Duanemclemore

Anecdotally, when I use simple command idioms like ctl-tab to change tabs, alt-tab to change applications, or press alt in an application to bring up the single letter shortcuts for navigating menus my students are blown away.

I have to actively teach them how to use and navigate file folders, how to make an appointment in Outlook, and other fundamental user operations. I don't blame them, I blame the developers primarily of browser based cloud apps and OS's.

Edited to add: this includes using ctl and arrows to move by whole words, etc. fundamental stuff in the apps they would have been using since a young age. Not to mention how to use the fn key to access the other functions of Function keys, and fn-esc to switch the behavior globally on their laptops.

I'm a licensed architect. Welcome to our hell of the last 40 years.

When I was seven I wrote my first program. It was in Terrapin Logo and evenly tiled the monitor of my elementary school's Apple IIe with hexagons.

It's been all downhill since.

As a university professor, back in the early days of this when students were just copy / pasting output directly I was really hoping the model builders would implement steganographic fuzzy hashes.

Not that it's the ideal solution. But it would be really neat.

Buildings are a fantastically complicated and interesting complex problem space. I found my architecture studio students using it to ask technical and code questions about the buildings they were tasked with designing. I observed that the inaccurate information it was returning was compounding...

To be clear, I say "inaccurate" rather than "wrong" in this case because even if the information it returns is factually correct to the question being asked, students don't have an understanding of the complexity of the interdependent tectonic, regulatory, and spatial / experiential factors of a building sophisticated enough to ask their questions of the specificity and nuance necessary to get a good output that addresses the entire problem.

Anyway - with the students still learning to ask questions the right way, and the conditionally-incorrect facts making their learning more complicated rather than less, I hit on a strategy for them to use LLM's that seemed to help much better.

I suggested that instead of ask the LLM for the factual answer, or even better for the facts and an explanation, that they ask it to direct them to the proper place in the source material to find the answer themselves. Then, to treat it like a lab partner. IE:

Hey Claude I'm looking for "x."

Claude: "look at foo, bar."

Thank you - chapter (foo) part (bar) table (goo) says "car." However I notice that footnote (hoo) says there's an exception if "dar." Which is what I have. Walk me through this exception...

It seemed to have good results as a guide to understanding the disparate bodies of knowledge that they will eventually have to keep together in their heads and work synthetically and non-linearly through, rather than just as an external source of blindly trusted authority.

Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.

So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?

to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."

I distinctly remember seeing an exhibition of this work in Los Angeles in the early aughts. For the life of me I can't remember where. The photos were shot with a macro lens and blown up so that each specimen was ... 12" square? maybe bigger?

Even then there were dozens upon dozens of them on display. It was mind bending.