I'm losing sleep over this quagmire we're in. Students are using AI to complete their work without thinking, and it gives them the *illusion of competence* (just like "very clear lectures" do). It's really urgent we find a way to teach them to work with AI effectively for learning support.
Regarding technology's impact on people and society, beware of rebound effects.
For instance, "faster" communication tools (email, slack) have led to more volume with decreased quality and we spend more, not less, time communicating.
People and society adapt to tools, reaching a new equilibrium
Claude says my solution’s strengths include the use of a heuristic in an A* search. My solution doesn’t use A* and doesn’t claim to. There is no heuristic function in the code that Claude analysed. Where does Claude get these ideas? From similar problems it has analysed? From my usage history?
LLM vs LLM.
Note how Claude identifies the high memory weakness in the ChatGPT Advent of Code solution.
www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
This is a disaster in the making. What advice has Treasury been giving Chalmers?
www.smh.com.au/polit...
Most governments have shown zero interest in making sure new technologies raise rather than lower overall standards of living. Instead, politicians in both parties are busy seeking campaign contributions from the modern makers of income inequality. So that job - tech for people - falls to us.
This is an excellent illustration of the challenges presented by "alignment". Whose values and concerns are to be reflected in the alignment? It is, and always will be, a political decision. Language models are political models.
Private health insurance is a dud. That’s why a majority of Australians don’t have it | Grogonomics www.theguardian.com/...
If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control.
www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-ta...
Good software is far more nuanced than just how many devs work on it.
Skype hired good devs and won the video calling desktop market. It got to 1,000+ devs and then… this startup with 50 devs washed the floor with them for mobile chat + calls. It was called WhatsApp.
Some of my thoughts on OpenAI's o3 and the ARC-AGI benchmark
aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai...
From a 9th or 10th century schoolgirl’s letter to her teacher.
Wonderful thread on the student’s world and women’s writing.
If you read nothing else about AI this week, read this - absolutely fascinating, ties together a whole bunch of recent developments in the field
Wrote my own notes here but really this piece defies summarization, you should absorb the whole thing simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/...
GhatGPT-o1 underwhemled me on Advent of Code.
www.linkedin.com/posts/peterw...
GitHub added a permanent free tier for GitHub Copilot today, including access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. My notes here: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/18/...
Our energy retailer just wrote to us with the good news that we would be switched to a smart meter, unless we objected.
Of course we objected. The moronic/greedy implementation of "time of day" tariffs charges you for the peak day in every month. Unless you live a very regular life, that's crazy.
Tim Apple knows how to play the game, but also, this is a tell about how tariffs are going to work.
"Impossible to sell people's belongings without breaking into their houses", burglars say.
ariel photograph of vehicles leaving burning man, a packed ribbon of cars stretching off to the horizon
peak capitalism is creating an apocalyptic traffic jam in the middle of nowhere
In my book ‘Despotism On Demand’ I term this retail business model ‘flexible despotism’
Tech critics are used to being disingenuously denigrated, but Casey Newton’s screed against AI skeptics illustrates a deeper problem with tech journalism.
It needs to be confronted if some of the most powerful people in the world are ever to be properly held to account.
In 2005, the average rent is estimated to have been $759 per month. It is now estimated to be $1,521.
ipropertymanagement.com/research/ave...
Well, well, well. ANU’s Genevieve Bell kept working a lucrative side gig with Intel even after she took the University’s top job www.afr.com/work-and-car...
This latest case, out of Texas, shows how Character.AI chatbots encouraged a teen to self harm. One implied that murdering his parents would be an acceptable response to screen time limits.
Read more from @nitasha.bsky.social: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Made a list of resources for open source language models with @soldaini.net ahead of the tutorial tomorrow at 930 AM.
github.com/allenai/awes...
I remember when you could just buy a computer program like Microsoft Word or Photoshop and just have it on your computer forever without having to pay monthly or yearly. What a time that was
Manifold St, Camperdown, Victoria, Australia.
Camperdown looks nice because of the trees in Manifold St.
A doctor’s letter to United Healthcare for denying nausea meds for a child on chemo
