“Chat GPT is ruining my love of teaching
I don't know how to handle it. I am TT at a large state R1. With every single assignment that involves writing, it now seems to me that I am wasting my time reading corporate-smooth crap that I absolutely know by sense of smell is generated by a large language model, but of course I can't prove it. I have done a lot to try to work with, not against, LLMs. For example, l've done entire exercises comparing chat gpt writing with in-class spontaneous writing, not to vilify chat but to see it as basically a corporate-sounding genre, a tool for certain kinds of tasks, but limited in terms of how writing can help us think and explore our own ideas. I give creative, even non-writing based assignments when I can. My critical assignments ask students to stay close to texts and ask them to make connections; other assignments really ask them to think personally and creatively.. But every time I ask for any writing, even short little essays, I can tell - I can just feel it - that a portion of the class uses this tool and basically is lying about it. If I have to read one more sophomore write something like "The writer likely used this trope, a common narrative device in the literature of the time, to express both the struggles and the joy of her people" I'm going to throw my laptop in the ocean. This is a humanities dept and it is a total waste of time for me to even read this stuff, let alone grade it. The students are no longer interpreting a text, they re just giving me this automated verbiage. Grading it as if they wrote it makes me feel complicit.
I'm honestly despairing. If I wanted to feel cynical and alienated about my life's career I could have chosen something a little more lucrative. Humanities professors of Reddit, what are you doing with this?”
Via @DrPen – from Reddit
Fellow #selfhosted#admins: how do you move important things (like family photos, as most other things are replaceable) under your own wing and sleep at night? One problem with disc or os and boom, all of it is gone. Like tears in rain.
@mms I don't host in any manner, and have lost irreplaceable photos. I have been thinking if self-hosting #Hubzilla and having a live clone of it would work out.
@begasus quite interesting! #HaikuOS sounds like it gets desktop features right more than other OS-es, so it makes sense to have other OS+app run on Haiku rather than the other way around. It should only get better with the Qubes/Tails and #unikernel approaches getting adopted more and more.
Making software that runs repeatedly or continuously, like CI jobs, more efficient also means less energy. If you’re working on OSS or internal projects at work that you can make similar changes to, please look into it! It’s not exactly #permacomputing but it feels like a tangible computing thing that we all can help with in corporate jobs.
I need to work on an eink display editor/terminal theme that uses font weight, italics, underlining, highlighting, etc. rather than colors for syntax highlighting. #eink
It's fascinating to me looking at beginning language guides and thinking "what does this say about the culture of the language"
When I was delving into #OCaml it was (with affection) "here's hello world and here's a dense academic paper on implementing event systems in OCaml 5!"
#Java guides used to be centered on the assumption that you were a web programmer looking to do applets, even long after that assumption died.
#RustLang generally seems to assume a background in programming w/ a CLI.
@hrefna I know syntax matters to people (and I haven't yet written #Erlang, only some #Prolog), but it is just a language. Just pattern-matching and immutability make it better than most by a long shot. So, I think the Erlang inventors got the language quite all right, and Elixir might just be a nicer way to write OTP style.
@theohonohan somehow, the write-up seems to transcend details like design, speaks more to perceptions and pre-conceptions around design and more @ltratt
While the LSP protocol is useful for completion or access to symbol definitions, some of its features are less appealing. In #Emacs, you can instruct Eglot to ignore any feature you dislike.
E.g. (setq eglot-ignored-server-capabilities '(:inlayHintProvider)) to remove annoying hints mixed with the code in c-mode with clangd.
I feel so awkward explaining Mastodon and the Fediverse to people who have no prior knowledge of either.
I've used phrases like: "imagine if you could run your own Facebook (ew) for your friends and family or join an existing community of like-minded people".
I've explained all of these concepts time and time again, to people from various backgrounds, those in software engineering for example find the concepts of federation and decentralisation really interesting. Some find these concepts hard to grasp, while others find the extra step of finding the right community cumbersome.
I understand that "X" social media platform is where people are, but, in the Fediverse, where people are can be any one of Y, Z, or whatever; all of us can communicate under different jurisidictions.
I'd really like to know the examples you've used to introduce the Fediverse to your peers and friends.
@grtcdr I haven't found anybody to try this on (nobody even thinks much about the meaning of everybody having e-mail on GMail), otherwise "messaging but like e-mail" seemed like a usable tack to take.
So I have a bunch of #selfhosted services running at home. Now, my home #ISP is your typical large Canadian telco (aka assholes) and they are actively sabotaging my host-at home stuff. (i.e. I set it up, it works a few days, then it stops being reachable from outside, at work, rebooting doesn't fix etc.)
Can any recommend a reliable "just works" remoting solution (where the host is linux) where I can always remote in if the host has power and an outbound connection?? (paid is ok)
I was wondering if comments alongside source code are not read for reasons other than them being likely to be out of date. Maybe its because ... syntax highlighting makes them less readable?
Is Fortran usable as a C substitute, or as an improvement over C unlike C++? As an example, what kind of software uses your code?
Fortran's verbosity is ... less tolerable than Ada's, and the column-major arrays may surprise serious C devs. But it does many other things right, and is already part of the toolchain in big shops.
Sure, it isn't new and shiny, but that isn't bad for risk-averse managers.
Some say you must start with a simple programming language and learn your way up. Others tell you to learn a low level language such as C to understand how everything works.
I've seen plenty of developers who started with Python or JS, and some who started with C. Comparing them, there is no doubt about which method yields the best developers.
The good news is that it's never too late to go back to the fundamentals.
@oantolin
> semi-informal pseudocode
There is #TLAplus nowadays, a very intriguing option as a first "design language". @galdor
Another approach might be to first learn how to write and execute a test plan (maybe the Ruby Cucumber way, or with a #PropertyBasedTesting tool).
@thelastpsion cool! I haven't used it much instead of C++ but it is great that it doesn't depend on a complicated compiler like #GCC or #LLVM and still does quite well.
"Copyleft is less free than permissive licenses because permissive licenses allow you to make proprietary forks of free software" is a worldview that just straight-up makes no sense at all
@ghisvail
> "if project goes proprietary, a fork can happen"
But past community contributions remain with the project (including non-artifacts like QA by production use). @drewdevault
My wife @eugenialoli has been working on installing Linux on various old computers for which a lot of other options are now unsupported.
She's been finding that machines with 2GB or RAM or 16GB of storage tend to struggle, whether while installing the OS, booting, installing common apps or running those apps.
2GB of RAM is an incredibly large amount. As is 16GB of storage.
WTF are we software people doing as an industry that makes us consume so many resources?
@jbqueru@eugenialoli would #HaikuOS be/have been useful? Do people need most of the apps installed by default in a typical Linux distro? I tend to start with Debian netinst and build on top of it. It has gotten more laborious (or I am jaded) but it can keep disk usage creep under control.
And, of course, the frittering away of compute and storage by software is by design, for the upgrade treadmill.
"You saved $9.99 in shipping fees on this order with Amazon Prime." No, jackass, if you charged $10 to ship a $20 item I'd go buy it at the store or at one of your competitors.
The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.
Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”
This was instituitionalized in pre-invasion India ... A while after a couple basically had grandchildren, they would give up the house to the eldest son and go live in a hut in a commune in the forest. Proactive rather than reactive, but that is what the philosophy of the land guided one to.
@HeavenlyPossum re: looting, selling food, medicine or education was considered a social demerit.
I watched Edge of Tomorrow (2014) after it was recommended by @dpiponi.
He's right about the slickness of the storytelling.
It's a film that only makes sense from a solipsistic viewpoint. Every time Tom Cruise's character is executed by Emily Blunt (in the course of training) we reset with him. Does she just wink out of existence as he dies in that timeline, or does she have to explain and dispose of the body? I'm also not sure what the Omega's perspective of the timelines is supposed to be.
