beej71

> It seems like everyone in education is frustrated and can’t figure out how to use AI for education productively yet.

Oh, it's terrible. I'm a computer science instructor at a university (I have 20 years of industry experience prior) and it was already bad enough before trying to predict where the market was going to be 4 years in the future. But a year ago, it was tough to predict where the market was going to be in one month.

So yeah, we can teach all kinds of stuff. But is it the right stuff? With one month of visibility, who can tell?

But now I feel like it's settled down a little bit. And now I feel like I have more like 7 to 8 months of visibility. One thing that's helped is that we see the hiring differential between seniors and juniors. So now we can answer the question, what does the market want? It wants the expertise between junior and senior. And I'm confident it'll want that for at least the next 7-8 months.

Good luck cramming that into 4 years, though! I figure we have to try to bridge the gap as best we can. Eventually, seniors will become rare enough that the expense isn't worth it. It'll become better to hire cheaper most-qualified juniors.

There's still some seriously open-ended questions though. How much does coding matter, for example? If you ask senior devs who don't do any coding how much they rely on their coding expertise to make decisions, you'll get a zillion answers across the spectrum. This becomes even more true for senior devs who use AI for coding. Heck, ask 100 devs if it's important that you can even read code or not and see what comes out!

And then there's the question of how do you teach those systems level thinking skills? Historically, universities haven't taught those skills. You came out of the University with general problem solving skills in technology, and then at your job you were exposed to a small corner of the codebase to fix some bug. Gradually, over the years, you learn more and more of the codebase and become more and more senior. We have to get that into our curriculum. I'm working on that as we speak and will be working on that for the next several years, it looks like; even if my position vanishes, I'll keep attacking it—this is a tough problem that's fun to try to crack.

Anyway, I hope someday my forward visibility gets back up to 18 months. Won't that be amazing. I'd also like to buy some RAM. ;)

> Kamala Harris lost because of the shady primary the democrats won.

I'd like to see some evidence for that being the reason Harris lost. I know maga was up in arms about it, but they weren't voting for her anyway.

I don't know how true it still is, but dumb TVs have traditionally been marketed as "commercial displays". You'll pay more and have to bring your own media, of course.

Lower tuition 80% to get it back to 90s value and I guarantee a massive change in that graph.

>> Did your parents pay for your education? > No, my family wasn't wealthy.

My dad was a teacher and my mom was a part-time teacher and they paid for my BS. We weren't wealthy, either.

Of course, inflation adjusted college costs were 1/5 what they are today...

It's amazing the polarization in the comments here. What I'm sadly certain of is that the powerful people running the show will never in a billion years be able to make sense of the sentiment of TFA.

Seems like you're directing your counterargument at the speaker.

I find comments like this perplexing. If it's meaningless, I'd like to trade places on the graph with Elon, please.

Yes, I did. :)

While I'm on board with having good html structure that prints well, and I'm on board with hiding navigation elements, etc., I'm not so on board with changing the default font size or fonts in the print version.

I just made a simple site that didn't set any font sizes anywhere, and a friend of mine complained that the font was too small on mobile. Do I detect a lo-res screen and increase the font size?

I know a lot of sites do exactly that, but I feel it's wrong. The user controls their default font size on their platform. What if they'd already increased it, and now I'm just making it bigger?

What if they'd decreased their default print font size and then I shrink it again?

I think it's best to leave those to the user entirely.

I wrote two xsl stylesheets and then encoded my resume in xml.

I know what you're thinking: "Ok genxer", but hear me out. :)

The two stylesheets produce HTML and Typst code. And so I get the exact render that I want.

(It actually goes further, making a CV and a resume from the same xml source, rearranging sections and sorting appropriately.)

Xml and xsl are quite dated, but this really does seem to be a good use case for data/presentation separation.

But really my dream is for print css (or something) to finally be implemented.

I use this in class. Basically if you turn in the complete work, your getting an A. But I make sure they know that there's an interviewer with slathering fangs waiting to make sure they have it down.

I'm not the students' competitor; the interviewer is. And the students not only have to impress the interviewer, but they have to impress them more than all their peers do!

The first place I taught gave no grades or unrequested feedback on anything. And no certificate. And those cohorts had the best placement rates. There was nothing in the school for the students to game, so they kept their eye on the real prize.

Not like this. Someday it will likely turn around, but it's probably going to be after we're long dead.

I'm still at DH (have been for 20 years), but taking a peek at Hetzner... seems compelling at 30% cheaper than I pay now.

One potential option (not without downsides, admittedly) is to publish a clearly-self-censored version on social media and link back to the website for the full one. Also RSS.

The pisser about third party websites is they have full control over the content and there's really not much of a way around that. Enough outcry can do it, but it's a tough time to get enough of that.

You're welcome! I'm always stoked to hear when the guides have made a difference. :)

> Like it probably wouldn't even make the town newspaper level insignificant.

To be fair, it actually did make the town newspaper and the people who live there actually do have something to say about it.

"The most you can charge for your software is my cost to recreate it."

It's interesting to see what other factors will come into play by vendors to allow charging higher prices. Lock-in in various forms, legal responsibility, etc.

I'm 55 and I plan to never get in the game again (20 years in industry). I'm going to teach as long as I can, and then only work for a non profit that's doing good or for the public sector. The pay won't be up there, but I have limited time left to do what needs doing.

I appreciate inform7 is quite human-readable, but it's not free form.

There certainly is, but in my recollection, devs could tackle either. Again, it's been a while.

I'm really glad that wasn't my career experience. I worked with a lot of extremely sharp devs in a variety of places. Dull ones were simply not hired.

Woot! I'm always glad to hear when it works out. Once it clicks, it's hard to remember what the trouble was in the first place. :)

Let me ask you this: what is the purpose of a protest?

The sheer number of participants implies that leadership can ignore those ideas at their peril. So if they don't know what the No Kings ideas are, they ought to look them up.

At last I can realize my dream of writing a JS interpreter in CSS! ;)

As long as the robots are paying into social security, I'm good. ;)

> Code was malleable only to a developer with great code comprehension

This used to be what being a dev was, if I recall. It's been a few years.

I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that I've never grown more mentally sharp by punting to AI. Learning a better solution is not the same as becoming more sharp.

This is far better than just hitting return, but there's zero chance it's as good as doing things the hard way. Tradeoffs, of course.