I worked for a 996 founder in a faced paced startup recently - after busting my ass for 5 months he fired me for not delivering fast enough despite creating an entire platform from scratch

Now I’m was old enough to realize the risk- but given this job market which absolutely sucks for developers but I see young twenty something’s getting influenced by stupid catchphrases like 996

I’m an AI engineer but I think schools need a nuclear option

Banish tech in schools (including cell phones) (except during comp classes) but allow it at home

Ie in high school only allow paper and pencil/pen

Go back to written exams (handwriting based)

Be lenient on spelling and grammer

Allow homework, digital tutoring AI assistants and AI only when it not primary- ie for homework not in class work

Bring back oral exams (in a limited way)

Encourage study groups in school but don’t allow digital tech in those groups in class or libraries only outside of campus or in computer labs

Give up iPads and Chromebooks and Pearson etc

There's another side of this. The teachers have gotten used to technology, too. They don't want to grade papers by hand anymore.

My SO was a TA in college, so I can echo this.

You'd get a stack of 120 blue books to grade in a week's time a few times a quarter.

The grading was entirely just checking if the student used a set of key words and had a certain length. This was a near universal method across the University for blue book exams.

Honestly, an LLM would be a better grader than most stressed out grad students.

Everyone has been phoning it in for a few centuries now

No issues to me in using LLM for suggestive grading assuming we have some evidence on its grading rubric and paper trail to audit for appeals to human review - ie human teacher is responsible not LLM

Any audits will be quickly farmed out to yet another AI for review, is my guess.

I'd imagine some system like YTs appeals system, where everyone is maximally unhappy.

One anecdote from my SO's time as a grader was that pre med students were the worst. They would just wear you down to get the best possible grade, appealing literally every missed point ad nauseum. Most profs would give in eventually in the undergrad classes and not deal with them. Of course further emboldening them.

No other major was like that, only those dealing with the future hellscape that was US healthcare.

I'd imagine that, yes, eventually your appeals in the AI future will end up at a prof, but delayed to hell and back. Even paying $200k+ won't matter.

I was a TA and knew many TAs, and no one I knew did things that way. (To some extent this can depend on the field though.)

> They don't want to grade papers by hand anymore.

This is only half correct. Grading by hand isn't an issue. Reading students' handwriting is the issue. Having to read the hurried scribbling of dozens of students is a huge challenge for teachers, who were already struggling grading typed papers on a deadline.

Back in the day we were writing code on paper (or on punched cards, using them as a paper substitute, as there were a lot of them left over from the Soviet times and they looked very "computer-y"), so even during computer classes you didn't necessarily need a computer. Not that I really think that it can still work in the year 2025 and beyond...

I was just talking to younger coworkers about this recently. Mid-90s to early 2000s: FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and C++ classes all had handwritten code parts for homework, handouts, exams, etc. This wasn't just pseudocode, you had to have full syntax, variable declarations, correct spelling of functions, etc. You frequently had to show code optimization, debugging, etc even on paper. Wild times!!

* All of those classes also had lab time (some dedicated, similar to a chemistry class), info on how to get the IDE if you had $ access to a computer at home, and alternatives as well.

Personally, I see more value in pseudo code (written or typed) and sketch type diagrams (analog or digital) than handwriting code. However, it was WILD and amazing to watch the gray-hairs of those days debug your code on paper!

Studied Fortran 65 as elective, submitted assignment/exams by writing actual code with pencil paper. Never got access to the cool looking machines in the actually cooled room. I am not kidding that I really enjoyed that paper compared to my other papers.

My exams had both per question. Pseudo code then actual code.

This was early 2000s, Java.

In my Uni we still had some coding test done with pen and paper (2014-2018), and AFAIK, they're still doing them. I even done a part of an exam in assembly with a provided Xilinx PicoBlaze assembly mnemonics list.

I don't know why people demonize them. If you know the syntax you're asked for, you can write in that language, and if you were asked to write in pseudo-code some algorithms, you should be able without any additional computerize help.

Or just give them laptops that are on an internal network only, with just the tools they need.

You could write your essay and save it in your classroom shared folder. I don't think this is rocket science.

This i could see work. Either white-list specific online resources or just full on local digital library of pdfs.

Phones still pose a problem. But asking for things on a phone and typing it back to a computer would be rather inefficient cheating.

Ban phones in the classroom. Thems were the rules for me in high school - phones went in our locker.

I struggled alot with hand writing assignments and the greatest boost in my grade and academic ability was getting my own laptop in highschool because of the writing.

So i really do not wish to see that backtracked. But i could see the internet being declared too destructive.

A computer without internet, a book, and ample time would have worked for me.

From a teacher's perspective, I'm sure the craft is a mess of bad school policies vs. so-called "best practices" vs. real learning science vs. government policies vs. ancient bad advice (eg. learning styles and tablets in classrooms) vs. personal opinion.

It's not like there is a senior engineer who's got mountains of expertise to defer to (like a software team would have). Teachers are likely given directives from their schools and get dumped a bunch of tablets and are told this is "modern" education and to just roll it out.

Anyway, to your point - top-down directives are what change schools. There has been success such as banning smartphones in Ireland & UK recently. Schools taking on the problems and then solving it themselves could go a long way, rather than waiting for government to mandate things.

The best format I ever learned math was with plain sheets of printer paper, essentially a page per problem letting me doodle the problem and really think it through freely. After working with the concepts we then logged on to Mathematica for visualizations to really cement the concepts.

Maths is probably the safest subject. Reading compression and writing is the dangerous stuff. Its arguably the most important subject in regular school, 2nd only to socialisation skills.

> Bring back oral exams

With 30 kids in a class Im not sure this is possible. Oral exams scale horribly

My best experience for book reports was by oral exam in high school with a class of about 30.

Everyone has independent work and one by one you are called to the teacher's desk. He would take your book, open it up to a "random" spot and read a couple of sentences and then ask about what is going on in that scene. Hard to bull shit.

This could be modified to be like parent:teacher conferences where appointment slots exist while everyone else is doing something else (lunch, another class, maybe scheduled after hours)

Bring back smaller classroom sizes.

Bring back functional school funding models.

Bring back a populace proud to pay for their priorities with taxes

But the issue is not there is not enough money in the budget, it's just not a priority. Old people are prioritized, not young future.

Double education budget.

Most western countries I follow are cutting on public education and teachers are miserable. It doesn't sound promising to be honest.

Doesn't France still do oral exams?

They do, but teachers are on the street every year as their conditions degrade. It might not last for long.

As does Denmark.

There was a time when governments, banks, corporations and institutions had big iron computers, and they were not in the classroom. That time was okay; education happened, and some people who went into computing did very cool things anyway.

>Be lenient on spelling and grammer

How about be strict on spelling and grammer (sic) to have a GPA that accurately places students in colleges. The days of dunces getting 3.9 GPA and making it into Yale need to end.

So how does a radical materialist explain consciousness- that it is too is a fundamental material phenomena? If so are you stretching the definition of materialism?

I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood

It doesn’t explain it.

Consciousness is a characteristic of material/matter/substance/etc.

There are not two types of stuff.

It is epistemologically rigorous. And simple.

whenever I see the word 'reductionist', I wonder why it's being used to disparage.

a materialist isn't saying that only material exists: no materialist denies that interesting stuff (behaviors, properties) emerges from material. in fact, "material" is a bit dated, since "stuff-type material" is an emergent property of quantum fields.

why is experience not just the behavior of a neural computer which has certain capabilities (such as remembering its history/identity, some amount of introspection, and of course embodiment and perception)? non-computer-programming philosophers may think there's something hard there, but they only way they can express it boils down to "I think my experience is special".

Because consciousness itself cannot be explained except through experience ie consciousness (ie first person experience) - not through material phenomena

It’s like explaining music vs hearing music

We can explain music intellectually and physically and mathematically

But hearing it in our awareness is a categorically different activity and it’s experience that has no direct correlation to the physical correlates of its being

The common thought experiment is the color blind researcher experiencing color for the first time(Mary the Colour Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument)

Experience doesn't look necessary: we consider tesseract explained even though we can't experience it.

You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao

Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true

(Warning: Gets into spiritual stuff)

https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g

That’s called meta cognition (what humans do) not subjective experience - which is the feeling of what happens and sets animal or agentic creatures apart from rocks (not sure about plants)

You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :)

But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture

Though you could have like a slider control for more or less bat.

Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals

If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so

IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity

Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that

You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit.

Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?

>Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process

I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses.

I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.

Saying it might be on a continuum just obfuscates things. What do you mean exactly?

If there is no sense of self or personal identity, how is that different than a block of wood or a computer? That there might be "mental" functions performed doesn't give it subjectivity if there is no subject performing them. And if there is no persistent reflective self there is no subject. You could call instincts or trained behaviors mental, activities of a kind of mind if you wanted to. But if it's not self aware it's not a moral subject.

WTF - how insane is this country.

Also the tech world Google, Facebook(Meta) in particular deserves part of the blame for this state of the world, by creating social media platforms that create willful ignorance bubbles around their users which allowed our stupidest people to feed themselves politically motivated conspiracy and lies over scientifically validated truths

One easy way to judge the quality of of the spec the ai generates is to run it a few times on the same story and compare the differences

Curious if you tried that - how much variation does the AI do or does the grounding in codebase and prompts keep it focused and real?

I haven't done intense tests yet, but based on my preliminary tests, the output is about 80% consistent. The others are like suggesting additional changes.

I set the foundation for a Telegram assistant, a web app, and a desktop app, while ditching Figma, Notion, Slack and Pipedrive. Not bad for a fistful of tokens

The amount of bugs and tech debt boggles the mind here

hey (author here). obviously, the rest of the content adds a lot of nuance to this statement. it's a bit provocative on purpose.

But in practice, now that I am working with it, what I needed from those tools already works, with no major bugs so far. I haven’t recreated the tools! just the parts I need to able to plug in and plug out features. Also, many of those features are usually available in great libraries (like Tiptap).

No major bugs maybe for you as a user, but I would bet there are some very serious security issues in multiple components. So I hope none of that code is reachable from the outside. Which ofc is already not true as you are processing data from the outside with llms.

I've been in the game for over 25 years and built plenty of architectures with over millions of MAU, so I am not super anxious about what I've built here. But any API I use can be breached. I would say the risk I take is about the same as using Airtable. And sadly, anything can happen. Also, I am not using it for financial transactions, mostly just deal flow material.