halgir

I spent some years as a product manager. This might be a cynical take, but my relationship with AI-written code is largely the same as it was with human-written code.

I would research and explain what I wanted the product to do. We'd discuss technical trade-offs, drawbacks, and risks. Eventually, we'd ship something. I understood broadly how the infrastructure worked, but to a large extent I had to trust the quality of the code my colleagues were writing. Sometimes things broke. That's okay, we're only human.

I think I'm just more comfortable being held responsible for something I don't fully understand because I always have been. Maybe I'm delusional and the comparison won't hold. We'll see.

> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.

My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.

Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.

> run-away climate change

We have one. But according to Down Detector's Down Detector's Down Detector's Down Detector, that's also down.

What's Updog?

It does. I eat small portions, rarely. My son has fortunately not expressed any interest in eating it, and I won't encourage him to.

I dislike Sea Shepherd as an organization, due to their distasteful methods (and personal bias, being a Faroese resident). But I spoke with several of their volunteers during one of their campaigns, and was pleased to realize that, as individuals, their hearts are mostly in the right place. Nearly all of them claimed to be vegan, which I feel does give you legitimate ethical grounds from which to criticize grindadráp.

However, if you don't oppose the general consumption of meat, I don't find the argument against grindadráp compelling. It yields more meat per killed animal than most, and the slaughter itself is arguably no less humane than most commercial meat production (not a high bar, I admit).

In terms of publicity, grindadráp suffers from being inherently more visible than commercial meat production. Personally, I think this is a positive thing. It confronts you with the fact that meat doesn't magically appear in a supermarket freezer - if you want to eat meat, then by definition a living animal has to die. The visibility of grindadráp has prompted conversations with my young son about where meat comes from, and the animal welfare consequences of eating it.

I feel the same way. I've hiked a few times at one of the locations in these photos with my 8 year old son (under close supervision). I think it's a great way to build a sense of responsibility and humility.

Unfortunately, that also makes it inherently more dangerous. Just a month ago, three tourists went missing at that location. [1]

[1] https://local.fo/three-persons-missing-after-visiting-vagar-...

But who will the align the aligner of aligners? :(

Apropos mixing bitterants, it's quite common to apply a bitter nail varnish to help people stop biting their nails. Not an addictive substance, but an addictive behavior.

> How can you ensure that the exercise actually teaches the students anything in this case?

By participating in the exercise during class. Introducing the cases, facilitating group discussions, and providing academic input when bringing the class back together for a review. I'm not just saying "hey take a look at this or whatever".

> If you're teaching ethics in high school (which it sounds like you are)

Briefly and temporarily. I have no formal pedagogic background. Input appreciated.

> This may sound harsh, but to me it sounds like you've created a non-didactic, busywork exercise.

I may not have elaborated well enough on the context. I'm not creating slop in order to avoid doing work. I'm using the tools available to do more work faster - and sometimes coming across examples or cases that I realized I wouldn't have thought of myself. And, crucially, strictly supervising any and all work that the LLM produces.

If I had infinite time, then I'd happily spend it on meticulously handcrafting materials. But as this thread makes clear, that's a rare luxury in education.

There is a middle ground between artisanal powerpoint craftsmanship and AI slop.

I agree you shouldn't use LLMs to produce material wholesale, but I think it can be positively useful when used thoughtfully.

I recently taught a high school equivalent philosophy class, and wanted to design an exercise for my students to allocate a limited number of organs to recipients that were not directly comparable. I asked an LLM to generate recipient profiles for the students to choose between. First pass, the recipients all needed different organs, which kind of ruined the point of the dilemma! I told it so, and second pass was great.

Even with the extra handholding, the LLM made good materials faster than if I would have designed them manually. But if I had trusted it blindly, the materials would have been useless.

That sounds horrible. Thanks for the insight.

> Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be?

No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just like you would before AI.

Possibly. I have a Samsung TV with all of the associated bloatware. Did a hard reset, never connected to the internet, use it exclusively as a display for my Apple TV. Turns on and off using the Apple TV remote via HDMI-CEC, so I can stow away the bloated Samsung remote. Startup time is now perfectly tolerable.

Thanks for explaining, I've never heard about this. In my social circle, nobody would seriously try to argue that it should still count as a "real" planet, but we still refer to Pluto-as-planet in an affectionate, nostalgic way.

I know it's not a planet, hence my sarcastic "sue me". I suppose the self-irony didn't work too well over text. My point was that many people still know about Pluto as a body that's at the edge of many people's everyday conceptualizations of the solar system, and I argue that makes it a more useful tool for helping people intuitively understand the particular distances involved.

> Only if you were born before it was retrograded which will be less and less likely as time goes on.

I admit my age plays into it. Though I am curious about the role Pluto has in modern primary school, do you know? I understand that it now has the same technical status as Eris et al., but I think it's still a fantastic example of how scientific understanding develops and changes. Not on par with discarding heliocentricity, but a very practical example of ongoing changes still present in our own time.

> As I have no interest in saving American misplaced pride (because let's not kid ourself it's about anything else)

I don't understand how this ties into American pride (nor am I American), what did I miss?

Because more people know about Pluto than Eris or Sedna. And we know that Pluto is the furthest away planet (sue me). So 15x Pluto is much easier to visualize in context of the entire solar system than 700x Earth. My cosmological knowledge is above average, but I don't know off the top of my head if 700 AU is super-duper far away or still in the range of the gas giants.

I use it in much the same way as you, and it's been extremely beneficial. But I also would not dream of signing my name on something that has been independently produced by AI, it's just too often blatantly wrong on specifics.

I think people who do are simply not aware that AI is not deterministic the same way a calculator is. I would feel entirely safe signing my name on a mathematical result produced by a calculator (assuming I trusted my own input).

We missed the boat for that a few million years ago. If we're engineering anyway, we might as well engineer for healthy old age directly.

Someone has to be the first. Granted, us being first is extremely unlikely. But the same is true for whoever it ends up having been.

Like how my biggest weakness is that I work too hard.

> Should they feel any obligation to help my siblings once the time comes?

Absolutely not, but hopefully your siblings will have been positive enough presences in your children's lives that they will want to of their own accord.

> the definition is clear enough.

It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement.

Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists?

I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.

English: https://dimma-fo.translate.goog/grein/starlink-vil-veita-int...

Personally, I experienced a rude awakening when reading his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". I've read part of his lectures, and heard great things about him in general. So I was extremely surprised when his own collection of anecdotes painted him as kind of a shitty human, in my opinion.

Very much an example of "never meet your heroes" for me.

Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...