jventura

> I’m watching the same “boil the frog” strategy unfold at Namecheap, and erode much of the brand trust they had built up over a decade, and it’s a shame.

What's happening with Namecheap? I've been a user for a long time and haven't noticed anything.. Maybe I'm one of the frogs being boiled!

As a non-native english speaker, I would say that even if the human has used an LLM to polish his writing, you are still interacting with a human. I use LLMs to polish my words (not the ones here on HN, but the words on my blog), and i have to iterate a lot until it writes the message (or tone) that I really want to convey.

But yeah, a blog post is not a short message. This one here is a short message and I didn't use any LLM. But I can guess that people that are not so fluent in english as myself may need it..

> I'd completely drop the dropout explanation. It's just not part of the modern recipe anymore, AFAICT.

Is there any other mechanism replacing it? As far as I understood, while following the LLMs from Scratch book, the dropout is a mechanism to prevent overfitting, and it makes a lot of sense (basically cripple some neuron connections randomly during training such that their weights aren't updated).

Edit: well, I could have searched on the internet, but other people may stumble on your post and you seem quite knowledgeable of the inner workings of these things. :)

Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine.

Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).

Couldn’t we, the rest of the world, continue to see Lake Ontario, as it was before? It’s a very stupid thing to do and I guess most of us, if asked, would be on team Canada..

I'm not a native EN speaker (I'm Portuguese), therefore a lot is lost in my attempt to find the right words. I'm writing these words without any use of AI or even a sentence-checker (only the spell-checker in Firefox).

Of course that the "succesfull" groups implemented their solutions, tweaked them and, tried their best to escape from race conditions and were able to talk about the performance/memory/etc. tradeoffs. We have a grid to grade for those and other items. They did not outsource all of their thinking to an LLM.. That is what I mean as taking responsability for their code, maybe not the correct word, but the one that came to my head when I wrote it..

How could I realistically enforce it? These are projects students do at home..

Not in the same level, see my other comments..

Everything that provides students with a workflow to think and to try to find solutions to a problem is much better than giving the answer directly! Unfortunately there will always be students that prefer to take the shortcut..

How could we "force" the students to use an LLM that confronted their doubts with more questions? We could tell them to start each chat with a specific prompt (to use the socratic method, etc), but they could eventually jail-break it..

But nevertheless, I like your idea! This is something that a document highlighting methodologies for students on how to use LLMs effectively could/should contain..

This is all so new, and caught us completely unprepared that there's no official university-level policies. Most of us are still navigating the waters and seeing what works and what doesn't work anymore.

I have colleagues that are teaching for more than 30 years, few years away from retirement, who suddenly have been confronted with a new way of doing things. Those are the ones that are still insisting on doing practical projects, etc. I've only been doing this for 20 years, and I'm quite lazy (worked previously as software engineer), so I've moved to those practical tests. I guess that there should probably exist a class or workshop to teach these students how to use LLMs effectively, but as I said, this technology and its implications is quite new.

Personally, what I did was to give them the "lecture" in the line of that they do not understand what the machine has generated, that is not the way a true engineer does, try to do some parallel with things like an LLM designing a bridge and civil engineers building that bridge, and a fatal flaw collapsing the all thing, etc.

In other words, we do not have a formal system in place, it's all talking and convincing them. Obviously it's a big enough problem that should deserve more investment in solutions, but we are all overwhelmed by other tasks. Maybe LLM studios should be held responsible for all these "disruptions" and provide solutions to problems they created! :)

> Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project?

Yes, if they are "responsible" for the code delivered, where responsible means they understand the code, the architecture, the decisions made, etc.

In this case, the students had to invent multiple strategies to solve a specific problem. The "successful" groups did a mix of generated and hand-crafted code (don't know percentages), implemented different strategies and knew their plus and minuses, could change the code in a timely manner to accommodate some of my requests, etc. The "unsuccessful" group couldn't do any of that.

I'm not anti-AI (and really, what could I do if I were?) since I use it myself, I'm just anti-slop, especially from my students.

But in reality I've been slowly transitioning from group projects (for a subset of the grade) to "practical tests", where they must implement a significant subset of a larger project in a 2h class. Still experimenting though.

CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang" - ask for clarifications until they follow unintended paths that lead nowhere.

To fellow professors, when you're suspicious my suggestion is to appeal to their honesty (like "let's be honest, how much of this code is yours, and how much is ChatGPT's?") and offer some empathy and understanding (like understanding they may had multiple deadlines in the same week, etc.). Nevertheless, don't miss the chance to give them the lesson on how is the correct way of doing things. The way to catch these students is to find the same signs of yesteryear copying from other students (which in essence is what copying from an LLM is, although the number has increased because they found us professors unprepared for the volume).

The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. They were clearly responsible for the code (even if they didn't wrote it 100% manually) and could explain their reasoning and strategies used to solve the problems.

Me and my colleagues still have a lot of projects to review, and I asked them to keep the score of the number of projects like these, but so far, the score is 1 in 3 (33%).

It seems a bus to me, just look at the size of the windows. Airplanes don't have windows like that..