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you used a wheelchair every day, your legs would atrophy.
|
| Regardless of the existence of other ways to exercise your
| legs which you also will not do, because you're a person with
| working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.
| eric_cc wrote:
| You're describing an extreme so let me counter with a
| different "what if" extreme: If , every day, you use a
| wheel chair for five minutes and run for several hours
| followed by 200 squats then your legs will not atrophy. My
| point is that writing papers is only one way to work your
| mind and using llm's for this does not indicate how you use
| your mind overall.
| johnea wrote:
| > which you also will not do, because you're a person
| with working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.
| raincole wrote:
| Many people with working legs choose to drive. It doesn't
| mean they don't go to the gym. Actually people even drive
| to the gym! (surprise, I know)
| lmm wrote:
| Many people drive to the gym to play on their phones,
| sure. But the kind of person who drives generally won't
| do much actual working out.
| tehjoker wrote:
| writing is one of the best way to develop your thinking.
| students really are cheating themselves if they use LLMs to
| write their assignments
| AstroBen wrote:
| Even if that's true I imagine there's a huge correlation
| between not trying on other challenging things and using LLMs
| for papers
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Sure. And there are new pedagogies that educators are trying
| out that help people learn even in the presence of these
| tools.
|
| But a huge amount of "ugh I'm too smart for this assignment"
| complaining that students do is just kids being immature
| rather than an honest attempt at learning through other
| means.
| pton_xd wrote:
| > Using llm's for papers does not mean your brain is
| atrophying though. There are lots of ways to challenge the
| mind even if you use llm's to write some papers.
|
| Writing is _hard._ Sometimes it means sitting with yourself,
| for hours, without any progress. Leaning on an LLM to ease
| through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the
| learning process.
|
| To your point, maybe you're learning something else instead,
| like when/how to prompt an LLM or something. But you're
| definitely not learning how to write. Whether that's relevant
| is a separate discussion.
| wjholden wrote:
| Lately I've been saying often the phrase "the process is
| the product." When you outsource the process, then the
| product will be fundamentally different from what you would
| have delivered on your own. In my own case of knowledge
| work, the value of the reports I write is not in the report
| itself (nobody ever reads them...) but rather the
| _thinking_ that went into them and the hard-won wisdom and
| knowledge we created in our heads.
| halfadot wrote:
| > Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is
| 100% short circuiting the learning process.
|
| Sounds like "back in my days" type of complaining. Do you
| have any evidence of this "100% reduction" or is it just
| "AI bad" bandwagoning?
|
| > But you're definitely not learning how to write.
|
| How would you know? You've never tested him. You're making
| a far-reaching assumption about someone's learning based on
| using an aid. It's the equivalent of saying "you're
| definitely not learning how to ride a bicycle if you use
| training wheels".
| anon-3988 wrote:
| If they use LLM for writing papers, they probably use it for
| other things as well. I have seen so many instances of adult
| actually skipping the step of "whys" and "whats" and go
| straight to "ask the LLM and we trim backwards".
|
| Its basically adults producing texts of slop messages to each
| other. It is actually atrophying.
|
| You might be in a circle of people that wants to know "why"
| things work. For example, when there's a bug, we go through
| several processes of:
|
| There's a bug...why does it happen? What were they thinking
| when they wrote this? How to prevent this from happening?
|
| This is true even for simple bugs, but nowadays you just vibe
| code your away into the solution, asking the AI to fix it
| over and over without ever understanding how it works.
|
| Perhaps its just the way things are. I mean who uses their
| head to do calculations nowadays? Who knows how to create a
| blurring effect in physical drawing?
| mistercheph wrote:
| Yeah, like playing subway surfers or watching tiktoks.
| palata wrote:
| > Students who know least of all and don't understand the
| purpose of writing or problem solving or the limitations of
| LLMs are currently wasting years of their lives
|
| Exactly. I tend to think that the role of a teacher is to get
| the students to realise what learning is all about and why it
| matters. The older the students get, the more important it is.
|
| The worst situation is a student finishing university without
| having had that realisation: they got through all of it with
| LLMs, and probably didn't learn how to learn or how to think
| critically. Those who did, on the other hand, didn't need the
| LLMs in the first place.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Someday, LLMs are going to cost actual serious money to use and
| people will have "LLM bills" to pay every month just to have
| some semblance of a brain at work. Maybe a portion of salary
| can just be deducted directly from a paycheck to pay for LLM
| tools.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Companies will have to provide the LLM just like retail
| stores have to provide cash registers for cashiers to use
| lesuorac wrote:
| Eh, I think this is going to be an outdated take.
|
| Employees are increasingly expected to use personal devices
| in work settings.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You are probably in a bubble
|
| The vast majority of companies still issue laptops and
| other hardware
| phamilton wrote:
| I can run the Qwen 3 0.6B model directly on my 3-year-old
| phone, and it can rewrite text and help me clearly explain my
| views. Even with new models possibly being less open and
| subsidized options drying up, we still have useful open
| models available for free on consumer hardware.
|
| Source: I used it to write this post.
| soerxpso wrote:
| > I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is
| not to create an artifact of text but force the student to
| think
|
| I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with
| material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free,
| probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing
| exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which
| I cannot do by actually learning the material (and which, for
| classes I care about, I may have already done without those
| exercises), but can only do by going through the hoops that
| professors set up and paying the massive tuition cost. If there
| were a different system where I could just actually learn
| something (which probably wouldn't be through the inefficient
| and antiquated university system) and then get a valid
| certificate of employability for having actually learned it,
| that would be great. Unfortunately, however, as long as
| university professors are gatekeepers of the coveted
| certificate of employability, they're going to keep dealing
| with this incentive issue.
| jrmg wrote:
| The work this degree will credential you for is so is so
| disconnected from the areas of study in your degree program -
| presumably in the same field as the job - that the majority
| of the things you might learn would not be valuable?
|
| I can't imagine this in my own life. I use concrete things
| and ways of thinking and working I learned in my CS degree
| _all the time_.
| mplanchard wrote:
| Heck my degree was in biochemistry, and now I'm a
| programmer, but I _still_ feel like I am constantly using
| skills I developed in school. The scientific method and
| good test design transcend all sciences.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Same deal, went back for an Anthro degree but jumped back
| into programming when Ted Cruz killed research. I use
| that degree every day of my life.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I honestly don't know anybody who does what they went to
| undergrad for, unless that undergrad was preparation for a
| higher credential (premed/prelaw).
| efavdb wrote:
| If this attitude prevails I would think the value of degrees
| will quickly diminish.
| ebiester wrote:
| This seems to be the general feeling of students right now.
|
| Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle
| class. Why would we be surprised when people with no
| interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the
| process?
| bumby wrote:
| Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information.
| Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I
| expect them to defend it intensely.
|
| We could make it less meaningful if employers weren't so
| keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may
| have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective
| becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an
| increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.
| geysersam wrote:
| In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials?
|
| You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.
| sigmaisaletter wrote:
| I don't know where you live, but in the "developed" parts
| of the world this is illegal. There will either be some
| government agency or some council of credential-giving
| institutions and they will give you a license to issue
| degrees, or most likely they will not give it to you.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| In the US, you can just make up degrees -- but you have
| to be honest that you're unaccredited.
|
| Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government
| approval and without that you cant received financial aid
| (or participate in some programs) -- but you can hand out
| pieces of paper for completing your program.
|
| https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-
| and...
| bumby wrote:
| There are accreditation bodies. So I don't think your
| self-proclaimed engineering degree is going to help you
| get a job or a professional engineering license like one
| from an ABET accredited school.
| ebiester wrote:
| They didn't have a monopoly on information anytime in the
| 20th century. If you wanted to have all the knowledge, it
| could be expensive to acquire a personal library, but
| nothing was stopping you from acquiring the same
| textbooks. Heck, until the information age it was pretty
| easy to forge a credential.
|
| But it wasn't about credentials even. It was about
| inculcating a culture. You knew that someone had the
| knowledge and ability to reach university, and you knew
| that they had a shared common culture with you. Shared
| common culture and norms increases trust. Credentials
| mattered for doctors, but universities, in the end, were
| selling something far more intangible: culture.
| bumby wrote:
| High barriers to entry are a feature of monopolies.
| Saying I could start my own railroad by simply buying up
| billions of dollars of land and investing billions more
| in equipment isn't a compelling argument against the idea
| of a monopoly.
| alpinisme wrote:
| > Academia put itself as a gateway
|
| How did academia do that? It doesn't seem like
| universities would have the power to do that. More
| likely, either employers put academia as a gateway. Or
| even: the culture at large misunderstood what pathways
| existed to middle class life. Or even: pathways to middle
| class life became scarcer and more insecure, and the real
| gatekeepers (hiring managers) had no good ways to select
| which of the many people at the door to let through.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree with you (and upvoted) but consider this: why
| don't fancy schools offer the same credentials for MOOCs
| if the information and assessment is on-par? I believe it
| is because they recognize the value of the credential and
| guard it closely.
| godelski wrote:
| I think you missed the parent's point. Maybe consider
| this:
|
| Why don't employers recognize the credentials of a MOOC
| to the same degree that they would a university degree?
|
| We could similarly ask why employers value the degrees of
| some universities more than others.
|
| I think it's important to realize that ultimately the
| decisions come from the employers, not the universities.
| No one is making the employers do anything. But at least
| the second question might have a clearer partial answer.
| In part, there is a selection of a tribe, an implicit
| "culture fit" that's happening. It isn't uncommon to see
| employer bias towards specific universities. This is
| especially true with prestigious universities.
|
| But it's not the universities that are making anyone do
| anything and that's an important distinction.
| bumby wrote:
| I brought up that I think the root problem is employers
| in a different comment, so I'm not missing that point.[1]
| The distinction is that I don't think it's a dichotomous
| problem. While colleges may not be the root problem, they
| can still be a contributor to the problem. (Besides, if
| an employer is to recognize a MOOC, that course
| completion has to be documented, which means it's just
| another version of credential)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890682
| godelski wrote:
| I was responding to the comment you wrote. But I also
| disagree with the other one.
|
| It is a confounding variable[0]. The problem with trying
| to go after the confounding variable is you 1) don't
| solve the problem after fixing it 2) let's the current
| negative feedback loop continue growing.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
| bumby wrote:
| Nobody ever claimed the best fix is going after the
| proximate cause and not touching the root cause. That's a
| narrative you contrived. I'm in favor of fixing both
| (which is how systemic improvements ought to work).
| godelski wrote:
| Look back at the thread: - ebiester
| claimed academia made itself the gatekeeper of
| credentials - alpinisme suggested that was silly.
| Employers have autonomy - you asked why MOOC
| classes don't get the same credentials - I said you
| missed alpinisme's point. The employer is the one that is
| deciding those credentials are not equal. I also pointed
| out how the same is true about different universities.
| Pointing out that you didn't need to say "MOOC" when
| "Stanford vs University of Wyoming" also leads to the
| same conclusion (which makes it weirder to point to
| academia as a whole instead of the prestigious unis)
| - you act like I was supposed to have read a reply to a
| different person while not addressing my point - I
| double down saying you're barking up the wrong tree. Take
| the finger and point it at employers - you say you
| never claimed employers aren't the problem and I'm
| creating a narrative
|
| Well you're right, you never claimed that. But ebiester
| did and when alpinisme called bullshit you came to
| ebiester's defense. Forgive me if I got confused.
|
| Regardless, it still doesn't change the fact that the
| employers have complete autonomy. They can make whatever
| rules they want. There's no use to pointing at academia
| because ultimately they have no say. Do they want to be
| the credential keepers, yeah! Which also means they'll be
| happy to be the ones being yelled at if the result is
| that employers keep using them as credential makers.
|
| Ultimately academia is about prestige. Ultimately it's
| about far more than "the product" (the credential). But
| who decides what credential is best? The fucking
| employers. No one is holding a gun to their head. There's
| no front door or back door dealings.
|
| You have concluded that since academia benefits from the
| employers selecting them as credential makers that they
| are the problem, or a meaningful part. The issue is, if
| you take away academia, the problem doesn't get resolved.
| Nor does it improve. Arguably, it becomes more noisy
| until employers converge onto some other arbitrary
| credential
| ebiester wrote:
| Academia did it with advertising. And it used some of the
| strategies founded by its marketing, communications, and
| psychology departments.
|
| It also recognized the GI Bill as an opportunity and also
| sent lobbyists for the HEA in 1965.
| palata wrote:
| > I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage
| with material, I could save $60,000
|
| I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education
| system and the recruitment in those companies that require
| this degree are broken. It's not the case in all countries
| though.
|
| Not that it is your fault, just stating the obvious.
| chongli wrote:
| It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of
| applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably
| predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and
| agreeability. University degrees cover all three.
|
| But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the
| room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't
| have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to
| buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want
| to build more housing because that will undermine the
| equity growth of homeowners.
|
| We are a society of ladder-pullers.
| godelski wrote:
| > We are a society of ladder-pullers.
|
| I don't disagree, but often we complain about people
| pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision
| we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior
| if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"
| lmm wrote:
| We can't fix the problem by making better choices as
| individuals, and exhorting people to do so saps energy
| and distracts. The system interprets integrity as damage
| and routes around it.
| godelski wrote:
| > We can't fix the problem by making better choices as
| individuals
|
| That's wildly inaccurate. Your logic necessitates that
| "the system" is not composed of individuals.
|
| The problem itself was created through individual
| actions...
| lmm wrote:
| The problem was created by individuals deliberately
| acting collectively, not simply choosing one way or
| another in their routine individual capacities. The
| solution will require the same.
| joha4270 wrote:
| The problem of individuals making optimal choices on an
| individual scale being sub-optimal on a society scale is
| so widespread we have a specific phrase to describe it:
| Tragedy of the commons
|
| I would love to live in a world where everyone was
| altruistic and made correct choices for the long term
| good of society, but I don't. And there are limits to how
| much I'm willing to act as if I do, when in practice it
| just means I'm giving away resources to people who are
| purely (thinkingly or unthinkingly) selfish.
| godelski wrote:
| > The problem of individuals making optimal choices on an
| individual scale being sub-optimal on a society scale
|
| The problem is people think this is a remotely accurate
| statement. These things only work if you use very low
| order approximations. Like being the only person and time
| not existing. As soon as you build any accuracy your net
| benefit more aligns with society.
|
| The classic example of this is the marshmallow
| experiment. It's myopic. We do it all the time but
| frequency doesn't make an action intelligent
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873275
|
| This isn't a tragedy of the commons issue. There's no
| finite resource we're all trying to draw upon in this
| case. The supply is generated by ourselves and it could
| be infinite if we chose to.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is
| willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"
|
| To me it reads as if you're contradicting yourself. It
| can be plainly seen that almost nobody is willing to
| defect. So change is impossible, you claim. Also change
| is possible, you claim. Which is it? You think people
| will change their choices as a result of you writing this
| comment and "winning" the argument?
|
| I agree that people are responsible for the current
| situation, since their choices brought it about. That
| does not constitute a solution, though.
|
| One or a thousand individuals changing their choice by
| themselves will do nothing. For tens of millions to
| change some external factor is required. If it was not,
| then it would have already happened. You say no external
| factor is required, so why do you think it didn't happen
| already, and why would it happen in the future?
| godelski wrote:
| There's no contradiction. > So change is
| impossible, you claim
|
| I claim the opposite. Just because few people defect
| doesn't mean that rate is fixed and immutable. That is
| where you misunderstand. Really, my comment is a "call to
| arms". It is a literally a plea to ask people of HN,
| including you, to become the change we all want to see.
| Follow your own logic. You have given up and are trying
| to justify it.
|
| You are not mindless automata.
|
| You have a choice.
|
| Your actions matter.
|
| Things have changed before, they can change again.
|
| Every big problem is composed of many small problems.
|
| We programmers are experts in breaking complex things
| down. Sure, fixing one small problem doesn't solve the
| big problem, but they do add up. That's all I'm arguing.
| I'm asking that others stop being apathetic and
| defeatist, to get up, and continue. I'm extending my
| hand, will you take it? There's more of us making effort,
| will you help?
| achierius wrote:
| > You have given up and are trying to justify it
|
| While I get where you're coming from -- I think the
| correct thing to do is to both move for systemic change
| _and_ attempt to live the life you advocate for -- I
| think the position of "I'm moral, why do other people
| need the system change in order to be 'moral' as well?"
| more totally abandons the actual goal (fixing things)
| than the other way around. Fundamentally, things tend to
| change for material, systemic reasons, and so most often
| the best way to get at issues is not to go after
| individuals (whose behavior is more a symptom than the
| disease) but the root cause, the systemic influences that
| cause them to act that way.
| godelski wrote:
| > I think the correct thing to do is to both move for
| systemic change and attempt to live the life you advocate
| for
|
| You'll get no disagreement from me[0,1,2].
| > Fundamentally, things tend to change for material,
| systemic reasons, and so most often the best way to get
| at issues is not to go after individuals (whose behavior
| is more a symptom than the disease) but the root cause,
| the systemic influences that cause them to act that way.
|
| This is the part I disagree with (as seen in my linked
| comments). This is a defeatist attitude that acts as if
| people are mindless automata. We forge our own reality.
| No, we don't have complete control, but we have some
| control. We cannot directly control the large system, but
| we can control ourselves and we can strongly influence
| those around us.
|
| Ultimately this is the root. There's no magic wizard in
| the sky making people do things, there is only us. Those
| "systematic reasons" are a bullshit excuse to pass
| blame[3]. All those things are created by us. The only
| reason we pretend it isn't is because the results of our
| actions are only observed after long periods of time.
| It's those small decisions that add up over time. With
| each action we choose a better future, a worse, or a
| neutral. No one can predict the future, but we have a lot
| of evidence that short term thinking leads to worse
| results. I'm not asking anyone analyze every move and
| overload themselves with the infinite chaos. But I am
| saying we all need to think a few steps ahead and
| consider unintended consequences. To not be so rash. If
| things were easy, they would have already been resolved,
| so we so really take a moment to consider more than our
| gut reaction.
|
| But ultimately, only you can control you. I hope you
| advocate for others around you to make good and
| thoughtful decisions, but there's no dragon in a cave
| where we can get everyone together and defeat. The dragon
| only is at thing of our collective consciousness. Each
| person that decides to defect makes the dragon a little
| weaker, and each person that decides to believe in the
| dragons power makes it a little stronger. That's the
| choice.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809695
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852024
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787383
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824534
| walleeee wrote:
| This attitude willingly donates what agency you have to
| the people and things trying to take it from you.
|
| Lead by example. Mimicry is real, we all do it whether or
| not we are aware. Every node in the graph influences
| others. If you must exhort, it works better if you follow
| your own advice.
|
| Of course, be discerning as you do this, and don't expend
| your energy or goodwill where it will be wasted. Be like
| Gandalf.
|
| Any dogmatic system is fault-tolerant, in that it will
| "route around" some amount of internal dissent, but this
| does not make it impregnable.
|
| The ruts in our minds steer us just as much as those in
| the ground. But earth turns and so can we.
| godelski wrote:
| It's disheartening how many people do not want to hear
| this. But it's the only way we can get things done. It's
| the same thing that led to this system we all hate, a
| race to the bottom. I posted this a week back. I think
| you'll enjoy the article if you haven't read it yet.
| Don't give up, you're not alone and I think we're gaining
| momentum. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824534
| walleeee wrote:
| Cheers. I saw that one and liked it. I do wish the title
| was "It's not _just_ the incentives ". Incentives are
| people and artifices. The latter deceptive or not. But
| the point being in feedback.
| mark336 wrote:
| This is a problem with liberal thinking. Its brains over
| do the right thing.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >The other elephants in the room are inflation and the
| housing market.
|
| I'm not even sure if people are aware of
| inflation/housing as a completely solvable issue by the
| govt. I guess it's because people most people are
| clueless on how it is to be solved.
|
| >We are a society of ladder-pullers.
|
| It's by design, to serve the rulers. It's an assembly
| line of slaves who are given some freedoms and are put
| through various stages of school, university, work and
| retirement. When most people retire they are left with
| little to nothing.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your
| education system and the recruitment in those companies
| that require this degree are broken.
|
| Meh, academic degrees don't come for free, someone has to
| pay for universities, staff and other expenses. In the US
| it's everyone for themselves by student loans that can't be
| discharged in bankruptcies, in Europe it's the tax payers.
|
| The problem is, the ones _profiting_ from the gatekeeping
| (aka employers) aren 't the ones paying for it in either
| system. If employers had to pay, say, 10.000$ for each job
| listing that requires an academic degree without an actual
| valid reason, guess how fast that incentive would lead to
| employers _not_ requiring academic degrees for paper-pusher
| bullshit jobs.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is also nobody cares about low prices but you can
| brag about how exclusive you are with high prices. One
| univertity near me automatically gives everyone a 40%
| scholarship - which is to say they have inflated their
| sticker price.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| So like a payroll tax specific to jobs that require
| higher education?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| No, only for jobs that claim to require higher education
| but do not. Basically, an "abuse tax" to reimburse the
| government (or the students) for having to spend money on
| something clearly not needed.
| necovek wrote:
| In a sense, it still comes down to supply and demand --
| if applicants, upon graduating, all requested to be
| reimbursed for, say, 25% of their tuition up front and to
| the university they graduated from, we'd end up with
| reduced salaries compared to just distributing those 25%
| to the new employee over a number a years.
|
| But how do you get all students to agree with this in
| principle when someone is in more rush to start earning
| an income than others?
|
| However, employers would then look to only hire from
| universities that do good teaching, so maybe it's a win-
| win?
| nradov wrote:
| Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative?
| Employers have a surplus of applicants for entry-level
| technical positions. They need to filter the applicant pool
| down to those with some level of competence and discipline.
| Possession of a college degree is a reasonably accurate
| proxy for those attributes: lots of false negatives but
| good enough from the employer's perspective.
|
| Ideally maybe employers ought to rely on more targeted
| selection mechanisms. But this would be extremely expensive
| (and potentially legally risky due to equal opportunity
| laws) so most don't bother.
| palata wrote:
| > Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative?
|
| As I said, the only country I know where it is like that
| is the US.
| shanusmagnus wrote:
| Are you saying the US is the only country that has an
| excess of applicants for entry-level positions? Or the
| only one for which credentialism is the solution to this
| problem? If the second, how does the place you're from
| solve it?
| palata wrote:
| No, I am saying that the US is the only country _I know_
| where students pay 60k per year.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative?
|
| For a true solution, the entire taxation and monetary
| system will have to overhauled. It's of course not going
| to happen.
|
| Transactions outside of the govt monetary system is
| effectively illegal or taxed so people are forced to
| participate by applying for jobs for their livelihood.
| sethammons wrote:
| My tuition was $35k a year 25 years ago. Just checked, and
| now it is $60k a year. Before room and board.
|
| Broken? Saddling individuals with a quarter million in debt
| when they are just starting life is absolutely broken. That
| they must indenture to be a modern professional (and buy
| hope for at least a middle class landing) is broken.
|
| The notion that everything must return a (generally, near-
| term) accounting profit is on its face stupid.
| svachalek wrote:
| $35k in 2000 is $65k now so that's actually decreased in
| real terms.
| vel0city wrote:
| $35k/yr for tuition in 2000 was still an _extremely_
| expensive college. The school I went to in that decade
| was ~$10k /yr in tuition+fees and was the most expensive
| state school in my state at the time.
|
| Even today, that university is considered expensive for
| the state at ~$8,200/semester.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| That's a disingenuous argument. You don't know what you don't
| know. Literally. A completely self guided high school
| graduate following random online materials will not learn
| nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit
| holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert
| unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a
| lot of time.
|
| Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the time)
| literally don't know HOW to learn on their own. I thought I
| did but college humbled me, made me realize that suddenly i'm
| in the drivers seat and my teachers won't be spoon feeding me
| knowledge step by step. it's a really big shift.
|
| If you were the perfect high school graduate, then congrats,
| you're like the 0.01%! And you should be proud (no sarcasm).
| This doesn't describe society at large though.
|
| For the very few that are extremely motivated and know
| exactly what job they want, i do think we need something in
| between self guided and college? No BS - strictly focusing on
| job training. Like a boot camp, but one that's not a scam
| haha.
|
| The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to
| build a network prior to entering the workforce. It's also
| one of the best times to date, but that's another story.
|
| Completely agree that the cost of college in the US is
| ridiculous though.
| bumby wrote:
| > _The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way
| to build a network prior to entering the workforce._
|
| I don't know how generalizable this is. I remember reading
| a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was
| really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC)
| was that it only matters for students who came from the
| lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to
| the network effect. But that also means the network effect
| was negligible for the majority of students.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I used to work for a guy who had his engineering degree
| from Harvard. I was out of the Navy, got a job but also
| had a GI bill and was looking to go to school for
| engineering while working full time. I asked him his
| advise. Pretty much he said is to go to a state school.
| The only real benefit, at least for engineering from Ivy
| League, is the network, which can make getting the first
| job easier. Otherwise the course work is the pretty much
| the same.
| sigmaisaletter wrote:
| "A completely self guided high school graduate following
| random online materials will not learn nearly as much on
| their own."
|
| I think you underestimate how bad some high schools really
| are.
| spiderxxxx wrote:
| >That's a disingenuous argument. You don't know what you
| don't know. Literally. A completely self guided high school
| graduate following random online materials will not learn
| nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit
| holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert
| unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a
| lot of time.
|
| Citation needed. There's great books out there that provide
| a lot of guidance down a particular path. I'd say a lot of
| them do, and I can't imagine online learning sources would
| be worse. There's online communities for learners for
| specific subjects that are full of people offering good
| advice.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| I don't have the time to provide a citation, my
| apologies.
|
| I'll leave you with this thought though. Of all the
| professions, tech is probably the one where this is the
| easiest to do. There are many companies that don't
| require a bachelors. For most of the last 15-20 years
| tech was in a "boom" cycle, and yet the vast majority of
| software engineers I met DID have a bachelors degree.
|
| Why? If it's as easy as "pick up a book", then why didn't
| more people take that path? I think very few people have
| the drive and discipline to accomplish a full career prep
| on their own.
|
| If your hypothesis was true, wouldn't tech be mostly
| filled with self-taught engineers?
| tpmoney wrote:
| I would argue that while tech is the easiest to get into
| without a degree:
|
| 1) The cultural zeitgeist around higher education (at
| least in the US) is and has been "you must go to college
| and get a degree". It's been over 20 years since I
| dropped out of my first university. I'm doing just fine,
| and yet to this day, I will be asked by older members of
| my extended family if or when I'm going back to "finish"
| my degree, or whether my company will offer tuition
| assistance to help me go back. If you graduate high
| school these days (and for at least the past few
| decades), the expectation is that you go to college and
| get a degree. And if you're going to have to do that
| anyway, you might as well get the degree in the field you
| want to go into.
|
| 2) As a corollary to that, while new / younger companies
| might have set aside the degree requirements, the big
| tech houses definitely still preferred them and having
| the paper was still a leg up in the hiring and
| recruitment process. And even in companies without an
| explicit preference for a degree, it's often listed as a
| requirement on the job posting. "BS or Equivalent
| Experience" is easier to match both as a candidate and as
| an employer if the candidate has the BS as that is an
| objectively verifiable fact.
| godelski wrote:
| > I'm there for the degree
|
| Would you hire someone without a degree?
|
| When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will
| you consider those without degrees?
|
| I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a
| system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may
| be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones
| gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were
| not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because
| many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where
| they have significant influence over hiring. So when that
| time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or
| push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done
| with little to no risk to your own employment.
| hnfong wrote:
| Speaking personally, yes, very much so.
|
| I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile
| to shame students for playing the game that people in the
| industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past,
| college degrees _were_ in fact more relevant than today,
| especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so
| if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren
| 't aware of these changes, they might just apply their
| outdated personal experience and just assume college
| degrees hold the same weight as they did in the past.
|
| I'm pretty certain when kids these days eventually become
| responsible for hiring decisions, they probably will handle
| things differently since their experiences are different.
| godelski wrote:
| I do appreciate that you do that! People making change is
| the only way change can happen.
|
| But I think the second part is amiss. I do agree that
| educators (being one) need to recognize the reality of
| the environment. But I think you also can't ignore that
| the reason the degrees are used to signal qualification
| is because the degree is intended to signal that some
| knowledge is held by a specific person. Yes, things have
| changed. It did used to be that interviews were much
| shorter, with a degree being a strong signal (at minimum,
| it is a signal that someone can sufficiently follow
| directions and manage their time). Should that mean those
| tasked with ensuring a student gets their education does
| not get their education? I get your point, but I think it
| is barking up the wrong tree. Asking academia to change
| only furthers the problem as it lets employers shift
| blame. It is like getting upset at a minimum wage worker
| for increased prices due to tariffs.
|
| The really weird thing is we're now in this bizarroland
| setting where employers will filter for degree and then
| spend months and a lot of time and money putting
| candidates through testing rounds. Making them do tons of
| leetcode and other things to evaluate their performance.
| Where the candidates spend months studying to pass the
| interviews. And the complaints here are probably more
| apt, about how the material they need to study is not
| significantly relevant to the skills needed for a job[0].
| Worse, it doesn't seem to be achieving the results it is
| setting out to seek.
|
| As they say about the stock market "the market can stay
| irrational longer than you can stay solvent". My point is
| that some academics are making classes easier. Grade
| inflation is a measurable phenomena and it sure got worse
| with Covid. My point is that employers are acting
| irrationally.
|
| [0] I'll give an example. I had an interview a few weeks
| ago and we had run a bit longer than expected prior to
| getting to the coding portion of the interview and where
| their coding software crashed a few times, giving us 10
| minutes to do what was expected to be 30. Finally coding,
| the program crashed and I said "I don't use a lot of
| Juypter Notebooks, does the kernel crash when OOM?" I'm
| explaining my thought process aloud and frankly, I'd
| never hit this on the job. No answer. I quickly scroll
| through logs, say "I'm going to guess that's the issue,
| I'd normally guess and if wrong google it". Yes, it was
| the right answer. But there was no reason to do this,
| especially with me guessing right. This wasn't some dinky
| startup, it was a multi-trillion dollar company...
| icelancer wrote:
| I am generally education blind. Mostly I would say graduate
| school experience has been a net negative on my teams
| overall, if anything.
| godelski wrote:
| The second half seems to contradict the first. But I do
| condone the actions, as that's the only way things can
| change.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Would you hire someone without a degree?
|
| Yes.
|
| A person is a idiot if he/she takes someone's competence at
| face value because of a degree. ( jobs aside - don't assume
| your doctor is competent because he has MD, it will cost
| you your life)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The purpose of the writing exercise is to produce a positive
| correlation between the possession of a degree and the skills
| that high-paying white collar jobs value. I don't blame
| students for not knowing that, or for not having the outside
| perspective to care. But positive signals of job competence
| are hard to come by, employers don't just blindly accept them
| despite what people like to say, and it's going to suck for
| new graduates if this one is eliminated.
| const_cast wrote:
| > I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably
| more efficiently.
|
| Not to burst yours or anyone else's bubble, but no, probably
| not.
|
| The hard part of learning isn't access to content, it's
| discipline and dedication. School provides structure, goals,
| timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be
| understated.
|
| I've heard from many people how they're going to learn
| programming online and then get a job as a developer. Almost
| all of them fail.
| jampekka wrote:
| I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it
| comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There
| are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine,
| if not even better, without the external discipline and
| structure. And even more those who could do it with
| something like a MOOC or just a posted curriculum. And to
| be able to work without an external discipline is IMHO one
| of the main learning goals of university, and a decent
| rationale for why a university degree is taken as a signal
| for recruitment.
|
| I learned programming online and got jobs as a developer (I
| did later study CS at a university though). In my
| experience the best developers are those who taught
| themselves. Admittedly this may have been more the case for
| my older generation where formal education for programming
| wasn't that great nor widely available.
| const_cast wrote:
| Those students do exist, but there are an exceedingly
| small minority. Of course, they won't tell you this,
| because everyone likes to believe they're self-motivated.
| Most people just aren't.
|
| The simple question to ask is, when you go home, what do
| you do? If the answer is learn how to sew or work on your
| project car you've had for 10 months, you can probably
| learn on your own. If your answer is watch TV, play video
| games, go on a walk - then you can't, and you should go
| to university. Some people have told me this question is
| unfair. I mean, they're so tired from work, of course
| they want to relax. Well, guess what - your life doesn't
| stop if you're learning how to code on your own or
| whatever. If that's all it takes for you to not do it,
| then you don't have what it takes.
|
| How often are people picking up new and complex skills
| that takes years to get the hang of? _Almost never_. So
| there you go, most people require a formal, structured
| education to pull that off.
| jampekka wrote:
| There are plenty of students studying out of interest.
| It's very common to e.g. study excess courses. Many doing
| their theses can work very independently and go way
| beyond what's required.
|
| Highly self-driven students are a minority, but not a
| rarity. People do things out of being interested and
| enjoying learning. It shouldn't be a surprise in a
| website called hacker news.
| achierius wrote:
| Speaking as someone who studied excess courses back in
| the day, I still agree with the GP. There's a big
| difference between being able to pursue random sparks of
| interest (as might someone picking up a course they find
| interesting) and consistently studying even when you
| aren't necessarily inspired by the material, or when the
| material is so hard it stops being fun. I spend a lot of
| time working on projects in my spare time even today, but
| I can think of only one case where I worked anywhere near
| as hard on one of those as I did on the projects for my
| university's OS course, or compilers course, or etc. Even
| students who do regularly go above and beyond would
| likely struggle without the structure to A) tell them
| what to learn, B) give them motivation -- because of
| course many students who do go the extra mile are still
| motivated by grades, prestige, research opportunities,
| etc.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > There are definitely plenty of students who would do
| just fine, if not even better, without the external
| discipline and structure.
|
| How do you know? It's easy enough to assert, but what
| kind of proof can there be for this assertion? Obviously
| the students are enrolled in university, and their
| accomplishments without it are only hypothetical.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least
| where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a
| bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would
| do just fine, if not even better, without the external
| discipline and structure.
|
| I don't understand how you can make this claim based on
| observing students who are in an environment with
| discipline and structure.
|
| I thoroughly believed this to be true when I was younger.
| I thought the explosion of the internet and availability
| of free course materials, videos, MOOCs, and any
| information you want was going to change the education
| game forever.
|
| What finally changed my mind was when I became a hiring
| manager. I decided I'd give an interview to almost every
| self-taught developer who applied. If someone didn't have
| a college degree listed on their resume, I'd schedule a
| call to hear their story. I thought I was going to be
| uncovering diamonds in the rough that other companies
| overlooked.
|
| With a few notable exceptions, it did not work out that
| way. Don't get me wrong: A couple of the self-taught
| developers were absolutely brilliant. However, I found
| that most were, to be blunt, not even progressing their
| intra-career knowledge as fast as peers with traditional
| backgrounds. We hired a few, but a common theme was that
| they needed more guidance for dealing with the structure
| and expectations of an office job.
|
| I also had a few very above-average friends in high
| school who went the self-education route. "College is a
| waste of money" mindset. Voracious readers in their
| youth. Last I checked, both of them were bouncing from
| entry-level job to job.
|
| Of course, there are students who go to paper-mill
| colleges who also learn very little.
|
| I think the value of a demanding, structured college
| education is partially the education, but largely about
| learning how to learn. Learning how to deliver, learning
| how to operate on a schedule, and having some structure
| to check your understanding relative to peers. Almost
| everyone I know (including me!) who does self-studying
| reading thinks their understanding is better than it is
| right up until they have to apply it, at which point they
| realize they didn't understand it as deeply as they
| thought. It's easy to read course materials and think
| "That makes sense" because it's logically consistent, but
| integrating the knowledge in a way that you can apply it
| and reason about it is harder. Structured learning forces
| people to do the latter, whereas self-guided learning
| leaves it as an exercise for the reader. An exercise that
| many don't follow up on.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >School provides structure, goals, timelines, and
| deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated.
|
| That _may_ be true for the vast majority, but it's criminal
| to waste the time of bright young people by putting them
| though hoops. I would even speculate that that they phoney
| goals, timelines, and deliverables in school actually
| damage kids.
| zeroq wrote:
| You're missing trees for forest.
|
| When I was a kid and got an assignement for writing an essey
| about "why good forces prevailed in Lords of the Rings" as a
| gate check to see if I actually read the novel I had three
| choices: (a) read the novel and write the essey myself (b) find
| an already written essey - not an easy task in pre-internet era
| but we had books with esseys on most common topics you could
| "copy-paste" - and risk that the professor is familiar with the
| source or someone else used the same source (c) ask class mate
| to give me their essey as a template and rephrase it as my own
|
| A and C would let me learn about the novel and let me polish my
| writing skills.
|
| Today I can ask ChatGPT to write me a 4 pages essay about a
| novel I've never heard of and call it a day. There's no value
| gained in the process.
|
| That's a simple example. The problem is that the same applies
| to programming. Novice programmer will claim that LLM give them
| power to take on hard tasks and programm in languages they were
| not familiar before. But they are not gaining any skill nor
| knowledege from that experience.
|
| If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to
| Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to my
| destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned
| topography of Germany in the process.
| palata wrote:
| essay*
|
| (I don't usually do that, but it appears so many times in the
| first few sentences that I had to do it here)
|
| I agree with your points, though, but I think that they are
| in agreement with the comment you are answering to...
| zeroq wrote:
| Hehe, it's fine, at least it proves that the post was
| written by human. ;)
|
| And yeah, and revisiting the OP we're on the same track.
| leereeves wrote:
| > But they are not gaining any skill nor knowledege from that
| experience.
|
| It sounds like you agree with GP.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| In the pre-Internet era there were Cliff Notes.
| xeyownt wrote:
| > Novice programmer will claim that LLM give them power to
| take on hard tasks and programm in languages they were not
| familiar before. But they are not gaining any skill nor
| knowledege from that experience.
|
| Not true.
|
| Using LLM to learn quickly a new programming language + being
| productive is best method ever. If you pay attention, you
| acquire rapidly new skill and knowledge, and those that are
| relevant to your job.
|
| Using LLM is MUCH more efficient than reading a book going
| through all the minute details of the language prior telling
| how to use it. It's the same as learning a language from your
| parents compared to learning a language from a class. You
| might not know all the grammar rules, but you'll be way more
| proficient. And nothing prevents you from learning the
| grammar later on.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > Using LLM to learn quickly a new programming language +
| being productive is best method ever. If you pay attention,
| you acquire rapidly new skill and knowledge, and those that
| are relevant to your job.
|
| I tend to disgree. maybe for you, but my mind does not work
| that way.
|
| As a teacher at a university I come to see that students
| "learn" by asking an LLM, but they forget to understand the
| content the LLM produces because the LLM actually solves
| the assignment (mostly) for them. One may say that's the
| teachers task to produce better questions, but the thing I
| most "struggle" with that getting educated as a student
| seems to just be a play of "gaming the system". Yes, it was
| similar during my time (learning how to reach your goal
| with as less effort as possible is a good part of the
| "education" at a university IMHO), but we actually had to
| think and understand while today just seems like prompt-
| and-copy.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague
| to Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me
| to my destinations, but by any means I can 't claim I've
| learned topography of Germany in the process._
|
| There are multiple ways you can use such technology, too. If
| you use Google Maps with its out-of-the-box configuration for
| turn-by-turn directions, with it oriented in the direction of
| travel, you won't learn so much; but if you change it to
| always display the map north-up, and _look_ at the map it
| shows you--inferior though it be to good paper maps, in most
| cases--it's easier to develop a feel for layouts and
| geography.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > Today I can ask ChatGPT to write me a 4 pages essay about a
| novel I've never heard of and call it a day. There's no value
| gained in the process.
|
| If we take the original article at face value, no you can't
| do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something that is
| obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even the most
| absent minded of instructors that you have read the material.
| So even with a ChatGPT LLM to help you out, you're largely
| going to have to do a modified version of C, replacing your
| class mate with the LLM and adding in the need to do your own
| reading and validation to ensure that the text matches the
| actual book contents.
|
| > If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to
| Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to
| my destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned
| topography of Germany in the process.
|
| I would argue that even if you plotted a route by hand
| reading maps, you can't claim to have learned the topography
| of Germany either. "The map isn't the territory" after all.
| thugthrasher wrote:
| ChatGPT and the like are in a weird position at the moment.
| It's usually pretty clear that you have written it using an
| LLM, but it's hard to PROVE. And you need to be able to
| prove it (to some degree, which varies depending on the
| institution) to reliably count off for it, otherwise the
| student will challenge your finding that they cheated and
| the Honor Court (or administrator, or other equivalent)
| will tell you that you can't do that.
|
| So, you can usually get away with it if there is not some
| way the professor/TA can prove it.
|
| As things change, this will change, but that's the
| situation the author of the original article finds themself
| in, because it's the current situation.
| golergka wrote:
| > If we take the original article at face value, no you
| can't do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something
| that is obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even
| the most absent minded of instructors that you have read
| the material.
|
| Only if you don't have any custom instructions about style
| and don't proofread it afterwards. All the usual "tells" of
| ChatGPT are very obvious to scrub out, and you don't have
| to use OpenAI's chat wrapper to begin with.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent
| professionals and academics don't understand this
|
| I figured this out in high school. It can't be all that
| uncommon of a thought that if you are already in school and
| paying and given time to learn, you might as well do so?
| palata wrote:
| I think that figuring this out is a great achievement.
| Probably one of the goals of school. It depends on many
| factors and the sooner, the better.
|
| Young kids don't get it, they just do what they're asked.
| That's okay. University students graduating without having
| figured it out is a problem. And somewhere in the middle is
| when the average student gets there, hopefully?
| liveoneggs wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGfiSM4H-7w
| drewcoo wrote:
| >> the purpose of a class writing exercise
|
| > how many intelligent professionals and academics don't
| understand this
|
| Mastery of a discipline does not imply any pedagogical
| knowledge, despite anything one of my childhood heroes, Richard
| Feynman, might have claimed.
|
| Despite frequent claims otherwise, in my experience and
| sampling of PhDs and Masters of different sorts and grad
| students working toward those degrees, an advanced degree does
| not teach anyone how to lead or teach. This is true of even
| some of the folks I knew studying Education itself who were a
| little too focused on their own research to understand anything
| "so simple."
|
| > cheat themselves out of an education
|
| What's "an education," though? For some people, education is
| focused on how to learn. For others, it's focused on some kind
| of certification to get a job. Some of us see value in both.
| And I'm sure there are other minority opinions as well. We, as
| a society, can't agree. The only thing we can seem to agree on
| in the US is that college should be expensive and saddle
| students with ridiculous debt.
| azernik wrote:
| An analogy I've heard is that it's like using a forklift at the
| gym. The point is not to get an object from point A to point B,
| it's to develop skills.
| fallinditch wrote:
| It's been obvious since ChatGPT blew up in early 2023 that
| educators had to rethink how they educate.
|
| I agree that this situation that the author outlines is
| unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education
| system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing
| exercise like the author describes, of course the students are
| going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their
| classmates are using it.
|
| The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they teach
| and how they test. It's strange how the author can't see this.
|
| Universities and schools _must_ change how they do things with
| respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students. I am
| aware that AI has many potential and actual problems for
| society but AI, if embraced correctly, also has the potential
| to transform the educational experience in positive ways.
| easygenes wrote:
| Amusingly, when I asked o3 to propose changes to the
| education system which address the author's complaints wrt
| writing assignments, one of the first things it suggested was
| transparent prompt logging (basically what the author
| proposes).
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817fe76-973c-8011-acf3-ef3138c144.
| ..
| fallinditch wrote:
| O3 actually came up with a good blueprint for an 'AI-
| centric teaching guide'. Impressive.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they
| teach and how they test. It's strange how the author can't
| see this.
|
| > Universities and schools must change how they do things
| with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students.
|
| Hard disagree.
|
| Students need to answer a fundamental question of themselves;
| Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade?
|
| If it is the former, the latter doesn't really matter.
|
| If it is the latter, the former was not the point to begin
| with.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Why isn't both a valid option, can't one be at a university
| to both learn and get a degree+GPA showing they did well at
| doing so? In any case, why does a student selecting that
| they are there to learn negate the responsibility of the
| university to provide the best curricula for students to do
| so with?
| alpinisme wrote:
| The assumption you are making is that students
| consistently using llms is required by the best
| curriculum. That's a big assumption. There may be value
| educationally in forcing students to learn how to do
| things on their own that an llm could do for them. And in
| that case, it's the student failing their education if
| they circumvent it with an llm, not the institution's.
| zamadatix wrote:
| At times there is value in that kind of approach,
| especially when the learning is specifically about those
| kinds of lower layers instead of higher concepts. As
| such, it's not that certain tools should be used in every
| assignment or never ever used, just whether they should
| be used commonly.
|
| For most continued learning it's better if the university
| uses calculators, compilers, prepared learning materials,
| and other things that do stuff on behalf of the students
| instead of setting the bar permanently to "the student
| should want to engage everything at a base level or they
| must not be here to learn". It allows much more advanced
| learning to be done in the long run.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| Universities do not provide knowledge, this is a
| romanticization of an ideal. They are about getting a
| passing grade and a certificate so that you can enter the
| workforce. The idea that you go to college to get an
| education is just a polite fiction to appease students and
| their parents
| halfadot wrote:
| For almost everyone in the world, the answer is the latter.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| > they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using
| it.
|
| Why would they be stupid? Were people before LLMs stupid for
| not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve
| the homework for them?
|
| Large part of education is learning about things that can be
| easily automated, because you can't learn hard things without
| learning easy things. Nothing conceptually changed in this
| regard, like Wolfram Alpha didn't change the way
| differentiation is taught.
| fallinditch wrote:
| Agreed, my bad choice of words. I really meant 'stupid'
| from a slightly ironic, competitive point of view. It's
| like the pressure to cheat in professional sport is
| obviously so intense, I'm sure a lot of a cheat's
| motivation is to remain competitive because their
| colleagues are cheating so they feel they have to as well,
| otherwise they lose.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| YMMV, in my uni there is more or less zero impact of
| cheating in your homeworks in most classes: the homework
| has low weight in final grade and are graded very
| generously.
|
| I agree that making assignments not designed with
| external sources in mind significantly impact the final
| grade is not ideal. I think this is minor and easily
| fixable point rather than some failure of the whole
| education system.
| roland35 wrote:
| What's funny about this is if you are an athlete who
| cheats constantly while growing up - you'll never develop
| the skills to be able to make it as a pro. Interesting
| how students don't see this same situation with their
| homework
| lmm wrote:
| > Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter
| classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for
| them?
|
| In American universities where your GPA from your in-class
| assessments forms part of your final grade? Yes,
| absolutely.
|
| Where I came from you do your learning in class and your
| assessment in a small, short set of exams (and perhaps one
| graded essay) at the end of each year. That seems far more
| conducive to learning things without having to juggle two
| competing objectives the whole time.
| hellisothers wrote:
| Seems like you missed the point of the article. The author is
| saying that if you treat the class/lesson as a means to an
| end only where the goal is to get a diploma then you're not
| actually getting an education. If you're using an LLM to do
| the work for you even if the other students are too then
| you're just following all the other lemmings off the ledge.
| signa11 wrote:
| do you think that the purpose of college/school/... is to
| give you a degree because you paid them money ?
| qingcharles wrote:
| I'll leave this link here in case you feel like being
| depressed today:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_.
| ..
| fallinditch wrote:
| It seems to me that the little sister is acting rationally.
| Yes it's a bit lazy but then: when was the last time you
| used a calculator for a calculation that you could have
| done in your head? Do you actually _need_ to be able to do
| mental arithmetic, do you actually really need to be able
| to work out what 24 + 7 is in your head?
|
| I don't know what the answer is. I'm old school, if it was
| up to me I'd bring back slide rules and log tables, because
| that's such a visual and tactile way of getting to know
| mathematics and numbers.
|
| It's interesting to consider how AI is affecting humans'
| cognition skills. Is it going to make us stupid or free us
| up to use our mental capacities for higher level
| activities? Or both?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Even with a calculator and more so with ChatGPT, you
| still need to know whether an answer passes the sniff
| test.
| lmm wrote:
| Only in a few fields. You can have a successful career
| publishing papers in the social sciences, or justifying
| decisions in middle-management, without being able to
| know whether an effect size passes the sniff test -
| actually not knowing will probably help you make
| convenient mistakes.
| sethammons wrote:
| 24 plus 7 is 41 or 94 or 3 and 4/7 are all obviously
| wrong, but only if you have developed number sense. I've
| had students who wouldn't bat an eye at any of those
| solutions.
| tpmoney wrote:
| One thing missing from the reddit story is how the author
| knows their sister is using ChatGPT to obtain the answer
| as opposed to validating work. I'll often punch a
| calculation I've already done in my head into a
| calculator to confirm for myself I landed on the right
| answer. Or come up with a solution to a problem, find
| myself wondering if there's a better solution or just
| feel like it doesn't quite look right and search for
| solutions online to compare and contrast. I'm not using
| the calculator or search to replace my work, I'm using it
| as the sniff test. But you couldn't determine that just
| by knowing my inputs to the calculator and google. You'd
| have to see the entire process.
| lawn wrote:
| > With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of
| course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be
| stupid not to if their classmates are using it.
|
| Its only stupid if you try to optimize for the wrong things
| (finishing quickly, just getting a pass).
|
| I'd say it's very smart if you don't rely on LLMs, copy the
| homework from someone else, or similar; because you're
| optimizing for learning, which will help you more than the
| various shortcuts.
| ozim wrote:
| I always get triggered when people argue against ,,rote
| memorization" - but it also is technique that builds up
| knowledge, skills and experience.
|
| Even if one won't need that specific know how after exams -
| just realization how much one can memorize and trying out some
| approaches to optimize it is where people grow/learn.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Memorizing things is somewhat helpful but being able to
| parrot back answers to questions is not at all the same thing
| as knowledge, skills, or experience. Memorizing a bunch of
| facts is an adequate way to fool someone into thinking you
| have those things. Testing for memorized facts is a good way
| to misidentify useful skills.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| And yet there _is_ still value in facts. For example,
| learning the ideal gas law in high school has enabled me to
| understand in my adult life how gases will react when
| compressed or when released. Yet the ideal gas law is a
| simple fact that you can memorize in minutes. In this case,
| memorizing that small fact about physics enabled me to
| apply it to gain understanding of other situations.
|
| I believe that the same holds true for other facts one
| might memorize. Yes, the fact may seem like meaningless
| trivia (and might even be so at times), but in the right
| situation knowing that fact can help with understanding.
| You can certainly spend too much time on memorization of
| facts, but that doesn't mean it has no place either.
| lmm wrote:
| A law is an infinite family of facts, it's already
| several steps up from memorising a concrete fact like the
| density of oxygen at room temperature and pressure.
| lawn wrote:
| I think memorization is very important for one big reason:
|
| Facts and knowledge acts as a scaffolding, making it easier
| to absorb more information and knowledge the more you have.
| kharak wrote:
| Coming from the other side of this argument: In my degree,
| rote memorization was required for a surprising amount of
| courses. It required students, me included, to memorize huge
| quantities of things we knew were utterly irrelevant to
| anything but being graded. (This prediction remained true).
| Committing irrelevant course work into memory over and over
| again almost burned me out, certainly made me lose all
| interest and fun in learning for over a decade afterwards. To
| be honest, I still feel slightly burned and that might never
| go away.
|
| You might have attended a good degree, where the learned
| information was actually beneficial. But I'd bet for most
| degrees out there, rote memorization is the consequence of
| professors wanting easily gradable exams, existing for their
| benefit, not the students.
|
| Which means the actual problem is low quality education and
| degrees and we might find common ground here.
| jameshart wrote:
| I've come across this analogy that I think works well:
|
| Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the
| gym.
|
| If all we were interested in was moving the weights around,
| you'd be right to use a tool to help you. But we're doing this
| work for the effect it will have on _you_. The reason a teacher
| asks you a question is not because they don't know the answer.
| mlsu wrote:
| The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's
| to receive the credential.
|
| This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students
| of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the
| university degree is yet another part of the machine that
| they will become a cog in.
|
| What should be alarming to everyone is that these students
| will graduate without having learned anything and then go
| into the workplace where they will _continue_ to _not_ use
| their atrophied critical thinking skills, to simply do yet
| more, as a cog in the machine.
| bumby wrote:
| This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift.
| Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the
| primary motivation for going to college was to develop a
| philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was
| to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the
| 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now
| inverted.
|
| * according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and
| the proportions are now inverted.
|
| Yeah, that's when the great "push for education" came, as
| well as neoliberalism which preached continuous hustling
| and individuality. And in the 90s, the ADA and other anti
| discrimination laws hit, and requiring a college degree
| was and still is a very useful pre-screening filter for
| HR to continue discrimination.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs
| started to spike in the US which is probably more
| directly related than some "philosophical" change in the
| zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up
| debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest
| way to pay it back.
|
| For me the impact of the university administrators as
| they chased higher endowments for more buildings with
| naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with
| direct hires that did not directly contribute to the
| faculty mission did more to alter the university
| experience than anything else.
|
| [0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-
| by-year
| MengerSponge wrote:
| We (America) made university educations super expensive.
| Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an
| effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.
| sgustard wrote:
| "Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases
| that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal
| funding designed to make college more affordable."
|
| https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I would also say some of the attitude shift is also
| contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who
| have a lot of bad things to say about the education who
| tell me universities should focus on education in a
| general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus
| on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard
| before, something along the lines of, "why don't high
| schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While
| also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so
| students can get jobs."
| tpmoney wrote:
| It's not inherently contradictory to hold both positions,
| if your overarching position is that the schools are in a
| weird in-between state that serves neither well. My time
| in school was marked with both forms of frustration.
|
| I wanted to learn a new language and I wanted to take
| some history courses that covered regions and eras not
| well covered in my high school courses. But despite my
| university having a significant "elective" component to
| my degree path, none of those courses were on the list of
| allowed electives for my degree. So in this case, the
| university was failing at a focus on education by
| hindering my ability to branch out away from my core
| studies and requiring that I take "electives" that were
| more closely associated with the imagined career path my
| degree would provide.
|
| On the flip side, the "core" courses for my degree were
| bogged down in academic minutia and exercises that bore
| only the most surface level resemblance to the things
| I've done in my actual career. Often the taught material
| was out of date relative to the state of the industry.
| Other times the material was presented with philosophical
| reasons for learning the material, but with no practical
| application backing it to help make that philosophy
| complete. And very little material (if any) covered the
| usage of tools of the industry. In this case, we're
| failing the goal of setting people up for their careers
| by not teaching the practical applications of the
| knowledge. And to be clear this isn't just a "learning
| examples are by necessity simplified examples" problem. I
| later went back to school at a local community college
| for different material and from day one those courses
| were more relevant and more up to date. They provided
| material that was immediately useful in real world
| applications of the underlying knowledge. And I think
| some of that was because many of the courses for that
| community college were taught by industry veterans,
| either part time or as a "retirement" gig.
|
| In short, my experience at a large university was indeed
| a series of boxes that were to be checked, ostensively to
| provide me a "well rounded" education, but practically
| all narrowly focused on getting me a job in the field.
| Yet the boxes also failed at being relevant enough to the
| state of the industry to actually give me a foundation to
| work from when starting my career.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Where I am at, you can learn a skill in high school
| either via elective or a career technical track like
| working on airplanes, HVAC, construction, etc. Back in
| the 90s, I took automotive electives because I liked to
| work on cars back then. It would prepare you to work at a
| small automotive shop or as a hobby. I realized that it
| didn't make that much money so switched to computers.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And by my school years in the 00's those programs were
| slashed across the nation thanks to Bush. They just kept
| putting down the blue collar work and encouraged everyone
| to go to college. Right as they make student loans
| unbankruptale.
|
| Always follow the money
| firesteelrain wrote:
| They are still around and I am in a Red state.
| PKop wrote:
| And there were fewer students going to university and so
| you had a higher proportion of people doing it for the
| love of learning. It was easier to get a job without a
| degree. It's not just a cultural shift, it's a change of
| supply and demand.
| lazide wrote:
| Notably, the late 70's and early 80's is when large scale
| social changes started to happen due to high inflation
| and major problems in the US economy. Also a lot of
| social unrest, and a pretty unhinged president (Tricky
| Dick).
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The same issues are seen in other countries. It's not
| specific to US presidents or policy. The insistence on
| maximizing university attendance was a widespread idea
| coming out of the left, e.g. in Britain it was heavily
| pushed by Tony Blair. The Blair government also raised
| tuition fees considerably.
|
| The stated rationale at the time was that degree holders
| earn more, so if everyone gets a degree, everyone will
| earn more. I am doubtful that was the true rationale but
| it's how the policy was sold to people.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also I think massaging unemployment numbers for a while
| is reasonable goal. After all those in education are not
| counted as unemployed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The mentality isn't, but the costs are US unique. You can
| afford to "explore" a bit of your youth if you're not
| going into 6 figures of debt.
| kipchak wrote:
| Arguably the cause of the cultural shift is economic.
| Wages began stagnating in the early 1970s, which caused
| increased demand for diplomas as a way to increase wages.
| This is most striking in the number of students seeking
| law degrees, which shoots off at around the same time.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| Yeah because in the 60s you could support a wife and 4
| kids, buy a house and 2 cars, without a high school
| diploma, all before turning 25. There was no reason to go
| to college unless you were interested in learning.
|
| These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1
| bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.
| andrehacker wrote:
| Well, the credentials defintely help to GET the first job.
| As a cog in the machine though you are most often valued
| for skills more than for credentials, at least in the U.S.
| kharak wrote:
| An anecdote to add to this:
|
| Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between
| two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more
| challenging and therefore time consuming, with the
| additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B
| was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an
| almost guaranteed perfect grade.
|
| Imagine which course most students choose?
|
| Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting
| course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better
| grades qualify for better compensated positions and
| prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about
| this or were confident enough in their ability did choose
| Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of
| hundreds went with A.
| jjmarr wrote:
| > The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because
| they don't know the answer.
|
| A decent amount of my professors _don 't_ know the answers
| because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures
| from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the
| answer justification that Cengage provided. During the
| lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since
| they didn't make the slides.
|
| Professors automate themselves out of the teaching process
| and are upset when students automate themselves out of the
| learning process.
|
| I can tell when the faculty views teaching as a checkbox that
| they officially have to devote 40% of their time to. I can
| tell when we are given busywork to waste our time instead of
| something challenging.
|
| To use your analogy, I'm being told to move 1000 plush
| reproductions of barbells from Point A to B by hand because
| accreditation wants to see students "working out" and the
| school doesn't want high failure rates.
|
| We are all pulling out the forklift. Some of us are happy
| because we don't have to work as hard. Others are using the
| forklift so we can get in a real workout at home, as school
| is not a good use of our time. Either way, none of us see
| value moving paperweights all day.
|
| edit:
|
| My favourite course during my Computer Engineering degree was
| Science Fiction because that professor graded us on substance
| instead of form. It was considered a hard class because one
| would get good marks on the essays by focusing on building
| substantive points instead of strict adherence to the form of
| a five-paragraph hamburger essay.
|
| The call to action is to make courses harder and stop giving
| students plush barbells.
|
| For example, University of Toronto Engineering Science
| (hardest program in Canada) gives first-year students a "vibe
| coding" lab in which students learn how to solve a problem
| that AI cannot.
|
| https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.h.
| ..
| lazide wrote:
| But that requires professors to do work and give a damn!
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| These projections about bad professor experience is
| exactly why colleges became so hyperconpetitive. The
| difference between a competitive (and not even exclusive
| level like Ivies) and a "semi-competitive" is night and
| day in terms of rigor, staff talent, and overall
| environment.
|
| But sure, you're always going to find a few meh or bad
| professors. And they will stick out as much ad thr great
| professors
| pca006132 wrote:
| There are many issues here. The lack of incentives is
| probably the most important one. For new professors (in
| research universities), good teaching is usually just a
| good thing to have, but it is not a deciding factor for
| their tenure. When they get their tenure, they probably
| have enough students, and they need to work hard to apply
| for funding and keep the students paid. Administrators care
| most about ranking, and teaching isn't really evaluated in
| the ranking. They just push the professors to do more
| research and apply for more funding.
|
| It is also hard to evaluate university teaching because
| there are no benchmarks for that (compared with high
| school, for example), and it is hard to judge if teaching
| is good from student feedback. You can only know if someone
| fucked up or did really well, which are outliers.
|
| There are other issues as well. Professor IMO is a
| ridiculous job, you are supposed to be an expert in the
| field, be a researcher, be a manager, be a teacher, be a
| salesman, all at the same time. There are people who can
| excel in all these, but these are probably just outliers.
| It doesn't help when PhD training doesn't train you to be a
| proper manager and teacher. While there are some teaching
| training, I think we are not really held to a high enough
| standard. E.g. One can pass the teaching course if they
| just show up and spend some time, even though their
| teaching is horrible.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Meanwhile at my uni, at Masters, I'm being taught how to
| create and delete rows in HTML - I wish I wasn't kidding.
| :(
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| I think LLMs, if used correctly, can be useful for BOTH the
| credentialing and the human resource development (*cough*)
|
| Essentially, since they are a summary of "the" state of
| knowledge, the teacher should be able to ask them to put a
| number on how novel a piece of text is.
|
| Once LLMs are able to evaluate, independently, the soundness
| of an argument... (Hopefully, this will be achieved AFTER $5
| H100s reach the average consumer)
| grey-area wrote:
| LLMs are sometimes wrong, and they don't know they are
| wrong, nor do students.
|
| They are the wrong tool for pedagogy.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't
| bother giving diplomas.
|
| Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none
| of her students would care, her students actually want to
| learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed
| because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to
| threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of
| class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to
| learn.
|
| There are many college students for whom none of these tests
| would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma,
| they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they
| need to be bullied into studying outside of class.
|
| What made us think these students were ever interested in
| learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely
| that they just want a degree because they believe that a
| degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many
| people will never use the information that they supposedly
| learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll.
|
| Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even
| less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit.
| People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts.
| (/s)
|
| Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is
| not offering a university education. If she worked with a
| few other experts and they designed a coordinated
| curriculum and shepherded students through it over the
| course of two to four years, and documented that process to
| the point where they could file with an accrediting agency,
| then she could issue a degree in piano.
| godelski wrote:
| > then she could issue a degree in piano.
|
| It's worth noting, plenty of universities do this. You
| can get a degree "in piano".
| aniforprez wrote:
| Yes they did actually say that. They go into the process
| of accreditation that would result in a person or
| institute being able to give a degree "in piano"
| godelski wrote:
| Not every reply is written to disagree.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You can get a BMus in Piano Performance, which is a
| standard music degree with a piano performance
| specialisation. It's not a special thing of its own kind,
| and it's normal for performers in music college to
| specialise in one instrument, usually with a second as an
| elective.
|
| Being able to play moderately hard pieces from dots and
| sight-reading are the entry level requirement. It's taken
| for granted you can already do that.
|
| The degree part means learning music history, theory, and
| performance styles, working on performance projects, solo
| and with other musicians.
|
| The analogy with ChatGPT is that it's taking over the
| entry-level part of the process. You can't expect to get
| onto a music degree if you only know how to prompt
| ChatGPT to produce a MIDI file for your entrance exam.
|
| And in CS, you can't produce good code if you barely know
| what a server is.
|
| It's all very Dunning Kruger. If you use an LLM to
| produce course work to get your piece of paper at the
| end, _you don 't even know what prompts you should use to
| do an unfamiliar job_, never mind having the skills to do
| it yourself.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I don't think that's a good comparison. I went college to
| learn and was also relieved occasionally when professors
| canceled class and still had to force myself to study. I'm
| sure plenty of your piano teachers students don't enjoy
| practicing the same notes over and over but do so because
| they want to know how to play piano.
| rohansood15 wrote:
| Students want the diploma because it has value. It has
| value because a student can only get it by learning and
| problem-solving.
|
| If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the
| work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it
| is printed.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Soon?
|
| I hire people now and where they went to school means
| little to me. The first priority is "can they do the
| work?" which is a niche programming. After that is
| established, I barely take note of school.
|
| I don't personally count a CS degree as an indication the
| person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has
| good work ethic.
| ozim wrote:
| Problem is you most likely don't have that big operation.
|
| For company I work for we hire 1 dev per year and I
| believe last year we did not even hire a single person.
|
| So I do have time to check up the candidate do 3 rounds
| each 1 hr so that candidates can see what company are we
| and what person is the candidate. We also are small
| company so we don't get that many applicants anyway.
|
| I cannot imagine how it goes when someone needs to hire
| 20 devs in one quarter. Especially for a company that is
| any way known and they can get 1000CVs for a single
| position. They need to filter somehow.
| betterThanTexas wrote:
| You could just as easily filter by having a github repo.
| It doesn't even need to be active or very full. Hell,
| that would also filter out a lot of people with college
| degrees! Might even save you time.
|
| In my experience, only very large and bureaucratic
| institutions (governments, schools) really demand degrees
| and certifications.
| 6510 wrote:
| HR seems a lot like real estate appraisal as~in
| appraisers know nothing about construction.
|
| One could in theory establish the value of a thing or
| person by comparing it with similar things but if
| everyone does that the process becomes senseless.
|
| If a working car is worth 5000, the same car from the
| same year with a defect that costs 1000 to fix should be
| worth 4000. If the repair costs 6000 there is no car.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Further, if a student can get a diploma without work,
| then the diploma does not have value anymore. If diplomas
| are no longer valuable, the signal they provide in the
| labor market will turn into noise.
|
| If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an
| employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire
| an employee?
|
| I think this story will become true, and society will
| radically shift into one where critical thinking skills
| will actually be the only skills employers look for in
| employees, since the grunt work can be automated.
|
| What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into
| apprenticeship based employment? How do potential
| laborers display their critical thinking skills apart
| from displaying them in person?
| nine_k wrote:
| In a medieval guild, to be admitted as a master, an
| apprentice had to create a chef d'oevre, or masterpiece,
| so called for this reason.
|
| In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly
| have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your
| prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution
| to something open-source.
|
| A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient,
| except maybe for very junior positions straight from
| college. These are exactly the positions most under
| pressure by the automation.
| Mbwagava wrote:
| Apprentices were supported, tho. We just chuck kids out
| in the cold with college debt and hope they survive with
| little reason to think they will.
| zharknado wrote:
| And they were supported because they were useful labor.
| Even an unskilled, brand-new apprentice could pump the
| bellows, sweep the forge, haul wood and water, deliver
| messages. If it frees up the master to produce more
| valuable output, that's a win-win. Then they can grow
| into increasingly valuable tasks as they gain awareness
| and skill.
|
| IMO one of the big problems is that we've gone too far
| with the assumption that learners can't be valuable until
| after they're done learning. Partly a cultural shift
| around the role of children and partly the reality that
| knowledge work doesn't require much unskilled labor
| compared to physical industries.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think software developers might be somewhat of an
| outlier. Industry wants good programmers but universities
| teach computer science which really should be called
| "computation science". Much of what we learn in
| university will hardly ever be used while many practical
| skills are at best learned as a side effect. Dijkstra
| favorite said that computer science is as much about
| computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
|
| So degrees have been a weak signal for a long time.
| Several of the best developers I've worked with had no CS
| degree at all. As a result we have interview processes
| that are baffling to people from other industries.
| Imagine a surgeon having to do interview surgery, or an
| accountant having to solve accounting puzzles. AFAIK we
| are very unusual in this regard and I think it's because
| degrees are such a weak indicator and the same is true
| for certificates in our industry.
| Retric wrote:
| > while many practical skills are at best learned as a
| side effect.
|
| I strongly disagree, that's the intent not a side effect.
|
| It's IMO a common misconception that early algorithm
| classes are just designed around learning algorithms.
| Instead basic algorithms are the simplest thing to turn
| abstract requirements into complex code. The overwhelming
| majority of what students learn are the actual tools of
| programming, debugging, etc while using the training
| wheels of a problem already broken up into bite sized
| steps.
|
| Ramping up the complexity is then more about learning
| tradeoffs and refining those skills than writing an ever
| more efficient sorting algorithm or whatnot.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| That is true, in the sense that the 100/200 level classes
| are covering programming basics in addition to whatever
| algorithmic theory is being presented. But beyond that
| that, programs really seem to differ pretty strongly on
| applied projects and software engineering practices
| (basic stuff like source control) and more
| theoretical/mathematical concepts. One type of capstone
| style class commonly seen is compiler design. To a
| certain extent, a good school will teach you how to
| learn, and give you enough of a background, class
| projects, internships, electives with applied options,
| that you get a well rounded education and can quickly
| ramp up in a more typical software organization after
| graduation. But as someone who has hired many new grads
| over the years, it always surprises me what sort of gaps
| exist. It rarely is about programming basics, and almost
| always about "software engineering" as a discipline.
| Retric wrote:
| That's fair.
|
| My experience is graduates of schools focused on the more
| practical aspects tend to make better Jr developers on
| day one but then stagnate. Meanwhile graduates of the
| more theoretical programs people pick up those same
| practical skills on the job leaving them better prepared
| for more demanding assignments.
|
| This then feeds into the common preference for CS degrees
| even if they may not actually be the best fit for the
| specific role.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Interesting. I did my undergraduate in Germany and my
| graduate in the US, so my experience might be unusual
| here and different from what you get in the US. My
| undergraduate algorithms classes in Germany and my
| advanced algorithms classes in the US involved zero
| actual coding. It was all pseudocode as you'd find in the
| Knuth books or in Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I was somewhat aware that in medieval period most started
| out as an apprentice in mid teens. Essentially work
| slaves in the house of a master. Then after a decade or
| so of toiling and gaining the skill they would go on to
| become individual business owners.
|
| But I wasn't aware about the master peace. Thank you for
| sharing that!
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well you see the obvious difference. They actually
| trained people for the job. Even if it was under the
| guise of child labor.
|
| We simply stopped doing that. A decade of apprenticeship
| reduced down to 3 months of shadowing during summer.
| concordDance wrote:
| Honestly, a future where diplomas are just noise and
| employers stop caring about them and thus young people
| stop wasting years of their lives "learning" something
| they don't care about sounds like a huge improvement.
|
| LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a
| service.
| Mbwagava wrote:
| I don't think diplomas have mattered for decades, at
| least in tech. Let's not pretend anything improved with
| the introduction of chatbots.
|
| Annyway, any advantage is entirely offset by having to
| live in a world with LLMs. I'd prefer the tradition of
| having to educate retarded college graduates. At least
| they grow into retarded adults. What are we gonna do
| about chatbots? You can't even educate them, let alone
| pinocchio them.
| dsego wrote:
| They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done"
| for whatever it means at that moment, and we could
| potentially see more erosion in technical abilities and
| work quality. You don't know what you don't know, and
| without learning things that you don't care about, you
| loose the chance to expand your knowledge outside of your
| comfort zone.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > They will only learn what's needed to "get the job
| done" for whatever it means at that moment
|
| I graduated university around the turn of the century,
| long before the current AI boom started, and the majority
| of my classmates were like that. Learning the bare
| minimum to escape a class isn't new especially if you're
| only taking that class because you _have_ to because
| every adult in your life drilled into you that you 'll be
| a homeless failure if you don't go to college and get a
| degree. The LLMs make that easier, but the university, if
| the goal wasn't just to take your tuition dollars to
| enrich a vast administrator class instead of cover the
| costs of employing the professors teaching you, could
| offset that with more rigorous testing or oral exams at
| the end of the class.
|
| The real lesson I learned during my time in university is
| that the two _real_ edges that elite universities give
| you (as a student) are 1) social connections to the
| children of the rich and leaders in the field that you
| can mine for recommendations and 2) a "wow" factor on
| your resume. You can't really get the first at a state
| school or community college, and you definitely can't get
| the second at a state school or community college,
| despite learning similar if not the same material in a
| given field of study.
|
| It hasn't been about (just) the learning for a long time.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| This, but also learning is like the mental equivalent of
| lifting weights.
|
| It's not so much what you learn, but that you train it
| hard.
| figassis wrote:
| I might be a good thing. Colleges have become complacent
| and too expensive. Costs of an education have been
| increasing while employment opportunities decreasing for
| some degree categories. People have been sounding alarms
| for a while and colleges have not been listening. The
| student loan market is booming.
|
| Now if students can shortcut the education process, they
| can spend less time in it and this may force colleges to
| reinvent themselves and actually rethink what education
| looks like in the new era.
| danieldk wrote:
| _What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into
| apprenticeship based employment? How do potential
| laborers display their critical thinking skills apart
| from displaying them in person?_
|
| This is already true to some extend. Not apprenticeship
| taking place of college, but the last couple of places I
| worked hiring generally happened based on: I already know
| this person from open source projects/working with them
| in a company/etc.
|
| In certain companies, degrees were already unimportant
| even before LLMs because they generally do not provide a
| very good signal.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Why wouldn't the shift to be to raise the standards of
| the schools?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's aroind 5 years out but schools are gonna have a rude
| awakening as the population decrease finally catches up
| to them. The standards won't raise because many will
| simply shut down over lack of students.
|
| The Harvards will be fine, though. But I guess that will
| raise the standards naturally.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I was somewhat downvoted for saying something similar
| recently here [1].
|
| Four year degree is a very expensive investment in the
| current environment. We should push younger people to
| face the real world as soon as possible. Apprenticeship
| is indeed a great way to achieve that IMO. As a great
| side effect the young people won't have to start out
| their careers saddled with huge debt.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43768903
| 7bit wrote:
| > It has value because a student can only get it by
| learning and problem-solving.
|
| No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the
| starting point for your first salary and then for every
| salary negotiation moving forward.
|
| As someone who did not go to university, but has the same
| knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of
| paper would have opened so many doors and made life so
| much easier. It took me 15 years to get a salary, that
| people get with the piece of paper after graduating. And
| not because it took me 15 years to reach that level of
| knowledge. I had that by the time the other graduated.
|
| I had a friend who always cheated in school, and now he
| works for a big car company and earned a fuck ton of
| money.
|
| Life is unfair and companies only care about the paper
| your diploma is printed on. If students would ask me for
| advice, I would tell them to cheat whenever possible.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| And companies value it because it signals that the holder
| of that paper can do the work and isn't completely
| stupid.
| samplatt wrote:
| In reality, holding a piece of paper has nothing in
| common with relevant ability. Some graduates will exit
| university as competent people, some won't.
|
| This isn't exactly news, or even a recent phenomenon. My
| peers who finished their CS degree circa 2004 ish were a
| broad mix of utter idiots who shouldn't get a job in that
| field, or damn sharp (if green) technically-minded
| people, or somewhere in between.
|
| The industry will sort them out; the ones that can, do,
| the ones that can't, will do something else of use, or
| find another job.
| Jensson wrote:
| There is a correlation, that is all you need for it to be
| valuable. Remove the correlation and value isn't there
| any more, see US masters in computer science for example
| that one doesn't correlate with skill so it isn't valued,
| but the bachelor is. In countries where a masters is
| correlated with skill they are values though.
| immibis wrote:
| Originally, yes, but hiring practices are about as inbred
| as the artistic tastes of the demoscene, so now they
| value it because they value it.
| 7bit wrote:
| That holds the same truth as that all other person can't
| do the work and are completely stupid. Which is zero.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I really think that they are used because it is easiest
| and cheapest fully legal filter. When you have
| significant number of candidates any filter that comes
| first to mind is selected. Degree is one such one that
| won't ever legally bite you.
| slics wrote:
| You forgot one big reward with your approach. You are not
| 200k in debt which will take that kid with diploma to get
| that piece of paper. You are debt free.
|
| I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a
| bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their
| backs on the people as well.
|
| Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the
| issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer).
| Invest that $100k at an average 15% return - it becomes a
| lot of money 25 years from now.
|
| Or get a piece of paper (if your major is useless) and
| pay the banks 100k + interest.
| grumbelbart2 wrote:
| While you are fully right, that is very US-centric.
| Tuition is practically free in large parts of Europe, for
| example.
| danieldk wrote:
| That's a very American point of view though. In many
| European countries people don't build up such big debts.
| I'm from NL and the upper bound among my friends was
| something like 50,000, but most people had much lower
| debts between 0 and 20,000. (Yay for lower enrollment
| fees + part of the money is given as a gift).
|
| And even if you ramped up a 50k debt, it's a government
| loan where the interest rates are low, your monthly pay
| off is based on your salary, and if you are not able to
| pay the debt within a certain period, it's wiped away.
| Mengkudulangsat wrote:
| > If students find a way to get a diploma without doing
| the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on
| which it is printed.
|
| Amen.
|
| I look forward to the era where we train professionals
| the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for
| blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.
| smcg wrote:
| Companies don't want to retain anyone longer than 2
| years. They would never go for this unless forced to. By
| collective action.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's not that they can't. It's that I can always pay more
| by freeloading on their training.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sure, then they complain that "nobody wants to work
| abymore".
|
| They can't have it both ways
| melagonster wrote:
| Teenagers and children were treated as a free servant for
| several years, and probably cannot learn anything.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is how many professionals are training in many
| European countries, and they still want a diploma to go
| with it.
|
| In many countries, regardless of how learning it was
| achieved, you still need a paper to prove that you
| actually did it.
|
| And in countries like Germany, better keep all those job
| evaluations close at heart because they get asked for as
| part of many job interview processes, additionally have
| them reviewed by lawyers, as they legally can't say
| anything negative, there is an hidden language on how to
| express negativity which to the reader sound positive on
| first read.
| exe34 wrote:
| He regularly turned up to work. He attempted every task
| that he was given. His manager evaluated the results.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Techbically even those hidden phrases arent permitted by
| law, and you have the right to get those phrases
| removed/have it be turned into a basic evaluation (just
| from when to when + what job)
|
| The employers that do use those hidden phrases just hope
| they arent challenged/the employee doesnt notice.
|
| Thats also why most evaluations are entirely written in
| the superlative.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Unfortunely they are common enough to keep lawyers and
| book publishing businesses going with dictionaries
| "evaluation => real meaning", exactly for that little
| help to go though it and validate its correctness.
|
| Many employeers profit from foreigners that aren't well
| versed in these nuances, and have to be educated this is
| a thing.
|
| An example for others not used to German work market,
|
| https://www.karriereakademie.de/arbeitszeugnis-
| formulierunge...
|
| Just go through the site with your favourite translation
| tool.
| chmod775 wrote:
| There's software for that even. The input is a ranking of
| the employee on a bunch axis (1-5 or something) and it
| spits out the appropriate text. Does the reverse too.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That one is new to me, sadly doesn't surprise me.
|
| When one gets to have a good works council, there are
| plenty of stories that go around.
| grumbelbart2 wrote:
| "Missing" information is a huge red flag as well, though.
| If an Arbeitszeugnis only lists the dates and what the
| person worked on, and nothing about results or behavior,
| we would never invite them for an interview.
| Akronymus wrote:
| It could be that the employee left due to being on bad
| terms with the employer, for something at fault with the
| employer. I personally wouldnt take a basic one as that
| hard a strike.
| eirikbakke wrote:
| PhDs are apprenticeships. Students perform original
| research under the supervision of a doctoral advisor, and
| submit their work to a "guild" of external reviewers
| (peer reviewed journals or conferences). Once the student
| has three peer-reviewed publications, they graduate.
| thugthrasher wrote:
| "Once the student has three peer-reviewed publications,
| they graduate."
|
| That's not a standard at all. You usually can't graduate
| without at least one peer-reviewed publication, but
| beyond that, as far as number of publications goes, it
| varies a lot from institution to institution. The biggest
| standard is that you complete a dissertation and defend
| it.
| jll29 wrote:
| An apprentice, after five years of work, can be a master,
| just by practcising.
|
| That's why the universities of Oxford and Cambridge give
| Master's degree to everyone that gets a Bachelor's degree
| after five years, without further examination or
| coursework (note that these are MAs only, _not_ MRes,
| MPhil or MBA degrees, which typically require 1-2 years
| of studies, exams and theses).
|
| Historically, the academic Master was seen as equivalent
| to a Master in a craft (e.g. philosophy <=> carpentry).
| PKop wrote:
| And that won't be their problem, they'll be long gone
| having achieved what they wanted when they were cheating.
| It is a societal problem or institutional and industry
| problem. If the market and these universities want these
| degrees to mean anything as signaling mechanism they must
| stop these students from cheating some way somehow...the
| students are never going to stop themselves.
| smcg wrote:
| But it will always be worth more than not having it, so
| companies will still require it.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > If students find a way to get a diploma without doing
| the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on
| which it is printed.
|
| I think this is already the case.
| mordae wrote:
| Good. It's about time.
| klibertp wrote:
| > It has value because a student can only get it by
| learning and problem-solving.
|
| No. That's how it should be, but the reality looks
| different: it has value because it shows that someone
| spent 3+ years doing what they were told to do, enduring
| all the absurdities they were subjected to in the
| meantime. Whatever means they used to cheat don't matter,
| since they still worked on what someone told them to and
| produced results satisfying the expectations.
|
| There are, perhaps, institutions where learning and
| problem-solving are seen as the most important while
| "following orders" and "staying in line" are
| deemphasized. For the students of all the others, putting
| up with an utterly absurd environment is often one of the
| biggest _barriers_ to learning. Yet, it 's a requirement
| without fulfilling which you can forget about graduating.
| Hence my conclusion: the diploma from most learning
| institutions certifies you as a good corporate drone -
| and that's enough of a signal in many situations, so why
| bother trying to fix it?
| alexvitkov wrote:
| This is a very bold statement, you should consider
| substantiating it at least a little, maybe give just one
| example on what those absurdities collee students have to
| endure are, that prove they're good corporate drones?
|
| From what I remember it was 4 years of learning stuff I
| signed up to learn, occasionally being quizzed on said
| stuff, and then they gave me a paper that claims I know
| the stuff.
| klibertp wrote:
| You might live in another country where the situation is
| different, or maybe my experiences are outdated (20 years
| later, they might be). What I remember is unfairness and
| corruption, feudal-like relationships, tons of wasted
| time on things I didn't sign up for and things I already
| knew but couldn't say I know for fear of retaliation. I
| was still better than people going to private
| institutions: on top of all that, they were also extorted
| for money at every turn. ...thinking about it, yeah, I
| really _hope_ my experience is outdated.
| betterThanTexas wrote:
| I'm not saying a college CAN'T provide an education, but
| it IS a little ridiculous you can't just test pass four
| years of regurgitating textbooks. Ideally for a fraction
| of the cost.
| betterThanTexas wrote:
| > It has value because a student can only get it by
| learning and problem-solving.
|
| No, it has value because it gatekeeps class mobility.
| Degrees haven't signified learning or problem solving
| longer than I've been alive. The attitude is that if you
| pay for an education, you're entitled to a degree. The
| education aspect is optional.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| You can also get it by cheating and bribing.
| sublinear wrote:
| Yes, but piano lessons are not a music degree. Similarly,
| vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal
| education either.
|
| I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the
| concerns about AI.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is
| basically useless. Whether you want to play in an
| orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game
| soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or
| not - they want to hear you perform.
| dragonmost wrote:
| Not only is that not true at all. There are many other
| jobs you can land other than performing with a formal
| music degree. Of course with the right experience you
| might get away with not getting that formal education but
| you open so many doors by going through school and
| getting the "useless" piece of paper.
| dontTREATonme wrote:
| Case in point: Rachel "Raygun" Gunn. She had all the
| credentials in the world but single-handedly became the
| reason break dancing is no longer in the Olympics.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Slight overstatement... break dancing was one of the
| locally picked sports and the next Olympics had already
| selected different sports before she performed...
|
| But she is a good example of degrees not equaling skill
| thugthrasher wrote:
| It should also be noted that she doesn't have a degree in
| "performing," as far as I'm aware, she has a degree in
| "studying the culture" of break dancing. So, we (or at
| least any of us who haven't read her work) don't actually
| know if she's good at what her degree is in. We just know
| that she's not good at performing.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I won't say there are exactly zero self-taught
| professionals in classical music because I don't know for
| sure. But I will say I've never heard of one. If they
| exist at all they're exceptionally rare.
|
| The music industry is built on the back of people with
| music degrees. They don't get the name recognition of
| headliners. But song writers, arrangers, and session
| musicians are all very likely to have formal training in
| theory and maybe performance.
|
| Producers and engineers less so. Those are more of a
| track record who-you've-worked-with occupation.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| All industries are built on the backs of truly educated
| and passionate talent. Those people often don't reap the
| fruit they help sow to everyone else that makes billions,
| trillion off them.
|
| Music is no different from software in thst regard.
| pjmlp wrote:
| > Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are
| not a formal education either.
|
| They are in some countries, you get at the vocational
| programs or apprenticeships alongside the highschool, and
| in the end you might get the opportunity to apply to the
| university or just carry on with your job.
|
| That is how I did mine in the 1990's Portuguese education
| system, and how I was already coding and understanding
| the big boys computer world at 16y.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Consider that there is some in-between.
|
| Some college students may be genuinely interested in one
| particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of
| other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.
|
| I still think they're better off at least making an effort
| and trying to learn something, but I do think it's
| important to note that just because a student has no
| interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no
| interest in any class.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| There is no in-between here. Consider:
|
| The course I'm interested in gets kinda hard, and my
| "just pull up an LLM" muscle is very, very strong, (and
| besides, I'm not used to struggling! and why should I get
| used to it in the classes i like?! I can't afford a C in
| my major!) so ... I use LLMs on my "I'm interested in it"
| class too and... we're back to the original argument.
| ijidak wrote:
| Absolutely. Also, the level of cheating in college, even
| pre-AI is often overlooked in these articles.
|
| For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often
| copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.
|
| AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many
| students are only in it for the diploma.
|
| If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment
| from a classmate or previous grad.
|
| And I imagine the students who really want to learn are
| still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they
| aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.
| Moru wrote:
| There are jobs that turns you down if you don't have that
| diploma. No amount of real world experience will get you
| past that bar. If it's not there, they wont even look at
| the rest of your application.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Most people don't go to college to learn for the sake of
| learning - that would be a very expensive luxury. They go
| for the opportunities that it opens up. The learning itself
| helps with that, but so does being able to prove that
| they've learned it. That what the diploma is meant to be
| for.
| simonask wrote:
| That's a US-centric view. A huge number of people in the
| world have access to high level education free of charge.
| garygatory wrote:
| Opportunity cost is cost.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't
| bother giving diplomas.
|
| You have this option with things like mits open courseware.
| Some colleges are OK with you just wanting to learn
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I think several orthogonal concepts are touched in this.
|
| 1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system
| with a completely different purpose than their main goal.
| Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach
| you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.
|
| 2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary
| school and given direction and vision on what to do in
| life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".
|
| 3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even
| guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to
| discouragement to even bother trying.
|
| 4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships,
| internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline),
| and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they
| complain about new grad output, they are still content
| outsourcing such training instead of investing in their
| employees for a career.
|
| There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause
| an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an
| opportunity to properly learn.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Sure, if we can agree that there exist courses for which we
| can agree that using an LLM to pass is a reasonable thing
| to do, would we also not agree that the course should be
| nuked from orbit?
| importantbrian wrote:
| I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I
| genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I
| still spend time learning about the subjects of my major
| and minor in my free time, but this would have described me
| pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their
| professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into
| studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something
| about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.
|
| In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements
| that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.
| code_biologist wrote:
| Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to a
| gym where you're told the goal is to be healthy and strong,
| but they can't really stop you from using a forklift, and
| jobs and compensation are given out according to how much you
| lifted irrespective of forklift use.
| karpierz wrote:
| Except part of the job involves lifting things in places
| where forklifts can't fit.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| They fit in most places or will over the next few years
| with the next "forklift" version.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because
| they don't know the answer.
|
| I remember illustrating a point to a class by posing a
| question and then calling on a student I figured wasn't smart
| enough to answer correctly so that everyone could see her
| make the mistake.
|
| The ethics of that still bother me.
| sgustard wrote:
| Why do some countries cheat in the Olympics? Because it is no
| longer a contest of human achievement, it's just about the
| medals as a symbol of national glory. Of course: once all
| countries are doping, the medals will become meaningless.
| College degrees will suffer the same fate if everyone cheats
| to get them.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The problem is there is no reliable way to test for LLM
| usage unlike for doping. There's no way to police this
| problem.
| lazide wrote:
| Sure there is - evaluate the candidates actual skill
| level without the ability to use automated tools.
|
| The current and old school way is a proctored exam.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Testing doesn't work for everything, especially for
| dissertations, publications, research etc. That being
| said I'm wholeheartedly in favor of using extensive in
| class testing when applicable.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It works for enough that 99% of cheaters are weeded out.
| Perfection is the enemy of "good enough".
|
| Also, always keep in mind the most underrated kind of
| cheater: the clearly smart kid who cheats to go from an
| A- to an A. That level of student can't be "caught" with
| tests because by all accounts they already know and have
| even mastered the material. The pressure at that level of
| competitiveness simply requires zero room for doubt. Not
| really what the article is about, but some food for
| thought.
| biker142541 wrote:
| Diversity in evaluation methodology is a reliable way for
| many subject. Even short, minimal handwritten exams would
| help to assess student understanding at a few key
| checkpoints and should should be reintroduced.
| Mbwagava wrote:
| > If all we were interested in was moving the weights around,
| you'd be right to use a tool to help you.
|
| Does the use of a quantifiable metric like a GPA not
| exacerbate this? In a world where people take a GPA
| seriously, you'd have to be irrational to not consider
| cheating a viable option.
|
| You could say the same about credit score and dating apps.
| These institutions assist the most predatory and harm the
| most vulnerable.
| Mbwagava wrote:
| Ooh ranked gaming, too. Also any kind of market activity.
| beAroundHere wrote:
| I think you're quoting the Sci Fi author - Ken Liu from his
| article in some major news outlet.
|
| I related with that analogy too, infact that whole piece is
| worth reading. I can't seem to find it's link though!
| I-M-S wrote:
| It's because you've mixed him up with Ted Chiang - the
| article in question is Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art [1]
|
| [1] https://archive.is/kS8NY
| Balgair wrote:
| I think we have to hold off a bit on the whole thing here.
|
| Look, we have no idea what the feedback is like that this
| grad student gives, what the class sizes are like, what the
| cadence is, what the grade percentages are, etc. All we know
| is that Clayton Ramsey is a grad student at Rice in the
| robotics department and that he wrote a hot take here.
|
| For me, the most important thing is if this grader is
| bothering to really grade at all. I think we've all had a
| harried grad student just dash off a few red lines on the
| week one HW about a week before the final exam. That's not a
| 2 way street, and if the feedback isn't as in-depth as he
| wants the work to be, well, he shouldn't be surprised. He
| can't be expecting students to put in the time unilaterally.
| But, we don't know any of that really.
|
| Personally, I think that before the decade is out, we're not
| going to be talking about this at all. Because the students
| will be adept enough at using the LLMs to make it look like
| their own writing anyways. This is a problem that experience
| will solve for them.
|
| And also, I think that the days of the massive lectures and
| essays are pretty much cooked. That 'cheap' model of
| education can't survive this LLM revolution. We obviously
| have to change what the heck higher education is trying to
| do.
|
| My take is that we're going to go to smaller class sizes like
| those at St. John's or Oxbridge. Under 10 people, you have to
| have done the reading or look like a fool, all with a PhD in
| the subject as a guide/teacher. Large classes weren't cutting
| it for decades (ask any Frat about their test banks), and now
| the veil is just ripped off.
| thugthrasher wrote:
| We will never reduce all class sizes to under 10 people.
| Large R1 schools are not going to reduce their number of
| students by a factor of 10 or increase their hiring by a
| factor of 10.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But going to school to prepare for life is like going to gym
| to lift weights to prepare for a marathon.
| dep_b wrote:
| If I could have a healthy and good looking physique by never
| going to the gym I would never go to the gym.
| 59nadir wrote:
| Right, but people using LLMs aren't actually getting the
| mental equivalent of a healthy and good looking physique if
| they let LLMs do stuff for them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well, you could. Most people prefer their pre-processed
| food over never going to the gym though.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I use chatgpt in a socratic way from time to time because I
| don't want answers I want the joy of thinking and learning. I
| heard there were efforts to make educational LLMs (whatever
| that means). Maybe it will help multiply teachers leverage so
| that more kids get inspired without having the teacher spend
| 1-on-1 time with them.. I don't know.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| If you took a forklift to the gym, you'd come out of the
| experience not only _very good at "lifting weights"_, but
| having learned a whole lot more about the nature and physics
| of weightlifting from a very different angle.
|
| Sure, you should lift them yourself too. But using an AI
| teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own
| tired brain was going to uncover. It's a very different but
| powerful educational experience.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any
| field than your own tired brain was going to uncover.
|
| If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should
| be worried about accuracy, up to date information,
| opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The
| tool you use doesn't change these factors.
| mFixman wrote:
| The tragedy is not that some students are going to college to
| get a diploma while learning as little as possible. It is
| that the boards of many private universities see their
| students' cash as more important than their education, and
| force the professors to pass everybody who went to higher
| education to buy a diploma.
|
| This has a negative feedback loop where universities have to
| lower standards to bring dumber and lazier students to
| compete with other diploma mills.
| indymike wrote:
| > Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to
| the gym.
|
| I'm sure the time has come for college students to master
| using LLMs. It's just as important as grammar or basic math
| now. The software I build (and the entire tech industry)
| automates huge swaths of business processes with AI. Students
| need to be able to understand, work with, and manage swarms
| of AI agents doing work.
|
| To stick to the analogy:
|
| I need skilled forklift drivers, not big buff workers like I
| used to.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| But the thing you are missing is that one needs a solid
| foundation of knowledge of the actual work to be able to
| manage it well.
|
| Someone with years of coding experience is going to be able
| to laser guide an AI agent to the answer/result than
| someone who has muddled their way through comp sci 101
| using an AI chatbot.
| indymike wrote:
| No one is saying they don't need a solid foundation of
| knowledge. The knowledge needed is different. What we're
| seeing now is lot like teaching people to care for a
| horse even though the automobile is now the dominant form
| of transportation
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you need forkloft drivers, don't recruit at the gym and
| be mad no one is forklift certified there.
|
| This isn't even an opinion on LLMs, it's recruiting 101.
| You're free to convince the gym to train forklift drivers,
| but don't be surprised when you're laughed out the room.
| Kapura wrote:
| forklift gym gang gang
| thesz wrote:
| > like taking a forklift to the gym.
|
| First, you will have excellent forklift skills in the end. A
| real profession!
|
| Second, girls dig forklift operators or so I was told.
| normyguy wrote:
| Dangers of Intelligence and Other Scientific Essays by Asimov
| predicted all this hullabaloo quite a while ago. So, yeah,
| seems like evidence to support your position. Welcome to the
| party. :)
| vendiddy wrote:
| That's a good one.
|
| One analogy I use a lot: if I have a professor sitting next
| to me, what is the best way to learn a topic?
|
| Struggle through it on my own and I won't be leveraging the
| professors knowledge.
|
| Ask the professor to do everything for me and I won't be
| learning anything at all.
|
| Now if the professor is an AI, the same trade-offs hold.
|
| For example, I will back and forth conversations with AI to
| explain subjects to me. I ask questions, push back, ask for
| examples, and so on.
|
| If I do ask the AI to answer something for me, I then ask it
| to break down the answer for me so I can make sure I
| understand it deeply.
|
| And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn
| something :)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The fatal flaw here is that an AI is more like asking a
| politician. Except maybe it won't gaslight you. It often
| has no idea what it's talking about, and pushing back may
| even have it change it's tune.
|
| >And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to
| learn something :)
|
| Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I
| wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this
| generation.
| switchbak wrote:
| It's an e-bike for the mind!
| chias wrote:
| I love this analogy because it's also not a waste of time to
| learn how to use a forklift!
|
| But the gym isn't the best place to engage in forklift
| training. And you engage in forklift training at the gym,
| expect to learn how to use a forklift to lift gym weights.
| Don't expect to also get the benefits that the gym is
| designed to impart.
| righthand wrote:
| Yeah I've been explaining something similar to people. Go ahead
| and spend your time using the Llm but if you think no one
| notices you're wrong. Your colleagues/teammates notice and when
| it comes time to test your real mettle you will end up last in
| line because no one has confidence that you can do anything but
| fake your results. This will hurt you when you want a promotion
| or raise or recognition of some sort of your efforts.
| gwervc wrote:
| I avree with starting from the third paragraph. However I
| disagree about what you said on academics. The few I
| interrogated on the topic already adapted their practice,
| notably changing the kind of homework they give, and changing
| exam format.
|
| My students however don't understand that the importance is on
| the process, not the result. My colleagues do.
| mistercheph wrote:
| In real life, many education professionals are co-conspirators
| with students to produce work artifacts in lieu of actual work,
| ChatGPT has done wonders for both parties to help accelerate
| production of piles and piles of paper that have the appearance
| of schoolwork, paper piles > learning is the nash equilibrium
| of the incentives in our present education scheme in the United
| States.
|
| But don't worry, worst case scenario, all of the kids growing
| up in this environment that are actually learning will build
| structures to exploit the prompters, I suspect the present
| situation where prompters can accidentally find themselves in
| real jobs is transient and building better filters will become
| survival imperative for businesses and institutions.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| There were 40,000 people in Kenya writing papers for American
| students before LLMs came along.
|
| I myself went to college to get the meal ticket, not to learn.
| But since the system was entirely exam based, I was forced to
| learn.
| la64710 wrote:
| Actually in real world AIs are doing great and continuosly
| accelerating and augmenting human efforts to solve open ended
| problems. Academic institutions should help students embrace AI
| tools and not just penalize them for using it.
| dheera wrote:
| I think this is going to be a problem as long as the metrics by
| which we evaluate students are intolerant of human errors and
| prioritize right answers over thinking skills.
|
| The current situation is that people need to pass exams, get
| certain GPA's, etc. to have opportunities unlocked to them.
| Education today is largely about collecting these "stamps" that
| open doors and not about actual learning.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| A non-STEM friend got to study/research at really great places
| across India, Germany, UK, USA, and China for her UG, MA,
| MPhil, PhD, and postdoc (including lots of field/on ground
| work). She said that she noted one common theme among her
| seniors (guides, mentors, colleagues, professors etc) -> that
| some bad, shit, low quality, whatever published paper is
| >>>>>>>>>>> high quality work/research but not published or
| slow to publish (and often for good reason). And she added
| these were not run of the mill profs who needed those to
| survive professionally or academically but the likes whose
| names/reputation often matter more than their departments by
| many times and don't need survival at all anymore.
| ookblah wrote:
| knowledge gap and consolidation just gets wider, like before.
| the internet rotted peoples brains but also brought that
| knowledge to people who would have never had the opportunity to
| learn.
|
| those who use the tools to accelerate their learning will do so
| and others who use it just to get by will see their skills
| atrophy and become irrelevant.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You can't reason through this problem. If there's homework due,
| teenagers are _going_ to use LLMs. The ones that don't are
| going to work very hard just to end up with at par work with
| everyone else. The only solution is returning to a paradigm of
| heavy in class testing.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think these complaints will fall onto deaf ears for at least
| two reasons:
|
| 1. Students are a captive audience. They don't want to be
| there. It's the law that makes them be there. Even once you're
| beyond mandatory education this holds true: they were just
| carried into further education by momentum. They didn't realize
| they had a real choice or what alternatives were available.
|
| 2. A lot of the skills you build in classes aren't useful to
| you. I spent a lot of time in my English (second) language
| classes, but it was my use of the internet that really taught
| me the language. The later years of English classes was just
| busywork.
|
| In my native language classes I had to write a fair number of
| essays. The only time this was useful was the final exam of
| that class. I haven't written a "real" essay since. Even if I
| did, it would probably be in English and use a different style
| - something taught to me by forum posts.
| simonask wrote:
| But this is exactly the problematic viewpoint. You thought
| that the point of letting you write essays in your native
| language was to enable you to write essays. It isn't, it
| never was.
| Aerroon wrote:
| But what was the point then?
|
| During the final exam, a national exam (all the students
| did it at the same time in the country) you were given
| blank pieces of paper, a pen, 10 different topics to choose
| from, and 6 hours.
|
| You pick a topic, write a draft, then write the essay. ~700
| words.
|
| Bonus points if you use relevant literature or science
| quotes in it. Quotes you had to memorize, without knowing
| the topics.
|
| None of the topics resonated with you? Tough luck, buddy.
|
| Don't have any 'novel' ideas? Figure something out!
|
| Cited something the reader didn't know about? Should've
| known better!
|
| Quoted someone the person grading doesn't know? Better hope
| they're in a good mood!
|
| There's a reason they got rid of this style of exam a few
| years later. Doesn't change that this one thing dominated
| my native language and literature classes.
|
| My biggest takeaway from it is how much I hate my native
| language class and literature class, but that might've
| happened even without the essay.
| lukan wrote:
| "Anyone who actually struggles to solve problems and learn
| themselves is going to have massive advantages in the long
| term."
|
| Looking forward towards is, but I fear that might be wishful
| thinking in part.
|
| Also pre LLMs I have seen too many deep thinkers fail and
| pretenders succed. I don't see how LLMs can change that. Unless
| we all collectivly grow tired if pretenders and fakers amd
| value deep understanding. I just see not many indication of
| that.
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with your last point. Pretenders are
| so easily seen by word choice and phrasing alone and yet
| these valueless additions are accepted and not immediately
| called out because it's not polite to call out. For example:
| when minimizing or distancing themselves from their failure
| or associating themselves with someone else's success.
|
| There should be zero tolerance for these types of behaviors
| in my opinion. I see zero evidence of these behavior even
| being identified by most, let alone any thought on calling
| them out or stopping them.
|
| You've helped me realize that folks using llms in replace of
| learning to write themselves are almost certainly giving up
| all thought of nuance on a topic and are, without realizing
| it, letting the llm either ignore or add nuance based on its
| training data and random chance.
|
| Hopefully the pendulum will swing the other way and there's a
| public epiphany but given the loss of nuance over the decades
| I'm not betting on it
| perrygeo wrote:
| It's especially damning since cognitive research is not at all
| ambiguous on the topic. Learning is the result of deliberate
| practice, intentionally placing yourself in situations where
| you need to solve problems. The output is irrelevant, building
| mental capacity is the game. The struggle to learn isn't just
| some unfortunate obstacle to be optimized away by technology.
| It _is_ the cognitive mechanism by which we build knowledge.
| indymike wrote:
| > Students who know least of all and don't understand the
| purpose of writing or problem solving or the limitations of
| LLMs are currently wasting years of their lives letting LLMs
| pull them along as they cheat themselves out of an education
|
| My high-school age daughter told me how her small private
| school solved this problem:
|
| They brought back oral exams.
|
| There aren't a lot of other good options. Written take-home
| work and online tests have always been fertile ground for
| cheating. Another benefit of oral exams: you learn to
| communicate under stress.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This is somewhat reflected in how we value university degrees.
| You get very little additional salary from having finished all
| but the last semester of a degree. The big boost all comes from
| the last semester where you get the degree. You'd expect that
| the vast majority of the actual knowledge is already there at
| that point and late dropouts would be seen by employers as some
| great bargain. It shows that the signaling of the degree
| trump's the actual knowledge. Good discussion with Bryan Caplan
| on this: https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-college-
| signaling-a...
|
| So, unfortunately the student's behavior is somewhat rational
| given the incentive structure they operate in.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > let their brains atrophy only to get a piece of paper
|
| this isn't the root of the problem
|
| the root of the problem is that higher education has become,
| for the most part, an exercise in getting a piece of paper, so
| that you can check a box on a form or pass first level
| screening for a job
| normyguy wrote:
| Dangers of Intelligence and Other Scientific Essays by Asimov
| predicted all this hullabaloo quite a while ago. So, yeah,
| seems like evidence to support your position. Welcome to the
| party. :)
| qoez wrote:
| To play devils advocate: There's so many times in school where
| I remember having to do BS tasks which could have been better
| spent working on side projects instead. If the students are
| smart that's how they'll leverage these tools. The vast
| majority won't but some will.
| justlikereddit wrote:
| If the purpose is thinking, why is the exercise so often about
| just producing an artifact out of text?
|
| And so often also on wildly tangential subjects that are purely
| academical artifacts.
|
| Cheating with LLMs is the inevitable conclusion of being a
| subject to a dragged out must-have education system that mostly
| just cheats the students of their time and money. That's the
| friendly way to put it.
|
| I jumped through all the fucking hoops and now I'm paid
| handsomely, at every corner of the road leading here you see
| some pompous academic wankers with more medals than a
| photoshopped North Korean general.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| AI has changed how we learn by making the process of improving
| work much easier. Normally, learning involves writing a draft,
| finding mistakes, and fixing them over time. This helps build
| critical thinking. AI, trained on tons of refined data, can
| create polished work right away. While this seems helpful, it can
| skip the important step of learning through trial and error.
|
| The question is: Should we limit AI to keep the old way of
| learning, or use AI to make the process better? Instead of fixing
| small errors like grammar, students can focus on bigger ideas
| like making arguments clearer or connecting with readers. We need
| to teach students to use AI for deeper thinking by asking better
| questions.
|
| We need to teach students that asking the right questions is key.
| By teaching students to question well, we can help them use AI to
| improve their work in smarter ways. The goal isn't to go back to
| old methods for iterating but change how we iterate altogether.
| palata wrote:
| I would argue that if you are losing a consequent amount of
| your time fixing grammar, then it sounds like you need to spend
| that time to improve your grammar skills.
|
| > We need to teach students to use AI for deeper thinking by
| asking better questions.
|
| Same thing here: the whole point of learning critical thinking
| is that you don't need to ask someone/something else. Teaching
| you how to ask the LLM to do it for you is not the same as
| teaching you how to actually do it.
|
| In my opinion, we need to make students realise that their goal
| is to learn how to do _it_ themselves (whatever _it_ is). If
| they need an LLM to do _it_ , then they are not learning. And
| if they are not learning, there is no point in going to school,
| they can go work in a field.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| You're getting to the crux of the argument, knowing when to
| use AI. Doing or learning "It" in 2025 means using AI whether
| to understand it better or use it to get better grades.
|
| My take is teach them to get better at asking questions and
| then teach them when to use their own understanding to change
| their answer for the better. How many times has an AI's
| answer been 5/10 and with a few fixes it's a 9/10. That comes
| with time. Getting them asking questions and learning the
| "when" later is better at least to me.
| palata wrote:
| > Doing or learning "It" in 2025 means using AI whether to
| understand it better or use it to get better grades.
|
| Depends, I think. If we are talking about writing an essay
| (and I believe we are), then the LLM is somewhere between
| useless and counter-productive.
|
| Of course, if the LLM is used to understand an RFC (I would
| debate how useful it is for that, but that's another
| discussion), then it's different. The goal was to
| understand the RFC, it doesn't really matter how you did
| it. But the goal of writing an essay is not to end up with
| a written essay at all. Nobody cares about it, you can burn
| it right after it's graded.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Just paste the full text and ask a LLM to summarize it for you.
|
| It feels like we are getting to this weird situation where we
| just use LLMs as proxies, and the long, boring text is just for
| LLMs to talk to each other.
|
| For example:
|
| Person A to LLM A: Give me my money.
|
| LLM A to LLM B: Long formal letter.
|
| LLM B to Person B : Give me my money.
|
| Hopefully, nothing is lost in translation.
| tabbott wrote:
| I have a very similar experience. Some students who want to get
| involved in contributing to open source will try to contribute to
| Zulip by taking whatever they wanted to say and asking ChatGPT to
| write it better for them, and posting the result.
|
| Even when no errors are introduced in the process, the outcome is
| always bad: 3 full paragraphs of text with bullets and everything
| where the actual information is just the original 1-2 sentences
| that the model was prompted with.
|
| I never am happy reading one of those; it's just a waste of time.
| A lot of the folks doing it are not native English speakers. But
| for their use case, older tools like Grammarly that help improve
| the English writing are effective without the problematic
| decompression downsides of this class of LLM use.
|
| Regardless of how much LLMs can be an impactful tool for someone
| who knows how to use one well, definitely one of the impacts of
| LLMs on society today is that a lot of people think that they can
| improve their work by having an LLM edit it, and are very wrong.
|
| (Sometimes, just telling the LLM to be concise can improve the
| output considerably. But clearly many people using LLMs think the
| overly verbose style it produces is good.)
| perching_aix wrote:
| > I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is
| not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think
|
| Back in HS literature class, I had to produce countless essays on
| a number of authors and their works. It never once occurred to me
| that it was anything BUT an exercise in producing a reasonably
| well written piece of text, recounting rote-memorized talking
| points.
|
| Through-and-through, it was an exercise in memorization. You had
| to recall the fanciful phrases, the countless asinine
| professional interpretations, brief bios of the people involved,
| a bit of the historical and cultural context, and even insert a
| few verses and quotes here and there. You had to make the word
| count, and structure your writing properly. There was never any
| platform for sharing our own thoughts per se, which was sometimes
| acknowledged explicitly, and this was most likely because the
| writing was on the wall: nobody cared about these authors or
| their works, much less enjoyed or took interest in anything about
| them.
|
| I cannot recount a single thought I memorized for these
| assignments back then. Passed these with flying colors most
| usually, but even for me, this was just pure and utter misery.
| Even in hindsight, the sheer notion that this was supposed to
| make me think about the subject matter at hand borders on
| laughable. It took astronomical efforts to even retain all the
| information required - where would I have found the power in me
| to go above and beyond, and meaningfully evaluate what was being
| "taught" to me in addition to all this? How would it have
| mattered (in specifically the context of the class)? Me actually
| understanding these topics and pondering about them deeply is
| completely inobservable through essay writing, which was the sole
| method of grading. If anything, it made me biased _against_ doing
| so, as it takes a potentially infinite extra time and effort. And
| since there was approximately no way for our teacher to make me
| interested in literature either, he had no chance at achieving
| such lofty goals with me, if he ever actually aimed for them.
|
| On the other side of the desk, he also had literal checklists.
| Pretty sure that you do too. Is that any environment for an
| honest exchange of thoughts? Really?
|
| If you want to read people's original thoughts, maybe you should
| begin with not trying to coerce them into producing some for you
| on demand. But that runs contrary to the overarching goal here,
| so really, maybe it's the type of assignment that needs changing.
| Or the framework around it. But then academia is set in its ways,
| so really, there's likely nothing you can specifically do. You
| don't deserve to have to sift through copious amounts of LLM
| generated submissions; but the task of essay writing does, and
| you're now the one forced to carry this novel burden.
|
| LLMs caught incumbent pedagogical practices with their pants
| down, and it's horrifying to see people still being in denial of
| it, desperately trying to reason and bargain their ways out of
| it, spurred on by the institutionally ingrained mutual-hostage
| scenario that is academia. *
|
| * Naturally, I have absolutely zero formal relation to the field
| of pedagogy (just like the everyday practice of it in academia to
| my knowledge). This of course doesn't stop me from having an
| unreasonably self-confident idea on how to achieve what you think
| essay writing is supposed to achieve though, so if you want a
| terrible idea or two, do let me know.
| psygn89 wrote:
| As someone who doesn't have to grade student assignments, I'd
| rather read the bullet points. I've always liked using bullet
| points even in grade school, and also used words like dwelve, so
| I'd definitely fail the AI sniff test if I ever went back to
| school.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| My 10 year old who's an amazing at drawing sad AI is bad it won't
| allow creativity or imagination, it will just be copy paste
| artists
| quest88 wrote:
| Hah, I've been including the prompts of my patches in pull
| requests. Glad others like that.
| casey2 wrote:
| Teachers say they would rather read the prompt but the truth is
| plain that they wouldn't
|
| It's the old joke of the teacher who wants students to tried
| their best and that failure doesn't matter. But when the student
| follows the process to the best of their ability and fails they
| are punished while the student who mostly follows the process and
| then fudges their answer to the correct one is rewarded.
| alganet wrote:
| The suggestion that an artificial intelligence follows a specific
| kind of writing style is a trap.
|
| Relying on that to automatically detect their use makes no sense.
|
| From a teaching perspective, if there is any expectation that
| artificial intelligence is going to stick, we need better
| teachers. Ones that can come up with exercises that an artificial
| intelligence can't solve, but are easy for humans.
|
| But I don't expect that to happen. I expect instead text to
| become more irrelevant. It already has lost a lot of its
| relevancy.
|
| Can handwriting save us? Partially. It won't prevent anyone from
| copying artificial intelligence output, but it will make anyone
| that does so think about what is being written. Maybe think "do I
| need to be so verborragic?".
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| LLMs and AI use create new dichotomies we don't have language
| for.
|
| Exploring a concept-space with LLM as tutor is a brilliant way to
| educate yourself. Whereas pasting the output verbatim, passing it
| as one's own work, is tragic: skipping the only part that
| matters.
|
| Vibe coding is fun right up to the point it isn't. (Better models
| get you further.) But there's still no substitute for guiding an
| LLM as it codes for you, incrementally working and layering code,
| committing to version control along the way, then putting the
| result through both AI and human peer code reviews.
|
| Yet these all qualify as "using AI".
|
| We cannot get new language for discussing emerging distinctions
| soon enough. Without them we only have platitudes like "AI is a
| powerful tool with both appropriate and inappropriate uses and
| determining which is which depends on context".
| halfadot wrote:
| > Don't let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons
| of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness. I say
| this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more
| interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large
| language model can transform them into.
|
| Having spent about two decades reading other humans' "original
| thoughts", I have nothing else to say here other than: doubt.
| myth2018 wrote:
| > Anecdotally, this phenomenon seems more common among English-
| as-a-second-language speakers
|
| That part caught my attention. As an English-as-a-second-language
| speaker myself, I find it so difficult to develop any form of
| "taste" in English the same way I have in my mother tongue. A
| badly written sentence in my mother tongue feels painful in a
| sort of physical way, while bad English usually sound OK to me,
| especially when asserted in the confident tone LLMs are trained
| in. I wish I could find a way to develop such sense for the
| foreign languages I currently use.
| nairadithya wrote:
| Reading good literature helps you develop that sense fairly
| quickly.
| jama211 wrote:
| This is a pretty unhelpful response to be honest
| myth2018 wrote:
| Good that you brought that up: that works pretty well to me
| in my mother tongue. I still learn and absorb beautiful and
| useful patterns reading good authors. But that doesn't seem
| to work in other languages as well. I somehow don't manage to
| appropriate the new patterns, or maybe I do, but very slowly.
|
| Interestingly, when it comes to spoken English, I can learn
| by imitation way faster.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Crucially: if you just send me the prompt, and for some reason I
| would rather have read the model output, I can just paste the
| prompt into the model. However, theres no way to go the other way
| jama211 wrote:
| Then just make the assignment "write me a prompt for..." rather
| than "regurgitate info for..."
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I'd rather read the prompt
|
| Yeah, to recycle a comment [0] from a few months back:
|
| > Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to _counterfeit_
| signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper
| practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time
| into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or
| "can they even think straight." [...]we might have to cope by
| saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters
| are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."
|
| In other words, when the presentation means nothing, why bother?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41675602
| jama211 wrote:
| Not to mention that if the teacher would rather read the
| prompt... then ask for the prompt then? This genuinely reads to
| me like "I asked for an apple and got an apple instead of an
| orange, hurr durr I'm so annoyed".
|
| Asking students for regurgitated info and then being annoyed
| because they supplied generic regurgitated info is somewhat
| telling an attitude no?
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Asking students for regurgitated info
|
| You're confusing the artifact with the purpose. Teachers
| across the nation are _not_ trying to accumulate the largest
| corpus of distinct human-written reviews of _The Great
| Gatby_.
|
| The goal is to elicit some kind of mental practice, and the
| classic request is for something that helps prove it
| occurred. The issue is that such proofs are now being
| counterfeited with unprecedented scale and ease.
|
| When those indicators become debased and meaningless, we need
| to look for other ways of motivating and validating.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Ever since AI came out I've been talking about the prompt to
| output ratio. We naturally assume that the prompt will be smaller
| than the output just because of the particulars of the systems we
| use, but as you get more and more particular of what you want,
| the prompt grows while the output stays the same size. This is
| logical. If instead of writing an essay, I just describe what I
| want the essay to say, the description is necessarily gonna be a
| larger amount of text than the essay itself. It's more text to
| describe what's said, than to just say it. The fact that we
| expect to do less effort and get back more effort indicates
| exactly what we're getting here: a bunch of filler.
|
| In that way, the prompt is more interesting, and I can't tell you
| how many times I've gone to go write a prompt because I dunno how
| to write what I wanna say, and then suddenly writing the prompt
| makes that shit clear to me.
|
| In general, I'd say that AI is way more useful to compress
| complex ideas into simple ones than to expand simplistic ideas in
| to complex ones.
| roxolotl wrote:
| This is why it's unlikely these systems will effectively
| replace software development. By the time you've specified the
| novel system you want to build well enough in English such that
| you get exactly the system you want you might as well have
| written the code.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Yep. To put it another way: In a scenario where you want to
| say something, you can't outsource what you want to say to
| anyone. It doesn't matter whether or not you want to say it
| in code or if you want to say it in English.
| jama211 wrote:
| Well... you're forgetting the part where you can cut out the
| middleman. Currently a leader has to ask an engineer to build
| a system, and has to communicate effectively with the
| engineer until all of the novel details have been ironed out
| in the specification, and _y_ the engineer builds it.
|
| In a world where the LLM can do the building, the engineer is
| no longer required.
| empthought wrote:
| You just turned your leader into an engineer, is all.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| More often than not, the building is the easy part once the
| specifics are ironed out.
|
| In my experience, an _ideas leader_ (you know the type)
| will fail at telling a machine exactly what to do and get
| bored with the inevitable edge cases, computers saying no,
| and non-ideas drudgery. This is where I believe every no-
| code and low-code and WYSIWYG platform and now LLMs fall
| apart.
|
| A major aspect of programming is translating the messy
| meatspace to something an extremely fast moron (a computer
| and I wish I coined this term) understands. And as much of
| a step change LLMs for writing code are, I have yet to see
| them take this step.
| immibis wrote:
| They've tried this before and they made COBOL. Turns out
| you still need programmers to write COBOL because it's
| still programming even if the program looks Englishy.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| This is simply not true.
|
| I can describe a novel physics model for a video game. I can
| do a refresher on concepts like friction, air resistance,
| gravity, etc. that I don't remember well from school. Then I
| can describe the constraints and generate code to satisfy it.
|
| If I were to go and learn the physics really in depth and
| then code it myself, it would take 10x longer.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The comparison is to use a physics library. Only in the LLM
| case are you trying to write the physics engine yourself.
| And if its not the kind of physics that's in a library,
| yes, you will need to learn it to ship a game.
| xandrius wrote:
| I don't think prompt / output ratio, is the speed to get the
| output that matters.
|
| If I spend 1 hour and write 500 words of prompt to then attach
| X additional rows of data (e.g. Rows from a table) and the LLM
| returns X rows of perfect answers. It shouldn't matter that the
| output ratio is worse than if I had typed those characters
| myself.
|
| The important thing is whether within that 1 hour (+ few
| minutes of LLM processing) I managed to get the job done
| quicker or not.
|
| It's similar to programming, using LLMs is not necessarily to
| write better code than I personally could but to write good
| enough code much faster than I ever would.
| bost-ty wrote:
| > In that way, the prompt is more interesting, and I can't tell
| you how many times I've gone to go write a prompt because I
| dunno how to write what I wanna say, and then suddenly writing
| the prompt makes that shit clear to me.
|
| Bingo. It can be a rubber duck that echoes your mistakes back.
| Unfortunately, as other commenters have pointed out, the prompt
| may not be as interesting/iterative as we might suppose:
| "Here's the assignment, what's the answer".
| jama211 wrote:
| This is a lot of words of complaining instead of just changing
| the assignment specification to ask students to provide a prompt
| that they'd use, instead of asking them to regurgitate
| information. You get what you ask for mate, I don't understand
| what's so hard about this.
|
| If your assignment can be easily performed by an LLM, it's a bad
| assignment. Teachers are just now finding out the hard way that
| these assignments always sucked and were always about
| regurgitating information pointlessly and weren't helpful tools
| for learning lol. I did heaps of these assignments before the
| existence of LLMs, and I can assure you that the busywork was
| mostly a waste of time back then too.
|
| People using LLMs is just proof they don't respect your
| assignment - and you know what, if one person doesn't respect
| your assignment, they're probably wrong. But if 90% of people
| don't respect your assignment? Maybe you should consider whether
| the assignment is the problem. It's not rocket science.
| arh68 wrote:
| Yeah. I wrote _so many_ hamburger essays that 1) were terrible
| & 2) got As, I wouldn't blame a student for generating that
| crap. I have written approximately 0 hamburger essays post-high
| school. They don't want _good_ , they want their made-up rules
| to be followed
|
| > _you 're not always going to have a calculator in your
| pocket_ was the old fib, now it's s/calculator/llama/
|
| So much of education when I was growing up was pointless box-
| checking, I'm a little satisfied that, finally, LLMs might
| swing the pendulum back towards valuable work. If any
| assignment an LLM could handle is limited to 10%, and 90% of
| the final grade is determined by oral exams, that seems
| positive.
|
| Is "2x4" equal to 4 + 4, or 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 ? There's only one
| correct answer! " _You ... pick up that can_ " wow such
| learning
|
| If LLMs love to produce 3-bullet-point-bold-font copypasta,
| it's probably because it's the exact varietal of crap that
| garnered so many upvotes on Quora. Why would I be asked to
| write a 500-word essay when 50 words would suffice? Maybe let's
| move beyond regurgitation & rote drudgery
| blintz wrote:
| Call it the iron law of LLMs:
|
| "No worthy use of an LLM involves other human beings reading its
| output."
|
| If you use a model to generate code, let it be code nobody has to
| read: one-off scripts, demos, etc. If you want an LLM to prove a
| theorem, have it generate some Coq and then verify the proof
| mechanically. If you ask a model to write you a poem, enjoy the
| poem, and then graciously erase it.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| None of the people writing these sorts of posts seem willing to
| acknowledge how prevalent not doing your own work was before AI
| wad around.
|
| The hardest hit industry by AI has been essay writing services.
|
| If anything, it seems they're noticing because the AI is doing a
| worse job.
| tkgally wrote:
| I teach a university class in which I ask the students to submit
| writing each week, and I have also seen obviously LLM-produced
| writing. Yes, it's boring and doesn't show the students'
| thinking, and the students are not getting any wiser by doing
| assignments that way. Just last week, I told my students that,
| while they can use LLMs any way they like for the class, their
| writing will be more interesting if they write it themselves and
| use LLMs only sparingly, such as for fixing grammatical mistakes
| (most of the students are not native speakers of English). It
| helps, I think, that in this class the students' writing is
| shared among the students, and during class I often refer to
| interesting comments from student writing. The students
| themselves, I hope, will come to understand the value of reading
| human-written writing.
|
| That said, I myself am increasingly reading long texts written by
| LLMs and learning from them. I have been comparing the output of
| the Deep Research products from various companies, often
| prompting for topics that I want to understand more deeply for
| projects I am working on. I have found those reports very helpful
| for deepening my knowledge and understanding and for enabling me
| to make better decisions about how to move forward with my
| projects.
|
| I tested Gemini and ChatGPT on "utilizing Euler angles for
| rotation representation," the example topic used by the author in
| the linked article. I first ran the following metaprompt through
| Claude: Please prepare a prompt that I can give
| to a reasoning LLM that has web search and "deep research"
| capability. The prompt should be to ask for a report of the type
| mentioned by the sample "student paper" given at the beginning of
| the following blog post: https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/
| Your prompt should ask for a tightly written and incisive report
| with complete and accurate references. When preparing the prompt,
| also refer to the following discussion about the above blog post
| on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803
|
| I put the the full prompt written by Claude at the end of the
| Gemini report, which has some LaTex display issues that I
| couldn't get it to fix:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sqpeLY4TWD8L4jDSloeH45AI...
|
| Here is the ChatGPT report:
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/681816ff-2048-8011-8e0f-d8cbad2520...
|
| I know nothing about this topic, so I cannot evaluate the
| accuracy or appropriateness of the above reports. But when I have
| had these two Deep Research models produce similar reports on
| topics I understand better, they have indeed deepened my
| understanding and, I hope, made me a bit wiser.
|
| The challenge for higher education is trying to decide when to
| stick to the traditional methods of teaching--in this case,
| having the students learn through the process of writing on their
| own--and when to use these powerful new AI tools to promote
| learning in other ways.
| j2d3 wrote:
| All this was an excuse to use the word brobdingnagian.
| markusde wrote:
| Preach about the bullet points. I was grading some assignments a
| while ago and by some mysterious coincidence like a third of the
| answers were written in this strange bullet point format listing
| the the same 3 ideas.
|
| The punchline? Bullet point 3 was wrong (it was a PL assignment
| and I'm 99% sure the AI was picking up on the word macro and
| regurgitating facts abut LISP). 0 points all around, better luck
| next time.
| Zebfross wrote:
| I am personally proud of my use of AI because for anything non-
| trivial it is generally a conversation where each recommendation
| needs to be altered by an imaginative suggestion. So ultimately
| it's the entire conversation that needs to be considered, not
| just the "final" prompt.
| polpenn wrote:
| Here's something I sometimes do to avoid boring content when
| using LLMs: I type out what it gives me and tweak it as I go
| instead of copy/pasting directly.
|
| It helps me spot the bits that feel flat or don't add much, so I
| can cut or rework them--while still getting the benefit of the
| LLM's idea generation.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. You should be providing the
| ideas in any piece of text you write. The boring prose style is
| not the major objection being expressed here.
| zahlman wrote:
| > [Not a student's real answer, but my handmade synthesis of the
| style and content of many answers]
|
| > You only have to read one or two of these answers to know
| exactly what's up: the students just copy-pasted the output from
| a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably
|
| This is validating. Your imitation completely fooled me (I
| thought it really was ChatGPT and expected to be told as much in
| an entirely unsurprising "reveal") and the subsequent description
| of the style is very much in agreement with how I'd characterize
| it.
|
| In previous discussions here, people have tried to convince me
| that I can't actually notice these obvious signs, or that I'm not
| justified in detecting LLM output this way. Well, it may be the
| case that all these quirks derive from the definitely-human
| training data in some way, but that really doesn't make them
| Turing-test-passing. I can remember a few times that other people
| showed me LLM prose they thought was very impressive and I was...
| very much not impressed.
|
| > When someone comments under a Reddit post with a computer-
| generated summary of the original text, I honestly believe that
| everyone in the world would be better off had they not done so.
| Either the article is so vapid that a summary provides all of its
| value, in which case, it does not merit the engagement of a
| comment, or it demands a real reading by a real human for
| comprehension, in which case the summary is pointless. In
| essence, writing such a comment wastes everyone's time.
|
| I think you've overlooked some meta-level value here. By
| supplying such a comment, one _signals_ that the article is vapid
| to other readers who might otherwise have to waste time reading a
| considerable part of the article to come to that conclusion. But
| while it isn 't as direct as saying "this article is utterly
| vapid", it's more socially acceptable, and also more _credible_
| than a bald assertion.
| EigenLord wrote:
| I think the answer to the professor's dismay is quite simple.
| Many people are in university to survive a brutal social
| darwinist economic system, not to learn and cultivate their
| minds. Only a very small handful of them were ever there to study
| Euler angles earnestly. The rest view it as a hoop they have to
| jump through to hopefully get a job that might as well be
| automated away by AI anyway. Also viewed from a conditional
| reinforcement perspective, all the professor has to do is start
| docking grade points from students who are obviously cheating.
| Theory predicts they will either stop doing it, or get so good at
| it that it becomes undetectable-possibly an in-demand skill for
| the future.
| Balgair wrote:
| Nit pick: He's not a professor, just a grad student at the same
| place he got his undergrad, and he's mostly gone to university
| during covid. At least per his page here:
| https://claytonwramsey.com/about/
|
| Its not like professors get real training either, but the guy
| doesn't seem to have gotten any real pedagogy.
|
| I guess that I'm driving at that this guy is awfully young and
| the essay was a hot take. We should judge it accordingly.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Whose system though?
|
| I agree, it's weird for parents to say, "Jump through these
| hoops, and for every dollar you earn grinding sesame for some
| company, we'll give you an additional two."
|
| Working and educating yourself is decent and dignified, no? Is
| this a bad deal?
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| > Working and educating yourself is decent and dignified, no?
|
| I think that depends radically on the nature of the work. I
| hold a BS in Computer Science but am at an organization that
| requires me to use LLMs as part of my performance evaluation;
| I could protest, but it puts my immigration status at risk
| (my employer has sponsored me into my current country). I
| view the things asked of me (using LLMs) as degrading, but
| I'm unable to effectively protest that despite being well-
| regarded as an engineer (by peers and past employers) and
| credentialed (BS in CS).
|
| Put differently, most people do A Job because they need to
| put food on the table. One of my partners used to work in the
| veterinary field, which took an immense physical toll on
| them. They're much happier being (f)unemployed currently,
| being able to work in the garden and make good food and
| produce art, but our finances are suffering for it; they're
| hunting for jobs, but most of the current openings are pretty
| bad in terms of work/life balance and future opportunity.
|
| Working is not inherently necessary; in our current economic
| system it's exploitatively-required in order to live any sort
| of decent and dignified life, and there's loads of stories
| about people who work but aren't treated with dignity (thru
| healthcare or housing or food strife).
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| These people are about to become extinct.
| neilwilson wrote:
| "I would have written a shorter letter but I didn't have the
| time"
|
| Pithy and succinct takes time.
| ijidak wrote:
| The level of cheating in college, pre-AI, is often overlooked in
| these articles.
|
| Pre-AI, homework was often copied and then individuals just
| crammed for the tests.
|
| AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students
| are only in it for the diploma.
|
| If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a
| classmate or previous grad.
|
| And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still
| learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting
| AI do the thinking for them now.
| dsego wrote:
| Because everyone needs to finish university for jobs that
| 50-100 years ago were done by people with basic literacy and 4
| years of primary school. And even some advanced jobs are
| basically trades, so trade schools to churn out paper pushers
| and coders, and so on, but leave the universities for
| scientists and academics.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| People defending this are wrong in an additional, more pathetic
| way: Even if you insist on "cheating" and using an LLM to
| communicate, you are using it _badly_. You manage to be obviously
| incompetent at using the tool you are evangelizing.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > I'm not much of a generative-model user myself
|
| Perhaps that's good, perhaps that's bad, but it certainly doesn't
| really allow him to see much of the appeal... _yet_
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| As long as there are trick-questions, LLMs have legitmimacy for
| being used
| ruuda wrote:
| By now I consider LLM text a double insult. It says "I couldn't
| be bothered to spend time writing this myself," yet it makes _me_
| waste time reading through the generated fluff! I agree with the
| article, I'd rather read the prompt.
|
| https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions
| junto wrote:
| Back in the 90's I remember similar sorts of kickback from
| traditional media about the internet and from academia about
| students not using the library on campuses anymore.
|
| Libraries are still in every campus, often with internet access.
|
| Traditional media have transitioned to become online content
| media farms. The NYT Crossword puzzle is now online. Millions of
| people do Wordle every day online.
|
| This is just kickback. Every paradigm shift needs kickback in
| order to let the dust settle and for society to readjust and find
| equilibrium again.
| lqr wrote:
| For math and writing, we still have in-class exams as an LLM-free
| evaluation tool.
|
| I wish there was some way to do the same for programming. Imagine
| a classroom full of machines with no internet connection, just a
| compiler and some offline HTML/PDF documentation of languages and
| libraries.
| landgenoot wrote:
| This is perfectly possible.
|
| +-12 years ago I took a course on concepts of programming
| languages. The exam consisted out of programming exercises in a
| classroom without internet access.
|
| Grading was based on the number of (hidden) unit tests that
| succeeded.
|
| https://eelcovisser.org/blog/teaching/2014/02/05/programming...
| rocqua wrote:
| Is the author forgetting a baby in the bathwater he is throwing
| out? Especially on coding. He points out that vibe coding is bad,
| and then concluding that any program written through the use of
| an AI is bad.
|
| For example if you already have a theory of your code, and you
| want to make some stuff that is verbose but trivial. It is just
| more efficient to explain the theory to an LLM and extract the
| code. I do like the idea of storing the underlying prompt in a
| comment.
|
| Same for writing. If you truly copy paste output, it's obviously
| bad. But if you workshop a paragraph 5 or 6 times that can really
| get you unstuck.
|
| Even the euler angles example. That output would be a good
| starting point for an investigation.
| eric-burel wrote:
| A lot of criticism of LLMs is certainly legit and relevant, but
| are targeting very naive uses of the tools. Post-processing the
| output with an improvement prompt isn't even mentioned here.
| I'd rather read a criticism of agents, systems that produce SEO
| optimized articles etc. The debates would be more interesting.
| 6510 wrote:
| Teachers lose much if not all of their time teaching while people
| applying what they've learned spend all of their time applying
| and advancing the practical side of it. The later don't even know
| how to use LLM's.
| r0b05 wrote:
| Ironically, the biggest benefit I get from using LLM's is
| precisely to help me learn.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >I believe that the main reason a human should write is to
| communicate original thoughts
|
| More than communicate, I would say to induce thoughts.
|
| I write poetry here and there (on paper, just for me). I like how
| exploration through lexical and syntactic spaces can be
| intertwined with semantics and pragnatic matters. More
| importantly, I appreciate how careful thoughts are playing with
| attention and other uncharted thoughts. The invisible side
| effects on mental structures happening in the creation of
| expression can largely outweight the importance of what is left
| as an artefact publicly visible.
|
| For a far more trivial example, we can think about how notes in
| the margin of a book can radically change the way we engage with
| the reading. Even a careful spare word highlight can be a world
| of difference in how we engage with the topic. It's the very
| opposite of "reading" a few pages before realizing that not a
| single thought percolated into consciousness as it was wandering
| on something else.
| zjp wrote:
| I occasionally pair write with LLMs, but I give them my piece and
| then say, "I don't want your edits, just your feedback" and ask
| them some simple questions about the content and different angles
| on it. When the LLM says what I want it to say, I consider the
| piece good enough. That is to say, if a machine understands what
| you're saying and a human doesn't, that human's criticism might
| be below engaging with.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >That is to say, if a machine understands what you're saying
| and a human doesn't, that human's criticism might be below
| engaging with.
|
| No wonder OpenAI accidentally made LLMs even more sycophantic
| if this is what people want from them.
| internet_points wrote:
| > I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is
| not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think;
| a language model produces the former, not the latter.
|
| This so much. A writing exercise sharpens your mind, it forces
| you to think clearly through problems, gives you practice in both
| letting your thoughts flow onto paper, and in post-editing those
| thoughts into a coherent structure that communicates better. You
| can throw it away afterwards, you'll still be a better writer and
| thinker than before the exercise.
| Gud wrote:
| Although I agree with the OP that copy pasting verbatim from the
| LLM is a meaningless exercise, I just like to say that LLMs can
| be a fantastic study tool. I am using ChatGPT to help me with
| learning German, and it has had a profound impact on my learning.
| A_Stefan wrote:
| The output is so convenient that these students seem like they
| don't even change bits of it to make it their own.
|
| Since there is no "interdiction" to use any LLM, perhaps it
| should be mandatory to include the prompt as well when used.
| Feels like that could be the seed that sparks the curiosity..
| baalimago wrote:
| The problem isn't LLM, it's how universities are designed. With
| short terms and high pressure, students develop 'knowledge
| bulimia' (in lack of a better term). They have to study highly
| complex fields in short amounts of time, then move on to often
| unrelated fields quickly thereafter with no emphasize on
| persistent learning: the knowledge learned in previous exam can
| be mostly discarded. They may need to 're-learn' it for another
| exam, but that's fine, they are very good at learning new things
| which later on can get discarded.
|
| Using LLMs to achieve this is just another step in the evolution
| of a broken education system. The fix? IMO, make the exams for
| the courses delayed by one semester. So during the exam study-
| period, the students have to 'catch up' on the lectures they had
| a few months ago.
| skerit wrote:
| > You only have to read one or two of these answers to know
| exactly what's up: the students just copy-pasted the output from
| a large language model.
|
| I don't understand this either. I use it a lot, but I never just
| use what an LLM says verbatim. It's so incredibly obvious it's
| not written by a human. Most of the time I write an initial
| draft, ask Claude to check it and improve it, and then I might
| touch up a few sentences here and there.
|
| > Vibe coding; that is, writing programs almost exclusively by
| language-model generation; produces an artifact with no theory
| behind it. The result is simple: with no theory, the produced
| code is practically useless.
|
| Maybe I still don't know what vibe coding is, but for the few
| times when I _can_ use an LLM to write code for me, I write a
| pretty elaborate instruction on what I want, how it should be
| written, ... Most of the time I use it for writing things I know
| it can do and seem tedious to me.
| colbyn wrote:
| > I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is
| not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think;
| a language model produces the former, not the latter.
|
| Personally, I've been enjoying using ChatGPT to explore different
| themes of writing. It's fun. In my case the goal is specifically
| to produce artifacts of text that's different from what I'd
| normally produce.
| jjani wrote:
| > I'll now cover the opposite case: my peers who see generative
| models as superior to their own output. I see this most often in
| professional communication, typically to produce fluff or fix the
| tone of their original prompts. Every single time, the model
| obscures the original meaning and adds layers of superfluous
| nonsense to even the simplest of ideas.
|
| I'm going to call out what I see as the elephant in the room.
|
| This is brand new technology and 99% of people are still pretty
| clueless at properly using it. This is completely normal and
| expected. It's like the early days of the personal computer. Or
| Geocities and <blink> tags and under construction images.
|
| Even in those days, incredible things were already possible by
| those who knew how to achieve them. The end result didn't _have_
| to be blinking text and auto-playing music. But for 99% it was.
|
| Similarly, with current LLMs, it's already more than possible to
| use them in effective ways, without obscuring meaning or adding
| superfluous nonsense. In ways whose results have none of the
| author's criticisms apply. People just don't know how to do it
| yet. Many never will, just like many never learnt how to actually
| use a PC past Word and Excel. But many others will learn.
| time4tea wrote:
| Love that final thought.
|
| (AI slop). If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading.
|
| Perfect.
| harha_ wrote:
| I'm so tired of generative AI. I can't take anyone who uses them
| seriously anymore.
| cranium wrote:
| I've found really saddening to see students submit written-by-
| ChatGPT arguments to the department council when their university
| spot was on the line (for failing grades). This was their
| ultimate chance to prove their worth and they left it to ChatGPT.
|
| At first, I thought they didn't care. However, it was so
| pervasive that it couldn't be the only explanation. I was forced
| to conclude they trusted ChatGPT more than themselves to argue
| their case... (Some students did not care, obviously.)
| hi_hi wrote:
| So it seems like the future is people to write in a command
| prompt style for llms to better parse and repeat back our
| information. God I hope that isn't the future of the internet.
|
| How about an emoji like library designed exclusively for LLMs, so
| we can quickly condense context and mood without having to write
| a bunch of paragraphs, or the next iteration of "txt" speech for
| LLMs. What does the next step of users optimising for LLMs look
| like?
|
| I miss the 80's/90's :-(
| shaimagz wrote:
| if you've ever written a good prompt, you've probably thought:
| "someone else could benefit from this."
|
| we agree. mixus makes that easy -- across teams, classes, and
| communities.
| SebFender wrote:
| Maybe ridiculous from my part - but I think if they at least had
| to go hand written with these it could transfer a bit more
| knowledge back to the brain...
|
| Simply blaming models is an easy way out and creates little value
| - Maybe changing the medium and exercise to which it transfers
| could be a thing?
|
| It's time to get creative.
| lgiordano_notte wrote:
| If you outsource that to a model, you often end up with words but
| shallow or no understanding. Writing forces you to clarify your
| ideas. LLMs substitute genuine thinking with surface-level prose,
| which might sound alright but often lacks depth behind it.
| CivBase wrote:
| > A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of
| hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they
| shall receive a degree as testament to their completion of these
| assignments.
|
| IMO the core problem is that in many cases this typical belief
| holds true.
|
| I went to university to get a degree for a particular field of
| jobs. I'd generously estimate that about half of my classes
| actually applied to that field or jobs. The other half were
| required to make me a more "well rounded student" or something
| like that. But of course they were just fluff to maximize my
| tuition fees.
|
| There was no university that offered a more affordable program
| without the fluff. After all, the fluff is a core part of the
| business model. But there isn't much economic opportunity without
| a diploma so students optimize around the fluff.
| mightyham wrote:
| While I agree with the thrust of the article being that students
| are cheating themselves by relying on LLMs, it's important to
| reflect on ways in which educators have encouraged this behavior.
| Anyone who has been to college in the age of the internet knows
| that many professors, particularly in the humanities, lazily pad
| out their class work with short menial writing assignments, often
| in the form of a "discussion board", that are rarely even graded
| on content. For students already swamped with work, or having to
| complete these assignments for general ed courses unrelated to
| their major/actual interests, it is totally understandable why
| they would outsource this work to a machine. This is a totally
| fixable issue: in-person discussions and longer writing
| assignments with well structured progress reports/check-ins and
| rounds of peer review are a couple ways that I can think of off
| the top of my head. Professors need to be held accountable for
| creating course loads that are actually intellectually
| interesting and are at least somewhat challenging to use LLMs to
| complete. When professors are constantly handing out an excess of
| low-effort assignments, using shortcuts becomes a learned
| behavior of students.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I will often write a bunch of stuff and then use an LLM to pre-
| process it a little bit and suggest some improvements. I will
| then work through the differences and consider them individually
| and either accept them, or use them to write my own improvements.
| This is kind of like having an okay editor working for you. No
| substitute for a real editor, but it means that a: what I
| intended to say is preserved, b: there's no additional waffle
| (the prompt includes instructions not to expand on any topic, but
| only ever to summarise where possible), c: everything still goes
| by me in the end, and if it doesn't feel like something I would
| actually write then it doesn't get used.
|
| I believe that it has improved my writing productivity somewhat,
| especially when I'm tired and not completely on the ball.
| Although I don't usually reach for this most of the time (e.g.
| not for this comment).
| jonniebullie wrote:
| Am a student, the main message I have taken from this article, I
| should love to write and be comfortable with my thoughts no
| matter the situation. Thanks for this amazing writing.
| me3meme wrote:
| if people are going to read 630 comments about this post, I think
| they are not willing to read the prompt they prefer to expand
| endlessly like a LLM.
| samyar wrote:
| I agree on this. I thought LLMs are great for coding but they
| suck. They produce more work with debugging.
|
| I think I is good in two way, one is which you use if as a small
| helper (basic questions, auto completion...)
|
| Two for getting started on something that you have no idea on (
| not to teach you but just give you an idea of what it's and
| resources to learn more)
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm not hardcore anti-AIgen, but it feels like most of the usage
| of text-AIgen is for creating pointless filler.
| bobdosherman wrote:
| Writing sharpens your thoughts. Working math problems sharpens
| your ability to do math. In the context of the education system
| though, where grades are a signal of future ability, there's a
| strong incentive to engage in rent-seeking by either searching
| for a solutions manual or "refining" an LLM's output. The little
| I've done when I've taught math-based econ is to make it clear
| that in-class tests have very high weight on your final grade,
| and out-of-class problem sets have very low weight. I can only
| mouth words as to why it's vital for students to struggle
| independently on the problem sets as a tool for learning.
| unraveller wrote:
| You mean to tell me even anti-AI people are glazing my unseen
| prompts now! The solve for slop is easy for teachers and
| communicators alike: stop asking sorry questions and you stop
| getting sorry responses. Or stay the easy course, you will cede
| the game to discreet cheaters just to make honest people jump
| through antiquated hoops.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| I think prompt should be treated just like source code, as in the
| actual "craft" that you're paid to produce. Source code, if
| computer generated, feels more like artifacts (as in binaries).
|
| If you use AI all that is important is your ability to specify
| the problem, of course, as it always has been, you can just
| reiterate faster.
| spatchcock wrote:
| I'm learning C programming at the moment, originally I was doing
| it to understand security vulnerabilities more deeply, but I've
| found that I really enjoy the mental exercise of it (and the
| benefits of that exercise in my career, life etc.) Hopefully the
| ideas in this article will get to a lot of people eventually,
| otherwise I feel that people are going to dig themselves in a
| hole with using LLMs and not thinking for themselves.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| This is equivalent to students using AI to complete computer
| programming assignments. They misconstrue the purpose of an
| assignment as just one of generating output instead something to
| teach the principles and techniques they'll require later if they
| want a job in the profession. While they may believe they're
| fooling the teacher, all they're really doing is fooling, and
| cheating, themselves.
|
| Whether it be writing or computer programming, or exercising, for
| that matter, if you aren't willing to put in the work to achieve
| your goals, why bother?
| Krisando wrote:
| > I have never seen any form of create generative model output
| (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see
| than the original prompt.
|
| I've used LLM before to document command-line tools and APIs I've
| made; they aren't the final product since I also tweaked the
| writing and fixed misunderstandings from the LLM. I don't think
| the author would appreciate the original prompts, where I
| essentially just dump a lot of code and give instructions in
| bullet point form on what to output.
|
| These generated documentation are immensely useful, and I use
| them all the time for myself. I prefer the documentation to
| reading the code because finding what I need at a glance is not
| trivial nor is remembering all the conditions, prerequisites,
| etc.
|
| That being said, the article seems to focus on a use case where
| LLM is ill-suited. It's not suited for writing papers to pretend
| you wrote a paper.
|
| > I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are
| far more interesting
|
| Looking at the example posted, I'm not convinced that most
| people's original thoughts on gimbal lock will be more
| interesting than a succinct summary by an LLM.
| xixixao wrote:
| I have copilot turned off for markdown files. Cursor has this
| built in now. I'd never want AI to help write docs (except for
| narrow cases, repetitive references).
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > Why do we write, anyway?
|
| > I believe that the main reason a human should write is to
| communicate original thoughts.
|
| in fairness to the students, how does the above apply to school
| work?
|
| why does a student write, anyway? to pass an assignment, which
| has nothing to do with communicating original thoughts-- and
| whose fault is that, really?
|
| education is a lot of paperwork to get certified in the hopes
| you'll get a job. it's as bereft of intelectual life as the civil
| service examinations in imperial china. original thought doesn't
| enter the frame.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > Don't let a computer write for you!
|
| To play devil's advocate original code alienates you from many
| programming jobs. This was true before LLMs, and remains true
| now. Many developers abhor original code. They need frameworks or
| packages from Maven, NPM, pip, or whatever. They need to be told
| exactly what to do in the code, but copy/paste is better, and a
| package that already does it for you is better still. In these
| jobs, yes, absolutely let a computer write it for you (or at
| least anybody that is an untrusted outside stranger). Writing the
| code yourself will often alienate you from your peers and violate
| some internal process.
| 49531 wrote:
| I don't think using dependencies or frameworks is any different
| than using a word processor for writing. They're tools that get
| you to the real work of writing original code.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Frameworks and language code packages are not code editors or
| IDEs.
| qwertox wrote:
| I write my emails to people like the HoA myself, but always feed
| it into an LLM to make sure the point comes across. There are
| always so many corrections suggested, that I'd end up writing a
| precise mail, but one which I'd never had written that way. It's
| just not me in that mail. So I have the task to find a middle
| ground of what I need to remove from mine in order for it to be
| as easily understandable as the one the LLM suggests.
|
| Am I alone with this?
| zhyder wrote:
| Strongly agree with the author that the original prompt is much
| more substantive, but I think they're mistaken that "skin in the
| game" is a small motivating factor for human written text. It's
| the entire motivation: we all want to look like we've done more
| (get better grades at school, or get better compensation at work)
| while minimizing effort. We're not incentivized to produce just
| the substance, coz effort scales O(substance).
| thomasfedb wrote:
| I would argue against "entire". As an academic I (and I believe
| many of my colleagues also) take much pride in what we write -
| both the content and the prose itself.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| >I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far
| more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large
| language model can transform them into
|
| Can't agree more, but let's take a step back and understand why
| even in first place somebody uses LLM to generate content? imo
| everyone feel it's more of grunt work which doesn't deserve their
| piece of mind to focus, they downscale it as low hanging fruit
| and let them be automated for them. it's very thin line between
| getting automated everything mundane vs losing actually
| creativity.
|
| so it's author's stack ranking on whether writing this content in
| original thoughts have more value ( research report ) or LLM
| brings more value ( eg: very basic but heavy content like
| admission LoRs, essays ).
|
| i feel it's more subjective to the situation being handled at the
| moment.
| jjaksic wrote:
| I think AI can be an amazing tool that can help us learn even
| better when used correctly and when not used as a substitute for
| learning and understanding.
|
| It can be used as a personal tutor. How awesome is it to have a
| tutor always available to answer almost any question from any
| angle to really help you understand? Yes, AI won't get everything
| right 100%, but for students who are still learning basics, it's
| fair to assume that having an AI tutor can yield far better
| results than having no tutor at all.
|
| It can also be used as a tool for doing mundane work, so you can
| focus more on the interesting and creative work. Kind of like a
| calculator or a spreadsheet. Would math majors become better
| mathematicians if they had to do all calculations by hand?
|
| I think instead of banning AI, education needs to reform.
| Teaching staff should focus less time on giving lectures and
| grading papers (those things can be recorded and automated) and
| more time on ORAL EXAMS where they really probe student's
| knowledge and there's no possibility of cheating.
|
| Students can and should use AI to help them prepare. E.g. don't
| ask AI to write an essay for you, write it yourself and ask it to
| critique it. Don't ask it to give you answers for a test, ask it
| to ask you questions on the topic and find gaps in your
| knowledge. Etc.
| obscurette wrote:
| People thought that social media in our pockets can be amazing
| tool to help to connect the humanity if used correctly. And
| here we are.
|
| And about oral exams ... I agree that these are amazing. In
| seventies and eighties when I was in school, most of exams were
| oral. But our society is really afraid of these, because oral
| exams are always subjective.
| neogodless wrote:
| > Lately I've seen more people in their cars thwarting stoplight
| boredom--that is, unable to sit unmediated for even the few
| moments that it takes a red light to turn green, they reach for
| their smartphones.
|
| I wish it was only at stoplights. But then just a few days ago, I
| witnessed a totally unnecessary accident. Left-lane got green,
| and someone in the straight lane noticed the movement but didn't
| look up and drove right into the car in front of them...
| llsf wrote:
| The most brain intensive activity I ever did at school, happened
| in the very last two years (so, ~20 years at school lead to it),
| when I rubbed my brain to Lambda Prolog.
|
| I almost had headaches after intense thinking of problems and
| ways to solve them in lambda prolog. That was the most
| interesting and satisfying to physically feel the effect of high
| focus combined with applying what was a new logic.
|
| Computer science at the university, taught me how to learn and
| explore new ideas. I might sound like my grandpa who told me when
| I was 8yo that using calculator would lead to people not able to
| count... and here I am saying that LLM might lead to people who
| do not know how to write.
|
| Actually, I am a bit concern that we might produce more text in
| the short term because it is becoming cheap to write tons of
| documentation with LLMs. But those feel like death by Terms and
| Conditions, i.e. text that no one reads. So not only we would
| lose our ability to write, but we can seriously affect our
| ability to read. Sure LLM can summarize as well, but then we lose
| the nuances.
|
| Nature is lazy, but should we be lazy and delegate our ability to
| think (read/write), to a software ? Think about it :)
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