Unfortunately grade deflation has little positive impact for the students. Medical and law schools often (typically) don't take grade inflation/deflation from a school into account. And almost no scholarships take this into account. If you do have professional school aspirations, there's very little benefit to being at a school with grade deflation.
Unfortunately, the fixation with race in America doesn't start nor stop at college admissions. College admissions is probably the last place where it tilts in the direction of certain minority groups.
I agree that we should just stop using race everywhere and we should crack down on it -- but I think college wouldn't be where my energy would be... actually the military is where I'd start. And oddly it's the place where race based affirmative action is still permitted (military academies - where it benefits minorities) and in its halls (where I've heard that it has a strong white supremacist bent). The reason is because what is happening in colleges is more reactionary -- fix the catalyst and the arguments for the reaction largely go away.
That's not what this actual data shows. While there has been an increase math deficiency, the increase in failure rates happened recently and probably only partially related to the math preparation issue.
I think we will make a major mistake if we think math preparation fixes this - especially in CS classes where AI literally calls out to be used for projects. And it certainly doesn't explain me hearing the same problems are happening at MIT -- they just are being a bit wiser about "catching students" (or rather not doing so).
One way to fix that issue that I’ve seen is a daily quiz to start the class. The key is the quiz is super easy. Even if you were confused by the lecture, if you watched it at all you’d likely get a 100 on the quiz. If you didn’t watch it you’d likely get a 0. This quickly for people watching the lectures online ahead of class.
ELIZA has never done well in conversational tests. GPT-4.5, for example, tends to out-human humans. Like I could never ask ELIZA this question and get anything close to a decent response: "Give me three points that convey the impact that 9/11 had on rap music in the 21st century with some good examples?" Asking ChatGPT today gives me an answer that I'd give an A grade to a strong college student. ELIZA's response -- "What do you think?".
The issue is that before GPT models basically were useless for any conversation. We are literally in science fiction realm. From a text conversation perspective the gap between where we are at and what’s left to get to is relatively small.
In my opinion, the main thing we need to do is have training happen continuously. And probably more real world data (from sensors).
I said this either in late 93 or early 94. I was in a class when someone demo'ed Lynx to me, and I tore into it and the WWW. Looking at the timeline it seems that Mosaic came out right after Lynx, but my memory of it has Mosaic coming out way after Lynx. And it seemed like Navigator years after that, but the real history is super compressed. By the time I'd seen Mosaic, I was then pretty convinced of its utility.
If it makes them feel any better, I told people in the 90s that the WWW didn't make sense because we already have telnet, archie, gopher, veronica, and ftp. What can WWW give me when I already have those tools to connect with...
I really don’t understand how so many people can support this admin. It’s not that I ideologically disagree with them, but they are so corrupt that they appear incompetent. They actually aren’t incompetent, they just don’t care about what is important to almost everyone else. If you, for example, don’t care about public safety or accountability it turns out you can make a lot of money.
This is it. I've had a similar experience in just playing around I asked it to clean up some code it wrote to increase maintainability and readability by humans. After a few iterations it had generated quite solid code. It also broke the code a couple of times along the way. But it does get me thinking that these pipelines with agents doing specific tasks makes a lot of sense. One to design and architect, one to implement, one to clean, one to review, one to test (actually there's probably a bunch of different agents for testing -- testing perf/power, that it matches the requirements/spec, matches the design, is readable/maintainable, etc...).
I think you’re right that "true in all models but unprovable" is not accurate. By Godel’s completeness theorem if a FO sentence is true in every model of the axioms then it is provable from those axioms.
But I don’t think incompleteness is best described as saying "no first-order axioms can pin down a single model" That’s more about non-categoricity/compactness/Lowenheim–Skolem.
Well I think the point is there is no "new kind of math". There's just types of math we've discovered and what we haven't. No new math is created, just found.
I'm an AI optimist. But AI video is probably the one thing that does depress me. Seeing that we can make anything visually, there's nothing that impresses me visually. I watch a video that two years ago I would've thought was really cool, and now my first thought is, "Yawn, is this AI?".
Video, more than anything else, is the place where I really care if something is AI or not. If I could get a TikTok that had no AI usage -- I'd be in. Which is weird for me, because I'm typically the guy who is all-in on AI.
Actually a simple flow-chart works for a large number of use cases. That said, there are a lot of use cases where we don't have a simple way to run a linear regression model to get reasonable results where "AI" does seem to work well.
Again, I wasn't reacting specifically to you (as noted, I wouldn't be surprised if so, but I also wouldn't be surprised if not). I was making a more general statement.
I have seen it too. The answer is easy - they don’t like AI. I've seen similar things with some people that don’t like women in tech or certain minorities - they suddenly critique at an extremely high level. I also haven’t looked at this particular case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to be the same thing here.
I thought it was done to keep the video from getting taken down due to copyright (with automatic scanners). I also noticed sometimes videos will have a horizontal line that runs through it -- I've assumed that it wouldn't get flagged for copyright violation.
I'm learning that while Windows has a bad rap in some tech circles, its surprisingly still pretty well regarded. This past school year my daughter and niece both moved from Windows to Macs. A couple of weekends ago I asked them both how they liked it -- they seemed to transition well to the Mac. They both said the same thing -- Windows was better at basically everything except the Message app and iPhone mirroring, but those two things made the Mac totally worth it since, as they put it, phone beats laptop.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
It's technically not illegal, but often is. You can't pay terrorist organizations or specially sanctioned orgs. See https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov
Probably should consult an attorney before paying a ransom (whether for kidnapping or other purposes).
I feel like people forget that they're still allowed to program. You're still allowed to create workflows tying together LLMs and agents if you want. Almost all the tools and technology that existed before LLMs are still available to be used.
That is absurd as a suggestion of it being the entire point of programming. In fact, it goes back to my original point - I have no idea why Djikstrs would say something so non-sensical, and likely neither did he.
The fallacy here is the assumption that humans know why we do what we do. Much like modern LLMs we have an explanation, but it’s just something we cook up in our brain. Whether or not it’s the truth is far more complex.
Oddly, despite LLMs being these huge networks with billions of parameters, we still probably do understand it better than we do our own brains.