zarify

> Example two: Voter ID. In every country in the world, you need ID to vote. Democrats have pushed to completely remove it for years.

Would just like to point out that here in .au you don’t need ID to vote (as in to show up and cast your vote, not talking about registering).

How long until people genuinely don’t know how to check if the LLM is wrong?

(I use LLMs for lots of things. They’re useful for lots of things. Gemini 3.8 also feeds me lines of complete bullshit every couple of days.)

I saw something similar in Google's ToS update that went out the other day:

> 13.2 Customer Indemnification Obligations. Customer will defend Google and its Affiliates providing the Services and indemnify them against Indemnified Liabilities in any Third-Party Legal Proceeding to the extent arising from (a) any Customer Application, Project, Customer Data, or Customer Brand Features; or (b) Customer's or an End User's use of the Services or AI Agents in breach of the AUP or Section 3.3 (Restrictions).

(From https://cloud.google.com/terms)

I used the Excel example the other day. What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger, and so folks who have the domain expertise can do something useful with it.

It’s easy to look down on it as fragile, ugly, insecure or whatever, but by and large it works for solving people’s problems.

I see vibe coding the same way. There’s going to be a lot of shit, just like there’s a lot of shit spreadsheets, but I also think there’s going to be a lot of itch scratching.

Ugh. Every time I accidentally put a HEIC on my Windows machine, or one of my students tries to upload a WEBP to our school's LMS :/

The writing tutor is part of a home hosted web app that I've got to try and encourage my kids to get a bit more fluent at intentional writing, plus specific types of writing (creative, reflective, persuasive, etc).

Because I'm using pretty small models (biggest option I've been working with is a 14B) and primary age kids writing is really different from adults, there's a lot of very targeted prompts around mechanics, vocabulary, sentence and paragraph structure, general encouragement and so on. I've also got LanguageTool feeding spelling and grammar analysis into it, since small language models just make up so much dumb stuff when it comes to spelling (it helps that we have an Amazon Echo and they're used to dumb AI so don't expect too much of it).

The kids can "submit" their draft to get a bit of summative feedback which runs it through the whole suite and they can go through the different feedback contexts (highlights relevant passages, suggests word choices, gives general feedback related to the writing purpose and prompt). Each draft takes a snapshot so my wife and I can see what the kids change about the draft after the feedback. This part actually works pretty well.

There's also a "nudge" mode where occasionally the LLM tutor will surface a bit of feedback with a subtle notification while they are writing. This aspect sounded pretty good in my head but since it's analysing a writing fragment sometimes it's not super helpful and even though the notification isn't too disruptive, it still breaks into the flow.

The more I think about it, the more useful this sort of model sounds useful for code too, since it doesn't need to just be about "does the code run, are the outputs correct" but could reason a bit more about program structure, naming of variables and functions and whether they are appropriate to the purpose, quality of comments and whether they indicate an understanding of the code and so on. Most of that you could get with a decent AST analysis, but relevance of comments etc is something that could be quite useful.

Good luck with teaching Python to your own kiddo. I'm finding my own are more interested in programming microcontrollers like the micro:bit than graphics. Gets you really comfortable with fairly simple code and immediate feedback about whether you gets things right. See the micro:bit Python editor for a really well scaffolded IDE too (https://python.microbit.org/v/3).

Most of teaching kids to code is them understanding terminology, structure, and getting them unstuck. This has bits of information mixed with unscaffolded terminology all over the place, some hidden in collapsibles, and some just missing.

For example the `range` example in the second activity doesn't show a `for` loop's structure, how `range` is called, or what it does. One of the hints shows you the syntax for a `range` call, but nothing about loop syntax.

The hints are on request rather than at-need, and aren't linked to what's going wrong for them - doing some structural analysis of the code to decide what hint might be needed would make hints more useful. The couple of activities I looked at didn't have particularly useful hints that targeted real problems and were more of the "here's a snippet of completed code" variety, which doesn't teach anyone anything.

I'd recommend going and looking into some teaching pedagogy before building stuff, tbh.

The actual activity objectives don't look too bad, but the UI is a mess of the wrong sorts of information to help kids learn the principles.

I was curious about the tutor, but not curious enough to hand over an auth token to it. I've been building a writing tutor using local models for my kids, and it's been an interesting experience trying to provide helpful, structured information at the time they need it, rather than just asking for answers, or parsing generic advice.

If only they had some sort of marketplace to be able to sell them off at a reasonable price.

Hahah, smart boards. I remember pushing back hard against my school on those. The fact they evolved into short throw projectors that occasionally have ok touch monitoring is a win, even if it took a bunch of $5-10k surfaces that no one could draw on, but inevitably ended up with a few whiteboard marker smudges to get there.

Open gradebooks are amazing. You just need to have school leadership that sets realistic expectations with students and parents and backs up their teachers rather than caving to helicopter parents. I've had nothing but good feedback from parents and students about timeliness and transparency on marking feedback. Standardised testing on the other hand is goddamned menace that has done more to damage the value of assessment than transparency ever has. The value of open gradebooks is the feedback, not the numbers.

AI in schools feels like more of a fait accompli. Who provides most of the software infrastructure to schools? Microsoft and Google. Who is busy stuffing AI into all the things? Oh look, it's Microsoft and Google.

Determining important from human speech. I’ve had a few summaries from meetings I’ve been involved in and there’s always been a real mismatch from what was actually focused on and how it comes across in the summary.

Sounds like it's just focused on shows and games from the description in the paper:

> At ages 1 and 1.5 years, which was conducted in a subsample, parents were asked to report the average amount of time that the child spent daily on television (TV) on weekdays and weekends within the past month. This was collected in 2010 to 2011 when TV was the primary source of screen viewing time for 97% of Singaporean families [38]. At ages 2, 3 and 6 years, parents were asked to report the amount of time, in 5-min increments, their child spent using screens on weekdays and weekend days. Three types of devices were considered separately: (1) TV and TV-related games consoles; (2) computers (desktop or laptop); and (3) hand-held devices including tablets, smartphones, and hand-held games consoles. At age 8 years, parents were asked to report on their child’s time spent sitting or lying down while watching screens on the most recent weekday (school days) and on the most recent Saturday and Sunday. Four types of devices/media were considered separately: (1) watching videos on a TV (TV programs, DVDs, Blu-ray); (2) watching videos or playing games on computers; (3) watching videos or playing games on tablets or smartphones; and (4) playing video games on consoles.

We’re having this sort of conversation at the school that I work at, which serves remote communities and other disadvantaged students. One of our states is currently making noise about reducing “screen time” for schools without much distinction about what it involves.

And here’s us, an online only school that serves kids that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access education at all or some types of classes at best, left wondering where that might leave us if our state decides to zombie its way into similar policy decisions.

Edit: Downvotes for pointing out that government policies without nuance around what "screen time" means hurts kids who have no alternative education options, apparently?

Feels like there’s a lot of projection going on there.

I’ve worked with a lot of professionals over the years who chose to work part time (and have done myself too). Various reasons, but mostly it boiled down to valuing their time and wellbeing more than grinding full time.

The thing about “living standards” is, like many standards they change depending on your priorities.

AI aside, I think the biggest thing we could do is stop thinking about education as a profit centre. We’re not multiplying humanity if we’re only doing it for the fraction that can afford it.

Edit: Having more of a look I see you’re making this freemium, which is a good thing.

I bought one of these and I quite like it. Form factor is nice, transfer is a bit rough around the edges but serviceable.

Pretty sure my credit card got harvested from either them or the website purchase though

I think there’s a lot of value in some of this (and as the owner of a somewhat spicy brain I relate to the desire for processes that help), but it feels like at least some of this (c|sh)ould be scripted and not LLM’d.

I’ve been watching some of the GitHub App promos, and it feels like because you have an app with access that knows how to agent, that’s the first method within reach, even if it isn’t necessarily the best one.

Funny, I had the opposite experience with MiniMax and Mimo when using OpenCode. MiniMax got stuck with looping through broken tool calls all the time and MiMo just powered through things and for the most part just worked.

Sounds like yet another thing that makes life harder for the unbanked, the homeless etc.

This is the sort of thing that makes me worry about my solar inverter, battery etc. so much remote management stuffed into these things.

I recently installed Ubuntu on a little Geekom mini PC for my 6 and 8 year olds to share. So far my 6 yo isn’t too into it, but her older sister mostly uses it for the games I’ve put onto it through Epic and Steam and programming using MakeCode, mostly for Arcade (https://arcade.makecode.com) (I have a couple of micro:bit-based handheld shields) and more recently getting into the awesomely simple networking that the micro:bit provides (https://makecode.microbit.org).

Since the micro:bit requires some file management for programming them, that’s been a good entry point to the file system.

> - the fact that in another role they would have to work 25% more (50 weeks per year instead of 40 weeks per year)

Heh. I left teaching for three years to work in the private sector and the "25% more work" was honestly the best work life balance I've had in 20 years.

Ah, it was probably me hearing about Texas and then extrapolating that to the rest of the US. Probably not a great idea on my part. Thanks for setting me straight :)

Ultimately how useful is the high uptake in individual states? My understanding was that the US had a lot of weirdness going on about provision of utilities over state lines.

(Mind you here in Oz I think we have our own state politics involved, but I guess at least we have fewer states )

Gemini refused to provide any suggestions about implementing a serial connection in a non-standard way for some hardware I own because I ran the risk of “damaging my hardware” or producing buggy code.

Copilot pulled something similar on me when I asked for some assistance with some other third party code for the same hardware - presented a fading out message (article paywall style) with some ethical AI disclaimer. Thought this one was particularly strange - almost like a request from either the third party or the original manufacturer.

There have been a number of instances here in .au where centralised location/health/etc data has been misused (stalking, checking out potential dates, domestic abuse or aiding domestic abusers) through inappropriate access. I doubt we're unique.

I'd argue that it doesn't need to be "Joe Q. Public", because companies are made up of Joe Q. Publics.

I teach kids to code (plus other techy stuff) for a living.

Some kids love my robotics classes using MakeCode or MicroPython. Some kids love my data science classes with Python and SQL (I doubt anyone loves the Excel formula :P). Some kids love writing games in Scratch or MakeCode Arcade. Some love writing MakeCode in Minecraft EE. The one thing they all have in common is there are always kids who get turned off by the environment we're using.

Some of my students tell me I talk too fast, so it can be helpful for them to review content, and I've had quite a few students with varying degrees of hearing impairment. Pretty useful in my field.

The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I record live classes for students, and we've had occasions when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/

That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.

I've use Teams every day in education for a couple of years now.

My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class teams had read/write access by default for all files in a team. This meant every student in a class team could modify what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to figure out right?

Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point). Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches. Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about all the new features or bug fixes.

I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new features online (3 months later than would have been useful for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly supporting workmates in its use.

Alternatively it could be objection to numerous examples of somewhat arbitrary standardised testing which takes over student education to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, limiting a lot of the creativity and enjoyment students might otherwise take part it.

But that's just my cynical educator's view.