maybe this just betrays that i don't know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once

imo academia in the us selects for self-serious mini-tyrants. people unable to sleaze their way to an equivalent position in the job market, so they go with a position where their subordinates have no agency or recourse for inappropriate behavior and are entirely dependent on them for their funding and their career progress^[by standing up to my piece of shit advisor, i have left with just a master's degree after five years, despite definitely having enough research completed under this advisor to leave with a phd. i chose to stand up for myself and try to end this cycle instead of adding an acronym to my title. arguably a mistake, idk, there is a robert frost poem about this.]. the university system here seems to only care if a professor brings in grant money

if so, they can do whatever they want.

e.g. a year ago a student of mine with a documented, legally required accommodation was just straight denied it by a professor in my department. this poor student had to go through some equal opportunity claim just to have his accommodation met, and the professor is still there, having suffered no consequences.

maybe i should apply to a phd program outside of the us. i speak spanish (but slowly, y como un gringo) 🤷

😭

what worked for me teaching an undergrad course last year was to have

• in-class exams weigh 90% of the total grade, but let them drop their lowest score
• take-home work weigh 10% and be graded on completion (which i announced to the class, of course)
  • i was also diligent about posting solutions (sometimes before the due date

it's a completion grade after all) and i let students know that if they wanted direct feedback they could bring their solutions to office hours

it ended up working pretty well. an added benefit was that my TAs didn't have to deal with the nightmare of grading 120 very poorly written homeworks every four weeks. my students also stopped obsessing about the grades they would receive on their homeworks and instead focused on ~~learning~~ the grades they would receive on their exams

however, at the k-12 level, it feels like a much harder problem to tackle. parental involvement is the only solution i can think of, and that's already kind of a nightmare (at least here in the us)

people who talk about "prompting" like it's a skill would take a class^[read: watch a youtube tutorial] on tasseomancy because a coffee shop opened across the street

ugh cybersecurity is already a fucking nightmare i should have braced myself

i made the stupid mistake of doing math, then cs

surrounded by

my narrow technical specialty + lack of experience or knowledge of other fields = i'm the smartest, here is a trivial solution to your problem

constantly

you can save even more time by not doing the work at all

the output is more consistent than what an LLM shits out, too

Edit: serious note, even though you probably aren't worth anyone's time: you may be conflating the technology's actual use cases (as an accountability sink and to spread misinformation) with the intentions of its creators. and the real reason higher-ups are pushing this is because they're pliant dipshits that would eat dogfood if the bowl was labelled "FOMO". also they hate paying employees

the question was rhetorical, but also thank you for the links! <3

i am not surprised that they are all this dumb: it takes an especially stupid person to decide "yes, i am fine allowing this machine to speak for me". even more so when it's made clear that the machine is a stochastic parrot trained via exploitation of the global south and massive amounts of plagiarism and that it also cooks the planet

i am an android user, but in the us not having an iphone can be tedious, so i set up openbubbles

did y'all know that apple lets its users create emojis with "AI" and these things come through as images to non-iphones?

thought i was past the "apple users incidentally harass non-apple users through imessage" thing, but this shit makes me want to just tell everyone that i will only answer messages on signal messenger

The reason I do CS is because a professor of computer science lied to me about the kind of work I'd be doing to get me to enroll in the CS PhD program instead of math. Guy later physically threatened me in his office and plagiarized my work, but I'm not sure if this reflects poorly on computer scientists, academics, or CS professors.

Anyway I have a chip on my shoulder.

the closest i've ever come to being an idea guy is saying 'yeah, i have ideas, they are [shit them out explicitly]. they are half-baked at best but let me know if you do anything with it'

coming up with ideas is fucking easy, for example:

pick a (palatable) villain from anything
put them in a setting that is banal but unusual for them
write jokes

BAM

i googled for discussion around how a VPN can protect (or not) against a MITM attack, and came across this:

We are a small team of men trained through stoicism, currently, as newcomers to cybersecurity, we’ve taken the biggest risk by betting everything on ourselves and the leverage we can gain by sacrificing everything that is not essential.

and while the technical parts seem fine based on a surface-reading, this thick as molasses STOIC MANLINESS of their red-teaming is the silliest shit ever

(ps: read their website in the voice of foghorn leghorn, it's pretty fun)