[HN Gopher] English professors double down on requiring printed ...
___________________________________________________________________
English professors double down on requiring printed copies of
readings
Author : cmsefton
Score : 94 points
Date : 2026-02-01 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yaledailynews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yaledailynews.com)
| zkmon wrote:
| >This academic year, some English professors have increased their
| preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns
| related to artificial intelligence.
|
| I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly
| is this AI-resistance sustainable?
| secabeen wrote:
| You can't easily copy and paste from a printout into AI. Sure,
| you can track down the reading yourself online, and then copy
| and paste in, but not during class, and not without some
| effort.
| xigoi wrote:
| LLM services have pretty much flawless OCR for printed text.
| stephenbez wrote:
| It's easy to take a picture of a printout and then ask AI
| about it. Not that hard even when it's many pages.
| layer8 wrote:
| It takes more initial effort than just starting reading, or
| even just skim-reading the material.
| Flavius wrote:
| This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop
| AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a
| photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All
| this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students
| to engage in digital hoop-jumping.
| ulrashida wrote:
| Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean
| another x% of the class reads the material rather than
| scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.
| mbreese wrote:
| It's not theater. It introduces friction into the process.
| And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper,
| or take a photo and upload the picture), you'll get more
| people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to
| jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active
| choice.
|
| At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is
| the passive default. By shifting it to require an active
| choice, you've make it more likely for students to choose to
| do the work.
| Flavius wrote:
| That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of
| snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and
| analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's
| because they actually want to read it, not because using AI
| was too much hassle.
| randcraw wrote:
| You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will
| inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly
| written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence
| -- making it easy for a prof (and _their_ AI) to detect
| the presence of AI use, especially if students are also
| quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own
| summary.
|
| Alternately, the prof can require that students write out
| notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a
| photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a
| handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays
| that follow.
|
| I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will
| become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and
| engineering courses.
| blell wrote:
| Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of
| something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount
| of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.
| mbreese wrote:
| It's not the time that's the friction. It's the _choice_.
| The student has to actively take the picture and upload
| it. It's a choice. It takes more effort than reading the
| autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot
| helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they
| replaced.
|
| It's not much more effort. The level of friction is
| minimal. But we're talking about the activation energy of
| students (in an undergrad English class, likely
| teenagers). It doesn't take much to swing the percentage
| of students who do the reading.
| blell wrote:
| Are you really comparing the energy necessary to read
| something to taking a photo and having an ai read it for
| you. You are not comparing zero energy to some energy,
| you are comparing a whole lot of energy to some energy.
| LtWorf wrote:
| The quotas for summarising text and parsing images and
| then summarising text aren't the same. As you surely
| know.
| blell wrote:
| Who's paying for that? Certainly not the users (yet).
| jrm4 wrote:
| You _fundamentally_ misunderstand the value of friction. The
| digital hoop-jumping, as you call it, is a very very useful
| signal for motivation.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The students were reading AI summaries rather than the original
| text.
|
| Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but
| you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything
| that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set
| expectations.
|
| This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all.
| But if you don't train your own brain to read and make
| thoughts, you won't have one.
| epolanski wrote:
| I was reading summaries online 25 years ago as well.
|
| Hell, in Italy we used to have an editor called Bignami make
| summaries of every school topic.
|
| https://www.bignami.com/
|
| In any case, I don't know what to think about all of this.
|
| School is for learning, if you skip the hard part you not
| gonna learn, your lost.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| Instead of learning the things that can be done by ai,
| learn how to use the ai as that's the only edge you got
| left.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed
| options.
|
| What could it mean for an "option" to be "required"?
| bko wrote:
| Who is behind this over digitization of primary school? My
| understanding is that in the Us pretty much all homework and
| tests are done on computers or iPads.
|
| This obv isn't a push by parents because I can't imagine parents
| I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best
| they're indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that
| don't want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the
| other work they used to do.
|
| And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten
| better, so what gives?
|
| Can anyone comment if it's as bad as this and what's behind it.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| My kids are in elementary school in the SF area (although
| pretty far in the 'burbs) and this is not my experience.
|
| The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and
| production of larger written projects and presents--the kind of
| things you'd expect. The younger one doesn't have any school-
| supplied device yet.
|
| Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short
| writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the
| majority of homework.
|
| I'm fine with this system. I wish they'd spend a little more
| time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing
| exercises in the 90's; my older one doesn't seem to have those
| kind of lessons). But in general, there's not too much
| homework, there's good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate
| that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and
| create projects using the tool he'll use to do so in future
| schooling.
| michaelt wrote:
| A few decades ago:
|
| * People needed to be taught digital skills that were in
| growing demand in the workplace.
|
| * The kids researching things online and word-processing their
| homework were doing well in class (because only upper-middle-
| class types could afford home PCs)
|
| * Some trials of digital learning produced good results.
| Teaching by the world's greatest teachers, exactly the pace
| every student needs, with continuous feedback and infinite
| patience.
|
| * Blocking distractions? How hard can that be?
| nine_k wrote:
| Reading with AI summaries jumping into your eyes is like
| writing in a word processor that completes sentences and
| paragraphs for you.
|
| Writing with a word processor that just helps you type,
| format, and check spelling is great. Blocking distractions on
| a general-purpose computer (like a phone or a tablet) is as
| hard as handing locked-down devices set up for the purpose,
| and banning personal devices.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then
| printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a
| word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation
| beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for
| comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is
| going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an
| iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page
| flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how
| the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then
| you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start
| being blank instead of actually having text.
| anilakar wrote:
| At 150 eurobucks apiece, printed freshman coursebooks were
| prohibitively expensive in uni. We just pirated everything as a
| consequence.
| Flavius wrote:
| That's the whole point. They don't care about students or
| education, they care about wasting resources and making a lot
| of money in the process.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| some do and some don't. the "outrage" button is appropriate
| for the first part (don't care about students; waste
| resources to increase profits), but destructive for the
| second (we do care about students; we use resources in the
| classroom). It is hard to discuss this important topic when
| things go to "yelling" immediately?
|
| > They don't care about students or education, they care
| about wasting resources and making a lot of money in the
| process.
| Symbiote wrote:
| At my university in actual Europe, many copies of the required
| textbooks were available in the library. Printing was free.
| jmclnx wrote:
| While I fully agree with this, this quote bothers me:
|
| >Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can
| cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding
| option
|
| Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so,
| only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should
| go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on
| paper.
|
| But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will
| avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a
| student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive
| software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they
| want. Or even a typewriter :)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have
| gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade
| split, to a 50/50 split, and have moved my quizzes from being
| online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-
| written notes
|
| Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it
| effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md
| file:
|
| https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
|
| And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a
| quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk
| throughs, etc.
|
| Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the
| projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating
| themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art
| of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience
| that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher
| level in the future.
|
| AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I
| have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations
| (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise.
| But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well.
|
| "It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs
| to be good."
| buckle8017 wrote:
| hopefully you've also modified the quizzes to be handwriting
| compatible.
|
| I once got "implement a BCD decoder" with about a 1"x4" space
| to do it.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| We just had our first set of in person quizzes and I gave
| them one question per page, with lots of space for answers.
|
| I'm concerned about handwriting, which is a lost skill, and
| how hard that will be on the TAs who are grading the exams. I
| have stressed to students that they should write larger,
| slower and more carefully than normal. I have also given them
| examples of good answers: terse and to the point, using
| bulleted lists effectively, what good pseudo-code looks like,
| etc.
|
| It is an experiment in progress: I have rediscovered the joys
| of printing & the logistics moving large amounts of paper
| again. The printer decided half way through one run to start
| folding papers slightly at the corner, which screwed up
| stapling.
|
| I suppose this is why we are paid the big bucks.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > I have also given them examples of good answers: terse
| and to the point
|
| Oh man, this reminds me of one test I had in uni, back in
| the days when all our tests were in class, pen & paper
| (what's old is new again?). We had this weird class that
| taught something like security programming in unix. Or
| something. Anyway, all I remember is the first two
| questions being about security/firewall stuff, and the
| third question was "what is a socket". So I really liked
| the first two questions, and over-answered for about a page
| each. Enough text to both run out of paper and out of time.
| So my answer to the 3rd question was "a file descriptor". I
| don't know if they laughed at my terseness or just figured
| since I overanswered on the previous questions I knew what
| that was, but whoever graded my paper gave me full points.
| logicchains wrote:
| Was it a Perl exam?
| thenipper wrote:
| How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't
| effectively write well?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| We have a testing center at Montana State for situations like
| this. I deliver my tests in the form of a PDF and the testing
| center administers it in a manner appropriate for the
| student.
| leviathant wrote:
| >How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't
| effectively write well?
|
| It's embarrassing to see this question downvoted on here.
| It's a valid question, there's a valid answer, and
| accessibility helps everyone.
| wredcoll wrote:
| It's a question that's too vague to be usefully answered
| especially on a forum like this.
|
| There's not such thing as "disabled people who can't write
| well", there's individuals with specific problems and
| needs.
|
| Maybe there's jessica who lost her right hand and is
| learning to write with the left who gets extra time. Maybe
| there's joe who has some form of nerve issue and uses a
| specialized pen that helps cancel out tremors. Maybe sarah
| is blind and has an aide who writes it or is allowed to use
| a keyboard or or or...
| zajio1am wrote:
| There is a specific condition called dysgraphia that
| pretty much fits descripion "can't write well".
| sjwgjnj wrote:
| Because it's another nonsensical "think of the children"
| argument for why nothing should ever change. Your comment
| really deserves nothing more than an eye roll emoji, but HN
| doesn't support them.
|
| Reasonable accommodations absolutely should be made for
| children that need them.
|
| But also just because you're a bad parent and think the
| rules don't apply to you doesn't mean your crappy kid gets
| to cheat.
|
| Parents are the absolute worst snowflakes.
| danadam wrote:
| > Your comment really deserves nothing more than an eye
| roll emoji, but HN doesn't support them.
|
| (*_*)
| bmacho wrote:
| There is -.-" for exasperation/annoyance
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| In the context of the immediate problems of AI in
| education, it's not a relevant thing to bring up. Finding
| ways for students with disabilities to succeed in higher
| education has been something that institutions have been
| handling for many decades now. The one I attended had well
| defined policies for faculty and specialist full time staff
| plus facilities whose sole purpose was to provide
| appropriate accommodations to such students and that was
| long, long ago. There will undoubtedly be some kind of role
| in the future for AI as well but current students with
| disabilities are not being left high and dry without it.
| baubino wrote:
| Reasonable accommodations have been made for students with
| disabilities for decades now. While there might be some cases
| where AI might be helpful for accommodating students, it is
| not, nor should it be, a universal application because
| different disabilities (and different students) require
| different treatment and support. There's tons of research on
| disability accommodations and tons of specialists who work on
| this. Most universities have an entire office dedicated to
| supporting students with disabilities, and primary and
| secondary schools usually have at least one person who takes
| on that role.
|
| So how do you handle kids who can't write well? The same way
| we've been handling them all along -- have them get an
| assessment and determine exactly where they need support and
| what kind of support will be most helpful to that particular
| kid. AI might or might not be a part of that, but it's a huge
| mistake to assume that it _has_ to be a part of that. People
| who assume that AI can just be thrown at disability support
| betray how little they actually know about disability
| support.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Do you find advocating for AI literacy to be controversial
| amongst peers?
|
| I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high school
| level I get very negative reactions from other parents.
| Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in the use of
| AI, and particular critical thinking skills around the tools,
| while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI. I don't want
| the school to be blindly "anti AI" as I'm aware it will be a
| part of the economy our kids are brought into.
|
| There are some head in the sands, very emotional attitudes
| about this stuff. (And obviously idiotically uncritical pro AI
| stances, but I doubt educators risk having those stances)
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Not OP, but I would imagine (or _hope_ ) that this attitude
| is far less common amongst peer CS educators. It is so clear
| that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future
| jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia. The
| best-positioned students will be the ones who can operate
| these tools effectively but with a critical mindset, while
| also being able to do without AI as needed (which of course
| makes them _better_ at directing AI when they do engage it).
|
| That said I agree with all your points too: some version of
| this argument will apply to most white collar jobs now. I
| just think this is less clear to the general population and
| it's much more of a touchy emotional subject, in certain
| circles. Although I suppose there may be a point to be made
| about being more slightly cautious about introducing AI at
| the high school level, versus college.
| danaris wrote:
| > It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a
| big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry
| and academia.
|
| No, it's not.
|
| _Nothing_ around AI past the next few months to a year is
| clear right now.
|
| It's very, very possible that within the next year or two,
| the bottom falls out of the market for
| mainstream/commercial LLM services, and then all the
| Copilot and Claude Code and similar services are going to
| dry up and blow away. Naturally, that doesn't mean that no
| one will be using LLMs for coding, given the number of
| people who have reported their productivity increasing--but
| it means there won't be a guarantee that, for instance, VS
| Code will have a first-party integrated solution for it,
| and that's a must-have for many larger coding shops.
|
| None of that is certain, of course! That's the whole point:
| _we don 't know what's coming_.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I agree with you that everything is changing and that we
| don't know what's coming, but I think you really have to
| stretch things to imagine that it's a likely scenario
| that AI-assisted coding will "dry up and blow away."
| You'll need to elaborate on that, because I don't think
| it's likely _even if_ the AI investment bubble pops.
| Remember that _inference_ is not really that expensive.
| Or do you think that things shift on the _demand_ side
| somehow?
| danaris wrote:
| I think that even if inference is "not really that
| expensive", it's not _free_.
|
| I think that Microsoft will not be willing to operate
| Copilot for free in perpetuity.
|
| I think that there has not yet been any meaningful large-
| scale study showing that it improves performance overall,
| and there _have_ been some studies showing that it does
| the opposite, despite individuals ' feeling that it helps
| them.
|
| I think that a _lot_ of the hype around AI is that _it is
| going to get better_ , and if it becomes prohibitively
| expensive for it to do that (ie, training), _and_ there
| 's no proof that it's helping, _and_ keeping the
| subscriptions going is a constant money drain, _and_
| there 's no more drumbeat of "everything must become AI
| immediately and forever", more and more _institutions_
| are going to start dropping it.
|
| I think that if the only programmers who are using LLMs
| to aid their coding are hobbyists, independent
| contractors, or in small shops where they get to fully
| dictate their own setups, that's a small enough segment
| of the programming market that we can say it won't help
| students to learn that way, because they won't be allowed
| to code that way in a "real job".
| LtWorf wrote:
| If they start charging what it costs them for example...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| There is so much confusion on this topic. Please don't
| spread more of it; the answers are just a quick google
| away. To spell it out:
|
| 1) AI companies make money on the tokens they sell
| through their APIs. At my company we run Claude Code by
| buying Claude Sonnet and Opus tokens from AWS Bedrock.
| AWS and Anthropic make money on those tokens. The unit
| economics are very good here; estimates are that
| Anthropic and OpenAI have a gross margin of _40%_ on
| selling tokens.
|
| 2) Claude Code _subscriptions_ are probably subsidized
| somewhat on a per token basis, for strategic reasons
| (Anthropic wants to capture the market). Although even
| this is complicated, as the usage distribution is such
| that Anthropic is making money on _some_ subscribers and
| then subsidizing the ultra-heavy-usage vibe coders who
| max out their subscriptions. If they lowered the cap,
| most people with subscriptions would still not max out
| and they could start making money, but they 'd probably
| upset a lot of the loudest ultra-heavy-usage influencer-
| types.
|
| 3) The biggest cost AI companies have is training new
| models. That is the reason AI companies are not net
| profitable. But that's a completely separate set of
| questions from what _inference_ costs, which is what
| matters here.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| without training new models, existing models will become
| more and more out of date, until they are no longer
| useful - regardless of how cheap inference is. Training
| new models is part of the cost basis, and can't be hand
| waved away.
| saltcured wrote:
| I think the "genie" that is out of the bottle is that
| there is no broad, deeply technical class who can resist
| the allure of the AI agent. A technical focus does not
| seem to provide immunity.
|
| In spite of obvious contradictory signals about quality,
| we embrace the magical thinking that these tools operate
| in a realm of ontology and logic. We disregard the null
| hypothesis, in which they are more mad-libbing plagiarism
| machines which we've deployed against our own minds. Put
| more tritely: We have met the Genie, and the Genie is Us.
| The LLM is just another wish fulfilled with calamitous
| second-order effects.
|
| Though enjoyable as fiction, I can't really picture a
| Butlerian Jihad where humanity attempts some religious
| purge of AI methods. It's easier for me to imagine the
| opposite, where the majority purges the heretics who
| would question their saints of reduced effort.
|
| So, I don't see LLMs going away unless you believe we're
| in some kind of Peak Compute transition, which is pretty
| catastrophic thinking. I.e. some kind of
| techno/industrial/societal collapse where the state of
| the art stops moving forward and instead retreats. I
| suppose someone could believe in that outcome, if they
| lean hard into the idea that the continued use of LLMs
| will incapacitate us?
|
| Even if LLM/AI concepts plateau, I tend to think we'll
| somehow continue with hardware scaling. That means they
| will become commoditized and able to run locally on
| consumer-level equipment. In the long run, it won't
| require a financial bubble or dedicated powerplants to
| run, nor be limited to priests in high towers. It will be
| pervasive like wireless ear buds or microwave ovens,
| rather than an embodiment of capital investment.
|
| The pragmatic way I see LLMs _not_ sticking around is
| where AI researchers figure out some better approach.
| Then, LLMs would simply be left behind as historical
| curiosities.
| danaris wrote:
| The first half of your post, I broadly agree with.
|
| The last part...I'm not sure. The idea that we will be
| able to compute-scale our way out of practically
| _anything_ is so much taken for granted these days that
| many people seem to have lost sight of the fact that we
| have _genuinely_ hit diminishing returns--first in the
| general-purpose computing scaling (end of Moore 's Law,
| etc), and more recently in the ability to scale LLMs.
| There is no longer a guarantee that we can improve the
| performance of training, at the very least, for the
| larger models by more than a few percent, no matter how
| much new tech we throw at it. At least until we hit
| another major breakthrough (either hardware or software),
| and by their very nature those cannot be counted on.
|
| Even if we can squeeze out a few more percent--or a few
| more tens of percent--of optimizations on training and
| inference, to the best of my understanding, that's going
| to be orders of magnitude too little yet to allow for
| running the full-size major models on consumer-level
| equipment.
| cheevly wrote:
| This is so objectively false. Sometimes I can't believe
| im even on HN anymore with the level of confidently
| incorrect assertions made.
| danaris wrote:
| You, uh, wanna actually back that accusation up with some
| data there, chief?
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| LLMs will stop being trained, as that enormous upfront
| investment will have been found to not produce the
| required return. People will continue to use the existing
| models for inference, not least as the (now bankrupt) LLM
| labs attempt to squeeze the last juice out of their
| remaining assets (trained LLMs). However these models
| will become more and more outdated, less and less useful,
| until they are not worth the electricity to do the
| inference anymore. Thus it will end.
| verdverm wrote:
| It is clear that AI had already transformed how we do our
| jobs in CS
|
| The genie is out of the bottle, never going back
|
| It's a fantasy to think it will "dry up" and go away
|
| Some other guarantees over the next few years we can make
| based on history: AI will get batter, faster, and more
| efficient like everything else in CS
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, like Windows in 2026 is better than Windows in
| 2010, Gmail in 2026 is better than Gmail in 2010, the
| average website in 2026 is better than in 2015, Uber is
| better in 2026 than in 2015, etc.
|
| Plenty of tech becomes exploitative (or more
| exploitative).
|
| I don't know if you noticed but 80% of LLM improvements
| are actually procedural now: it's the software around
| them improving, not the core LLMs.
|
| Plus LLMs have huge potential for being exploitative. 10x
| what Google Search could do for ads.
| verdverm wrote:
| You're crossing products with technology, also some
| cherry picking of personal perspectives
|
| I personally think GSuite is much better today than it
| was a decade ago, but that is separate
|
| The underlying hardware has improved, the network, the
| security, the provenance
|
| Specific to LLMs
|
| 1. we have seen rapid improvements and there are a ton
| more you can see in the research that will be impacting
| the next round of model train/release cycle. Both
| algorithms and hardware are improving
|
| 2. Open weight models are within spitting distance of the
| frontier. Within 2 years, smaller and open models will be
| capable of what frontier is doing today. This has a huge
| democratization potential
|
| I'd rather see the Ai as an opportunity to break the
| Oligarchy and the corporate hold over the people. I'm
| working hard to make it a reality (also working on
| atproto)
| oblio wrote:
| Every time I hear "democratization" from a techbro I keep
| thinking that the end state is technofeudalism.
|
| We can't fix social problems with technological
| solutions.
|
| Every scalable solution takes us closer to Extremistan,
| which is inherently anti democratic.
|
| Read the Black Swan by Taleb.
| danaris wrote:
| OK? Prove it.
|
| Show me _actual studies_ that clearly demonstrate that
| not only does using an LLM code assistant help make code
| faster in the short term, it doesn 't waste all that
| extra benefit by being that much harder to maintain in
| the long term.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'll be frank, tried this with a few other people
| recently and they
|
| 1. Open this line of debate similar to you (i.e. the way
| you ask, the tone you use)
|
| 2. Were not interested in actual debate
|
| 3. Moved the goalposts repeatedly
|
| Based on past experience entertaining inquisitors, I will
| not be this time.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Yeah. At this point, at the start of 2026, people that
| are taking these sorts of positions with this sort of
| tone tend to have their _identity_ wrapped up in wanting
| AI to fail or go away. That's not conducive to a reasoned
| discussion.
|
| There are a whole range of interesting questions here
| that it's possible to have a nuanced discussion about,
| without falling into AI hype and while maintaining a
| skeptical attitude. But you have to do it from a place of
| curiosity rather than starting with hatred of the
| technology and wishing for it to be somehow proved
| useless and fade away. Because that's not going to happen
| now, _even if_ the current investment bubble pops.
| verdverm wrote:
| wholehearted agreement
|
| If anything, I see this moment as one where we can
| unshackle ourselves from the oligarchs and corporate
| overlords. The two technologies are AI and ATProto, I
| work on both now to give sovereignty back to we the
| people
| somebehemoth wrote:
| > I see this moment as one where we can unshackle
| ourselves from the oligarchs and corporate overlords.
|
| For me, modern AI appears to be controlled entirely by
| oligarchs and corporate overlords already. Some of them
| are the same who already shackled us. This time will not
| be different, in my opinion.
|
| I like your optimism.
| jjav wrote:
| No such studies can exist since AI coding has not been
| around for a long term.
|
| Clearly AI is much faster and good enough to create new
| one-off bits of code.
|
| Like I tend to create small helper scripts for all kinds
| of things both at work and home all the time. Typically
| these would take me 2-4 hours and aside from a few tweaks
| early on, they receive no maintenance as they just do
| some one simple thing.
|
| Now with AI coding these take me just a few minutes,
| done.
|
| But I believe this is the optimal productivity sweet spot
| for AI coding, as no maintenance is needed.
|
| I've also been running a couple experiments vibe-coding
| larger apps over the span of months and while initial
| ramp-up is very fast, productivity starts to drop off
| after a few weeks as the code becomes more complex and
| ever more full of special case exceptions that a human
| wouldn't have done that way. So I spend more and more
| time correcting behavior and writing test cases to root
| out insanity in the code.
|
| How will this go for code bases which need to
| continuously evolve and mature over many years and
| decades? I guess we'll see.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, the genie is out of the bottle but could get back
| right in when it starts costing more, a whole lot more.
| I'm sure there's an amount of money for a monthly
| subscription that you'd either scale back your use or
| consider other alternatives. LLM as technology is indeed
| out of the bottle and here to stay but the current
| business around it is is not quite clear.
| cirrusfan wrote:
| I get a slow-but-usable ~10tk/s on kimi 2.5 2b-ish quant
| on a high end gaming slash low end workstation desktop
| (rtx 4090, 256 gb ram, ryzen 7950). Right now the price
| of RAM is silly but when I built it it was similar in
| price to a high end macbook - which is to say it isn't
| cheap but it's available to just about everybody in
| western countries. The quality is of course worse than
| what the bleeding edge labs offer, especially since heavy
| quants are particularly bad for coding, but it is good
| enough for many tasks: an intelligent duck that helps
| with planning, generating bog standard boilerplate,
| google-less interactive search/stackoverflow ("I ran
| flamegraph and X is an issue, what are my options here?"
| etc).
|
| My point is, I can get somewhat-useful ai model running
| at slow-but-usable speed on a random desktop I had lying
| around since 2024. Barring nuclear war there's just no
| way that AI won't be at least _somewhat_ beneficial to
| the average dev. All the AI companies could vanish
| tomorrow and you'd still have a bunch of inference-as-a-
| service shops appearing in places where electricity is
| borderline free, like Straya when the sun is out.
| danaris wrote:
| Then you're missing my point.
|
| Yes, you, a hobbyist, can make that work, and keep being
| useful for the foreseeable future. I don't doubt that.
|
| But either a majority or large plurality of programmers
| work in _some_ kind of large institution where they don
| 't have full control over the tools they use. Some
| percentage of those will never even be _allowed_ to use
| LLM coding tools, because they 're not working in tech
| and their bosses are in the portion of the non-tech
| public that thinks "AI" is scary, rather than the portion
| that thinks it's magic. (Or, their bosses have actually
| done some research, and don't want to risk handing their
| internal code over to LLMs to train on--whether they're
| actually doing that _now_ or not, the chances that they
| won 't in future approach nil.)
|
| And even those who _might_ not be outright forbidden to
| use such tools for specific reasons like the above will
| never be able to get _authorization_ to use them on their
| company workstations, because they 're not approved
| tools, because they require a subscription the company
| won't pay for, because etc etc.
|
| So saying that _clearly_ coding with LLM assistance is
| the future and it would be irresponsible not to teach
| current CS students how to code like that is patently
| false. It is a _possible_ future, but the volatility in
| the AI space right now is much, much too high to be able
| to predict just what the future will bring.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| I never understand anyone's push to throw around AI slop
| coding everywhere. Do they think in the back of their
| heads that this means coding jobs are going to come back
| on-shore? Because AI is going to make up for the savings?
| No, what it means is tech bro CEOs are going to replace
| you even more _and_ replace at least a portion of the
| off-shore folks that they 're paying.
|
| The promise of AI is a capitalist's dream, which is why
| it's being pushed so much. Do more with less investment.
| But the reality of AI coding is significantly more
| nuanced, and particularly more nuanced in spaces outside
| of the SRE/devops space. I highly doubt you could
| realistically use AI to code the majority of significant
| software products (like, say, an entire operating
| system). You might be able to use AI to add additional
| functionality you otherwise couldn't have, but that's not
| really what the capitalists desire.
|
| Not to mention, the models have to be _continually
| trained_ , otherwise the knowledge is going to be dead.
| Is AI as useful for Rust as it is for Python? Doubtful.
| What about the programming languages created 10-15 years
| from now? What about when everyone starts hoarding their
| information away from the prying eyes of AI scraper bots
| to keep competitive knowledge in-house? Both from a user
| perspective and a business perspective?
|
| Lots of variability here that literally nobody has any
| idea how any of it's going to go.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| AI is extremely dangerous for students and needs to be used
| intentionally, so I don't blame people for just going to "ban
| it" when it comes to their kids.
|
| Our university is slowly stumbling towards "AI Literacy"
| being a skill we teach, but, frankly, most faculty here don't
| have the expertise and students often understand the tools
| better than teachers.
|
| I think there will be a painful adjustment period, I am
| trying to make it as painless as possible for my students
| (and sharing my approach and experience with my department)
| but I am just a lowly instructor.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Honestly defining what to teach is hard
|
| People need to learn to do research with LLMs, code with
| LLMs, how to evaluate artifacts created by AI. They need to
| learn how agents work at a high level, the limitations on
| context, that they hallucinate and become sycophantic. How
| they need guardrails and strict feedback mechanisms if let
| loose. AI Safety connecting to external systems etc etc.
|
| You're right that few high school educators would have any
| sense of all that.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't know anyone who learned arithmetic from a
| calculator.
|
| I do know people who would get egregiously wrong answers
| from misusing a calculator and insisted it couldn't be
| wrong.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Yes but I was also taught to use a calculator, and
| particular the advanced graphing calculators.
|
| Not to mention programming is a meta skill on top of
| "calculators"
| subhobroto wrote:
| > I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high
| school level I get very negative reactions from other
| parents. Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in
| the use of AI, and particular critical thinking skills around
| the tools, while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI.
| I don't want the school to be blindly "anti AI" as I'm aware
| it will be a part of the economy our kids are brought into.
|
| This is my exact experience as well and I find it
| frustrating.
|
| If current technology is creating an issue for teachers -
| it's the teachers that need to pivot, not block current
| technology so they can continue what they are comfortable
| with.
|
| Society typically cares about work getting done and not much
| about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep
| into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if
| the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to
| measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026
| when there are robots that do that perfectly every-time, they
| should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do
| something else entirely.
|
| It's possible in the past, that learning how to use an abacus
| was a critical lesson but once calculators were invented, do
| we continue with two semesters of abacus? Do we allow
| calculators into the abacus course? Should the abacus course
| be scrapped? Will it be a net positive on society to replace
| the abacus course with something else?
|
| "AI" is changing society fundamentally forever and education
| needs to change fundamentally with it. I am personally
| betting that humans in the future, outside extreme niches,
| are generalists and are augmented by specialist agents.
| netsharc wrote:
| I'm also for education for AI awareness. A big point on
| teaching kids about AI should also be a lot about how
| unreliable they can be.
|
| I had a discussion with a recruiter on Friday, and I said I
| guess the issue with AI vs human is, if you give a human
| developer who is new to your company tasks, the first few
| times you'll check their work carefully to make sure the
| quality is good. After a while you can trust they'll do a
| good job and be more relaxed. With AI, you can never be
| sure at any time. Of course a human can also misunderstand
| the task and hallucinate, but perhaps discussing the issue
| and the fix before they start coding can alleviate that.
| You can discuss with an AI as much as you want, but to me,
| not checking the output would be an insane move...
|
| To return to the point, yeah, people will use AI anyway, so
| why not teach them about the risks. Also LLMs feel like
| Concorde: it'll get you to where you want to go very
| quickly, but at tremendous environmental cost (also it's
| very costly to the wallet, although the companies are now
| partially subsidizing your use with the hopes of getting
| you addicted)..
| cheevly wrote:
| Only if you naively throw AI carelessly at it. It sounds
| like you havent mastered the basics like fine-tuning,
| semantic vector routing, agentic skills/tooling
| generation...dozens of other solutions that robustly
| solve for your claim.
| netsharc wrote:
| Gosh, I really should attend LinkedIn University of
| Buzzwords...
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| everything you learn about math is completely obsoleted by
| ai five years from now
|
| everything you learn about working using chatbots is
| completely obsoleted by ai five years from now
|
| both are possible, but 2 is pretty much guaranteed if we
| get 1, so learning about chatting with opus is pretty much
| always less useful than learning derivatives by hand unless
| you're starting job applications in less than a few months
| bbor wrote:
| You seem like a great professor(/"junior baby mini instructor
| who no one should respect", knowing American academic
| titles...). Though as someone whose been on the other end of
| the podium a bit more recently, I will point out the maybe-
| obvious: Of course I can't ensure they aren't
| just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do
| that they are cheating themselves
|
| This is the right thing to say, but even the ones who want to
| listen can get into bad habits in response to intense
| schedules. When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus
| exam prep needs to happen but you're stuck debugging
| frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project
| late into the night... well, _I_ certainly would've caved far
| too much for my own good.
|
| IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, "this is for
| you" approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can't
| imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin
| & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a
| """prestigious""" place in a meta-rat race...
|
| For now, I guess I'd just recommend you try to think of ways to
| relax things and separate project completion from
| diligence/time management -- in terms of vibes if not a 100%
| mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you're
| doing great already :)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Yes, I expect that pressure will be there, and project grades
| will be near 100% going forward, whether the student did the
| work or not.
|
| This is why I'm going to in-person written quizzes to
| differentiate between the students who know the material and
| those who are just using AI to get through it.
|
| I do seven quizzes during the semester so each one is on
| relatively recent material and they aren't weighted too
| heavily. I do some spaced-repetition questions of important
| topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for
| the quiz. I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my
| undergrad, so I'm trying to remove that for them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad
|
| The pressure was what got me to do the necessary work.
| Auditing classes never worked for me.
|
| > I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics
| and give students a study sheet of what to know for the
| quiz.
|
| Isn't that what the lectures and homework are for?
| analog31 wrote:
| The irony is that on-time completion of is probably the #1
| source of project failure in the real world.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam
| prep needs to happen but you're stuck debugging frustrating
| pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the
| night...
|
| Millions of students prior to the last few years figured out
| how to manage conflicting class requirements.
| mmooss wrote:
| I think that's a great approach. I've thought about how to
| handle these issues and wonder how you handle several issues
| that come to mind:
|
| Competing with LLM software users, 'honest' students would seem
| strongly incentivized to use LLMs themeselves. Even if you
| don't grade on a curve, honest students will get worse grades
| which will look worse to graduate schools, grant and
| scholarship committees, etc., in addition to the strong
| emotional component that everyone feels seeing an A or C. You
| could give deserving 'honest' work an A but then all LLM users
| will get A's with ease. It seems like you need two scales, and
| how do you know who to put on which scale?
|
| And how do students collaborate on group projects? Again, it
| seems you have two different tracks of education, and they
| can't really work together. Edit: How do class discussions play
| out with these two tracks?
|
| Also, manually doing things that machines do much better has
| value but also takes valuable time from learning more advanced
| skills that machines can't handle, and from learning how to use
| the machines as tools. I can see learning manual statistics
| calculations, to understand them fundamentally, but at a
| certain point it's much better to learn R and use a stats
| package. Are the 'honest' students being shortchanged?
| j_french wrote:
| I had planned to move towards projects counting towards the
| majority of my CS class grades until chatgpt was released, now
| I've stuck with a 50/50 split. This year I said they were free
| to use AI all they liked (as if I can do anything about it
| anyway) , then ran interviews with the students about their
| project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a
| lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty
| well, plus they got some experience developing the important
| skull of communicating technical ideas.
|
| Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help
| prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely
| take a look at your AGENTS.md approach.
|
| What's your student feedback on it been like?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload
| course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order.
| Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can
| cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding
| option._
|
| This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just
| _bizarre_ to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of
| reading materials. _So much_ paper and toner.
|
| This is what iPads and Kindles are for.
| nine_k wrote:
| No, the cost of the paper, toner, and binding is the cost of
| providing of a provably _distraction-free_ environment.
|
| To make it more palpable for an IT worker: "It's just bizarre
| to give a developer a room with a door, so much sheetrock and
| wood! Working with computers is what open-plan offices are
| for."
| crazygringo wrote:
| What kind of distraction are you getting on your Kindle...?
|
| Also, the university isn't covering the cost here. The
| students are. And buying the Kindle would be cheaper than the
| printing cost of the packet itself.
|
| So I stand by my point. If you don't want distraction, get
| Kindles.
|
| And even iPads are pretty good. They tend to sit flat so
| you're not "hiding" your screen the way you can with a laptop
| or phone, and people often aren't using messaging or social
| apps on them so there are no incoming distractions.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Computers have not advanced education -- the data shows the
| opposite. I think we should just go back to physical books (which
| can be used!), and pen and paper for notes and assignments.
| randcraw wrote:
| At the very least, every school, subject, and teacher should be
| obliged to conduct experiments during the school year -- A/B/C
| trials in which various forms of note taking are explored:
| handwritten, computer-typed, and neither.
|
| Then see how it affects the kids' learning speed and retention
| of the various subjects. Then they need to compare notes with
| the other teachers to learn what they did differently and what
| did or didn't work for them.
|
| Ideally they'd also assess how this worked for different types
| of students, those with good vs bad reading skills, with good
| vs bad grades, esp those who are underperforming their
| potential.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| In pretty much any school system, just complain that the printout
| is not compatible with your text-to-speech engine, and the
| instructor will be required to provide an electronic version, no
| questions asked.
| berhunter420 wrote:
| Or you can fold your tuition dollars into cranes and burn them
| as performance art.
| jfengel wrote:
| Students have never understood the value of school work. It's
| a hard thing to understand. None of the assignments are asked
| because the teacher wants to know the answer. They already
| know. So it all closely resembles busy work. AI is perfectly
| designed to do busy work.
|
| Students have always looked for ways to minimize the work
| load, and often the response has been to increase the load.
| In some cases it has effectively become a way to tech you to
| get away with cheating (a lesson this even has some real-
| world utility).
|
| Keeping students from wasting their tuition is an age-old,
| Sisyphean task for parents. School is wasted on the young.
| Unfortunately youth is also when your brain is most receptive
| to it.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Isn't that the core of how universities operate, in the first
| place?
|
| Sure, you could get an education for cheap from a community
| college, or free from various online sources, or for the best
| education possible, get paid to learn on the job. If you
| attend a university though, you're getting prestige by
| showing how much of your money, or someone else's money, you
| can burn through.
|
| It's not like anyone's taking undergraduate classes at
| Harvard or Stanford because the teaching assistants actually
| instructing are going to provide above-average instruction.
| They aren't even concerned with tenured professors teaching
| performance; they put publishing metrics first.
| raincole wrote:
| If textbooks weren't so expensive I'd be more cheering on them.
|
| > TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload
| course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order.
| Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can
| cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding
| option.
|
| Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the
| whole system can fuck off.
| ageitgey wrote:
| > "Over the years I've found that when students read on paper
| they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch
| to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries," Shirkhani
| wrote to the News. "This improves the quality of class time by
| orders of magnitude."
|
| This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a
| major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the
| week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education
| establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies
| and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic
| summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it
| takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read
| the material. And if no one reads the original material, the
| class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone
| bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes
| a facade.
|
| Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI
| tools to be more productive while still learning how to think.
| The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing
| as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD
| level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning
| journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1
| second, removing the requirement for you to do anything.
|
| This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach
| children how to add numbers before we give them calculators
| because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-
| calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and
| screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in
| the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of
| masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?
| thomasfortes wrote:
| Last weekend I was arguing with a friend that physical guitar
| pedals are better for creativity and exploration of the musical
| space than modelers even though modelers have way more
| resources for a fraction of the cost, the physical aspect of
| knobs and cables and everything else leads to something that's
| way more interactive and prone to "happy mistakes" than any
| digital interface can offer.
|
| In my first year of college my calculus teacher said something
| that stuck with me "you learn calculus getting cramps on your
| wrists", yeah, AI can help remember things and accelerate
| learning, but if you don't put the work to understand things
| you'll always be behind people that know at least with a bird
| eye view what's happening.
| subhobroto wrote:
| > but if you don't put the work to understand things you'll
| always be behind people that know at least with a bird eye
| view what's happening.
|
| Depends. You might end up going quite far without even
| opening up the hood of a car even when you drive the car
| everyday and depend on it for your livelihood.
|
| If you're the kind that likes to argue for a good laugh, you
| might say "well, I don't need to know how my car works as
| long as the engineer who designed it does or the mechanic who
| fixes it does" - and this is accurate but it's also accurate
| not everyone ended up being either the engineer or the
| mechanic. It's also untrue that if it turned out it would be
| extremely valuable to you to actually learn how the car
| worked, you wouldn't put in the effort to do so and be very
| successful at it.
|
| All this talk about "you should learn something deeply so you
| can bank on it when you will need it" seems to be a bit of a
| hoarding disorder.
|
| Given the right materials, support and direction, most smart
| and motivated people can learn how to get competent at
| something that they had no clue about in the past.
|
| When it comes to smart and motivated people, the best drop
| out of education because they find it unproductive and
| pedantic.
| thomasfortes wrote:
| Yes, you can and I know just enough of cars to not be
| scammed by people, but not to know how the whole engine
| works, and I also don't think that you should learn
| everything that you can learn, there's no time for that,
| that's why I made the bird view comment.
|
| My argument is that when you have at least a basic
| knowledge of how things work (be it as a musician, a
| mechanical engineer or a scientist) you are in a much
| better place to know what you want/need.
|
| That said, smart and motivated people thrive if they are
| given the conditions to thrive, and I believe that physical
| interfaces have way less friction than digital interfaces,
| turning a knob is way less work than clicking a bunch of
| menus to set up a slider.
|
| If I were to summarize what I think about AI it would be
| something like "Let it help you. Do not let it think for
| you"
|
| My issue is not with people using AI as a tool, bit with
| people delegating anything that would demand any kind of
| effort to AI
| csa wrote:
| > And if no one reads the original material, the class
| discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing
| up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a
| facade.
|
| If reading an AI summary of readings is all it takes to make an
| exercise a facade, then the exercise was bad to begin with.
|
| AI is certainly putting pressure on professors to develop
| better curricula and evaluations, and they don't get enough
| support for this, imho.
|
| That said, good instruction and evaluation techniques are not
| some dark art -- they can be developed, implemented, and
| maintained with a modest amount of effort.
| jval43 wrote:
| I had to take some literature classes in high school, and had a
| truly exceptional teacher who facilitated great and interesting
| discussions. Really opened up my mind and I only later realized
| how lucky I was.
|
| Those summaries always existed, in the past you could buy them
| as little books for most of the classic literature we read.
| Thing is they were always the same trite points even back then.
|
| Our teacher would see right through any BS, but never call it
| out directly. Instead there would be 1 precise and nicely asked
| follow-on question or even just asking their opinion on a
| talking point. Not details, but a regular discussion question.
|
| If someone hadn't read the book they'd stutter and grasp at
| straws at that point and everyone knew they hadn't actually
| read it.
|
| On the other hand if you had read the book the answer was
| usually pretty easy, and often not what the common summaries
| contained as talking points.
|
| So cheating not only didn't work, the few regular cheaters we
| had in our class (everybody knew who those were) actually
| suffered badly.
|
| Only in hindsight did I realize that this is not the normal
| experience. Most other literature classes in fact do just focus
| on or repeat the same trite points, is what I've heard from
| many others.
|
| It takes a great teacher to make cheating not "work" while
| making the class easy, intellectually stimulating and
| refreshing at the same time.
| canpan wrote:
| You must have been blessed with great teachers.
|
| My experience was the exact opposite. I loved reading as a
| child. But I learned very fast in school that my "own
| opinion" on books results in bad grades, while reading and
| reiterating the "official summary" results in OK or even good
| grades. Like you say, the summaries existed long before AI.
| It is what the teacher and students make of the class.
| arnavpraneet wrote:
| I might be wrong but I fear this strategy might unfairly punish
| e-readers which imo offer the best of both worlds
| sodality2 wrote:
| I've brought my kindle to even the most strict of technology-
| banned lectures (with punishments like dropping a letter grade
| after one violation, and failing you after two), and never have
| they given me a problem when asked. They realize the issue
| isn't the silicon or lithium, it's the distractions it enables.
| I'm sure I could connect to some LLM on it, it's just that no
| one ever will.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Its obvious they don't care.
|
| That said, I always thought exams should be the moment of
| truth.
|
| I had teachers that spoke broken english, but I'd do the
| homework and read the textbook in class. I learned many topics
| without the use of a teacher.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| I've tried many e-readers since early Kindle but I keep coming
| back to two fundamental problems with e-ink, both relevant to
| education.
|
| First, extremely cumbersome and error-prone to type compared to
| swipe-typing on a soft keyboard. Even highlighting a few
| sentences can be problematic when spanning across a page
| boundary.
|
| Second, navigation is also painful compared to a physical book.
| When reading non-fiction, it's vital to be able to jump around
| quickly, backtrack, and cross-reference material. Amazon has
| done some good work on the UX for this, but nothing is as
| simple as flipping through a physical book.
|
| Android e-readers are better insofar as open to third-party
| software, but still have the same hardware shortcomings.
|
| My compromise has been to settle on medium-sized (~Kindle or
| iPad Mini size) tablets and treat them just as an e-reader.
| (Similar to the "kale phone" concept ie minimal software
| installed on it ... no distractions.) They are much more
| responsive, hence fairly easy to navigate and type on.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and
| college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real
| education.
|
| If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel
| them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they
| actually learn in college then what the students are doing is
| rational.
|
| If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that
| using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is
| that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which
| begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this
| institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time
| efficient way to ranking students for companies.
| rr808 wrote:
| It starts at admissions where learning is not a rewarded
| activity. You should be making impact in the community, doing
| some performative task that isn't useful for anything except
| making you different to your class mates who naively read the
| books and do the classwork honestly.
| testfoobar wrote:
| For elite colleges, it is a pithy aphorism that the hardest
| part is getting in.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to
| ranking students for companies.
|
| This topic comes up all the time. Every method conceivable to
| rank job candidates gets eviscerated here as being
| counterproductive.
|
| And yet, if you have five candidates for one job, you're going
| to have to rank them somehow.
| jrm4 wrote:
| As a college instructor, one issue I find fascinating is the
| idea that I'm supposed to care strongly about this.
|
| I do not. This is _your_ problem, companies. Now, I am aware
| that I have to give out grades and so I walk through the
| motions of doing this to the extent expected. But my goal is
| to instruct and teach all students to the best of my
| abilities to try to get them all to be as educated /useful to
| society as possible. Sure, you can have my little assessment
| at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for
| the companies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I didn't suggest you should care about company selection
| processes.
|
| But I would have been pretty angry to have been educated in
| topics that did not turn out to be useful in industry. I
| deliberately selected courses that I figured would be the
| most useful in my career.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right, but that _is_ the thing I pay attention to. Again,
| I want to hear from former _students_ that I did right by
| them, not current companies asking for free screening.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The GPA and course schedule should be sufficient.
| jval43 wrote:
| If I could go back in time and change what courses I took
| for my CS degree, it would be the exact opposite.
|
| I _wish_ I 'd gone more into theoretical computer
| science, quantum computing, cryptography, and in general
| just hard math and proofs.
|
| I took a few such courses and some things have genuinely
| been useful to know about at work but were also mind-
| expanding new concepts. I would never ever have picked up
| those on the job.
|
| Not to say the practical stuff hasn't been useful too (it
| has) but I feel confident I could pick up a new language
| easily anytime. Not so sure about formal proofs.
| subhobroto wrote:
| > At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and
| college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real
| education.
|
| I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say
| "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples
| from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were
| able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin,
| piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship
| from an elite college.
|
| This has been working extremely well except now you have AI
| agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.
|
| There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse
| making as students go through the flywheel already in motion
| with the current approach.
|
| However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach
| no longer works for a large population. It never really did but
| there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game
| going for a while. For one, college has become extremely
| expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for
| someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone
| getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same
| salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage
| for a long time.
|
| > Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper
| and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies
|
| Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest
| English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced
| to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the
| past
| the_snooze wrote:
| College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who
| go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available
| to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising
| up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They graduate not
| just with a credential but social capital. And it's that social
| capital that shields you from ChatGPT.
|
| College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in
| comparison.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Quote from OA
|
| " _TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload
| course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order.
| Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can
| cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding
| option._ "
|
| And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per
| double sided sheet of printing.
|
| In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of
| handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file
| with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would
| be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost
| was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of
| teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs,
| building costs including amortisation &c).
|
| How is this happening?
| lokar wrote:
| Two things
|
| Public universities are always underfunded.
|
| Universities can get more money by putting the cost on the
| students and then they cover it with gov grants and loans.
| eesmith wrote:
| Except, Yale is a private university, not public, while very
| few universities in the UK are private (https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_... lists 8 and
| https://studying-in-uk.org/private-universities-in-uk/ lists
| 11) so 2b3a51 almost certainly means public college teaching
| experience in the UK.
| edge17 wrote:
| This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on
| abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales,
| etc? I recall a time when a lot of these online stores were
| selling them for a few cents (granted, it was a long time ago and
| it was still called zShops on Amazon).
| rr808 wrote:
| Do you mean a few cents plus $5 shipping? I think they still
| exist but often results are ranked by total cost now which is
| clearer.
| subhobroto wrote:
| I have been thinking about this and it seems like it's an asset
| that students want to do as little work as possible to get course
| credits. They also love playing games of various sorts. So
| instead of killing trees, printing pages of materials out and
| having students pay substantial sums to the printing press so we
| can inject distance between students reading the material and
| ChatGPT, why not turn it around completely?
|
| 1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students
| and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the
| homework
|
| 2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output
|
| 3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is
| to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work,
| insights it missed and what it could have done better
|
| 4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is
| better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate
| or are there errors in some?
|
| Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that
| ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not
| game it:
|
| 1. Write some test cases that could make that specific
| implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail
|
| 2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its
| worst case runtime?
|
| 3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort
| for that specific input?
|
| 4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make
| quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler
| and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster
| in practice than quicksort?
|
| I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will
| leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the
| minority
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| My thesis paper about a course for Freshman Composition Writing
| to stress fundamentals by way of using quill, pencil, pen, and
| finally a typewriter, was written 20 YEARS AGO in response to
| Spell Check and Auto Predict at the time...2006...
|
| This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her
| approach and actions taken:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teac...
| jrm4 wrote:
| College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of
| funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value
| of "friction."
|
| You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to
| get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect
| and therefore not valuable.
|
| So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE
| DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but
| also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator
| in terms of motivation, etc.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" "When you read a book or a printed course packet, you turn
| real pages instead of scrolling, so you have a different, more
| direct, and (I think) more focused relationship with the words,"
| Fadiman wrote."_
|
| I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my
| experience despite that I have been using computer screens and
| computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with
| them for reading and composing documentation.
|
| Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility
| about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to
| explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs
| on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking
| postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is
| more conducive to learning and understanding than when one
| interacts with screens (including those where one can write
| directly to the screen with a stylus).
|
| I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I
| write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more
| likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing
| it.
|
| It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my
| brain as does writing by hand. There is something about
| handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes
| me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text.
|
| That's not to say I don't use screens--I do but generally to
| write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this
| is especially relevant when mathematics is involved--I'm more
| cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).
| cbfrench wrote:
| Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad
| student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up
| with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.
|
| My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem
| by an author covered in lecture. Then I'd hand it out at the
| beginning of class, and we'd spend the whole time walking through
| a close reading of that poem.
|
| It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of
| building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and
| anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be
| fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute,
| and they'd help me to notice things I'd never registered before.
| It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think,
| for some of them.) I'd also like to think it helped in some small
| way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of
| hours a week.
|
| Unfortunately, you can't perform the same exercise with a longer
| work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least
| break out sections for the same purpose.
| kkfx wrote:
| Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even
| at top universities, generally incapable of evolving, much like
| the stereotypical average vegetable seller.
|
| We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by
| hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire
| schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap
| note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done
| by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter
| skills.
|
| The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly
| incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing
| to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see
| that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates
| they produce.
|
| The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential
| epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the
| past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected
| out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag
| behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own
| interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.
| globalnode wrote:
| It only struck me recently how geared universities are towards
| careers and many of the requirements are set by industry, not
| necessarily by whats good for the student. If you want to enjoy
| learning for its own sake or enjoy a particular subject I'd
| suggest ditching uni and going for self learning. Ofc if you need
| a job you probably need certification, but not if you're learning
| for fun. Also if you want to make sure you're well rounded,
| browse uni websites and have a look at the syllabus / reading
| list and filter out any obvious industry requirements if they
| don't suit you.
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