bpesquet

I'm no LLM fanboy and I do know about their issues and shortcomings.

I also think that asking the right questions to a model while following a lecture, assessing its answers and integrating them into one's own reasoning is difficult. There is certainly a minimum age/experience level under which this process will generally fail, possibly hindering the learning outcome.

Nevertheless, I saw with my own eyes a mid-level student significantly improving his understanding of a difficult topic because he had access to a LLM in real time. I believe this is a breakthrough. Time will tell.

I'm a CS/AI teacher in an engineering school. A few days ago, towards the end of my course on convolutional neural networks, I asked my students to explain why tha first linear layer of the example PyTorch network had a specific number of neurons. This is a non-trivial question whose answer isn't directly available online (it depends on the input dimensions and the nature of all previous layers).

They struggled for a while, and the first student who gave the right answer explained how he did it. All morning, he interacted with ChatGPT while following my course, asking questions each time my own explanations weren't sufficient for him to understand. He managed to give the LLM enough context and information for it to spit not only the right answer, but also the whole underlying process to obtain it. In French, qui plus est ;)

This was for me an eye-opening, but also a bit unsettling experience. I don't use ChatGPT & co much for now, so this might seems pretty mundane to some of you. Anyway, I realized that during any lecture or lab, teachers will soon face (or are already facing) augmented students able to check and consolidate their understanding in real time. This is great news for education as a whole, but it certainly interrogates our current teaching model.

Yes, it's manual. I have no experience with automatic ones.

Admittedly, it is a rather pricey model (Omega Speedmaster). I bought it second hand for 1500 € a few years ago. Unfortunately, prices have since skyrocketed for many emblematic watches like this one.

The PineTime is still an electronic gadget that you won't use for very long.

My watch takes 15 seconds to rewind each day, and 5 seconds to be time adjusted by one minute twice a week. Service is every 5 years, the last one cost me 88 €. It gets more valuable each year, and I plan to bequeath it to my son in a (hopefully) very distant future.

To each his own, I guess.

Personal and subjective opinion ahead.

Any smartwatch will become unusable, polluting garbage a few years (months?) from now: a canonical example of planned obsolescence. Their self-tracking functions are a double-edged sword, a source of stress as much as relief.

Any well-built and well-maintained mechanical watch will last you decades. No dependencies on electricity and network connectivity, it's a self-contained and entirely autonomous piece of human engineering. Mine was built in 1975 and is one year older than me. In a world where everything fades away so fast, wearing it everyday feels like owning a precious relic.

Easy choice if you ask me.

Corrected, thanks for pointing it out.

Registered! BTW, awesome panel title.