zarify

I used the Excel example the other day. What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger, and so folks who have the domain expertise can do something useful with it.

It’s easy to look down on it as fragile, ugly, insecure or whatever, but by and large it works for solving people’s problems.

I see vibe coding the same way. There’s going to be a lot of shit, just like there’s a lot of shit spreadsheets, but I also think there’s going to be a lot of itch scratching.

Ugh. Every time I accidentally put a HEIC on my Windows machine, or one of my students tries to upload a WEBP to our school's LMS :/

Most of teaching kids to code is them understanding terminology, structure, and getting them unstuck. This has bits of information mixed with unscaffolded terminology all over the place, some hidden in collapsibles, and some just missing.

For example the `range` example in the second activity doesn't show a `for` loop's structure, how `range` is called, or what it does. One of the hints shows you the syntax for a `range` call, but nothing about loop syntax.

The hints are on request rather than at-need, and aren't linked to what's going wrong for them - doing some structural analysis of the code to decide what hint might be needed would make hints more useful. The couple of activities I looked at didn't have particularly useful hints that targeted real problems and were more of the "here's a snippet of completed code" variety, which doesn't teach anyone anything.

I'd recommend going and looking into some teaching pedagogy before building stuff, tbh.

The actual activity objectives don't look too bad, but the UI is a mess of the wrong sorts of information to help kids learn the principles.

I was curious about the tutor, but not curious enough to hand over an auth token to it. I've been building a writing tutor using local models for my kids, and it's been an interesting experience trying to provide helpful, structured information at the time they need it, rather than just asking for answers, or parsing generic advice.

If only they had some sort of marketplace to be able to sell them off at a reasonable price.

Hahah, smart boards. I remember pushing back hard against my school on those. The fact they evolved into short throw projectors that occasionally have ok touch monitoring is a win, even if it took a bunch of $5-10k surfaces that no one could draw on, but inevitably ended up with a few whiteboard marker smudges to get there.

Open gradebooks are amazing. You just need to have school leadership that sets realistic expectations with students and parents and backs up their teachers rather than caving to helicopter parents. I've had nothing but good feedback from parents and students about timeliness and transparency on marking feedback. Standardised testing on the other hand is goddamned menace that has done more to damage the value of assessment than transparency ever has. The value of open gradebooks is the feedback, not the numbers.

AI in schools feels like more of a fait accompli. Who provides most of the software infrastructure to schools? Microsoft and Google. Who is busy stuffing AI into all the things? Oh look, it's Microsoft and Google.

Determining important from human speech. I’ve had a few summaries from meetings I’ve been involved in and there’s always been a real mismatch from what was actually focused on and how it comes across in the summary.

Sounds like it's just focused on shows and games from the description in the paper:

> At ages 1 and 1.5 years, which was conducted in a subsample, parents were asked to report the average amount of time that the child spent daily on television (TV) on weekdays and weekends within the past month. This was collected in 2010 to 2011 when TV was the primary source of screen viewing time for 97% of Singaporean families [38]. At ages 2, 3 and 6 years, parents were asked to report the amount of time, in 5-min increments, their child spent using screens on weekdays and weekend days. Three types of devices were considered separately: (1) TV and TV-related games consoles; (2) computers (desktop or laptop); and (3) hand-held devices including tablets, smartphones, and hand-held games consoles. At age 8 years, parents were asked to report on their child’s time spent sitting or lying down while watching screens on the most recent weekday (school days) and on the most recent Saturday and Sunday. Four types of devices/media were considered separately: (1) watching videos on a TV (TV programs, DVDs, Blu-ray); (2) watching videos or playing games on computers; (3) watching videos or playing games on tablets or smartphones; and (4) playing video games on consoles.

We’re having this sort of conversation at the school that I work at, which serves remote communities and other disadvantaged students. One of our states is currently making noise about reducing “screen time” for schools without much distinction about what it involves.

And here’s us, an online only school that serves kids that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access education at all or some types of classes at best, left wondering where that might leave us if our state decides to zombie its way into similar policy decisions.

Edit: Downvotes for pointing out that government policies without nuance around what "screen time" means hurts kids who have no alternative education options, apparently?

Feels like there’s a lot of projection going on there.

I’ve worked with a lot of professionals over the years who chose to work part time (and have done myself too). Various reasons, but mostly it boiled down to valuing their time and wellbeing more than grinding full time.

The thing about “living standards” is, like many standards they change depending on your priorities.

AI aside, I think the biggest thing we could do is stop thinking about education as a profit centre. We’re not multiplying humanity if we’re only doing it for the fraction that can afford it.

Edit: Having more of a look I see you’re making this freemium, which is a good thing.

I bought one of these and I quite like it. Form factor is nice, transfer is a bit rough around the edges but serviceable.

Pretty sure my credit card got harvested from either them or the website purchase though

I think there’s a lot of value in some of this (and as the owner of a somewhat spicy brain I relate to the desire for processes that help), but it feels like at least some of this (c|sh)ould be scripted and not LLM’d.

I’ve been watching some of the GitHub App promos, and it feels like because you have an app with access that knows how to agent, that’s the first method within reach, even if it isn’t necessarily the best one.

Funny, I had the opposite experience with MiniMax and Mimo when using OpenCode. MiniMax got stuck with looping through broken tool calls all the time and MiMo just powered through things and for the most part just worked.