Khrux

TLDR: I think AI is coming for teaching (for better or worse), but not coming to replace us, because the teacher:student ratio is already as poor as can be.

I’m a teacher. Giving a serious answer, AI is likely going to be very involved in this industry over the next decade, purely for it’s ability to track and scaffold individual learning better than one adult doing the same for 30 people, but that would require a shift to even more digital learning, which takes the “how” of teaching out of the hands of a teacher in a way it currently is not.

That said, I don’t actually think it’s coming for my job precisely because there is 1 teacher to every 30 students. If you compare us to how cashiers have been replaced by self service tills, teachers have already been stripped to a minimal coverage of the classroom, and you cannot have 30 students independently working, because children and teenagers are predominantly motivated to avoid working. I’m this regard, it can only supplement our job, as they can’t meaningfully cut the adult to student ratio further for safety reasons.

Also, although I think it’ll start to be seen in the next 10 years, I’m not sure where it would come in. State schools do not have the budget, energy or time to experiment with individualised AI learning support, and private schools prefer to maintain older styles of teaching for a long time, as they prioritise the development of attitude and trust over academic scores as not only does it supplement academic scores, but it is what the corporate employers of privately educated students seek above merit.

This is a really good point but I feel there is a double edged sword here. Loads of old school bigoted nerds love star trek because for whatever reason they actually don’t pick up on the compassionate, far left messaging.

It was also different when 50 years ago, a black woman as bridge officer was scandal to right wing sensationalist media.

The overt and sometimes performative progressive details that are present now push the boundaries in a similar manner to the old boring change, while being much more noticeable to the rest of the audience.

I have an ADHD diagnosis, and I do think this is 60% just being better at diagnosing it, but I do also believe ADHD is sort of on the rise.

There is an incredible book called Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté, which is the significant book on ADHD in the same way that The Body Keeps the Score is for trauma, which delves into the potential ADHD causes beyond it being hereditary.

Of course modern dopamine-consumerist culture is part of the problem, but it largely makes ADHD symptoms obvious, and various unmet attention needs in early childhood are significantly more linked to developing ADHD, not to fault the parent or other caregiver who may not have the availability or ability to provide that attention due to modern societal demands. It’s been some years since I read it but I really remember one part clearly; it’s basically impossible to test nature Vs nurture in separated-at-birth twins because the act of separating twins at birth spikes the likelihood of having ADHD so much.

But honestly I think the largest contributor to increased ADHD cases is not that we’re better at diagnosing it, it’s that modern society increasingly warrants its diagnoses. 12000 years ago ADHD traits weren’t a disorder, as much as having different physical strength or height to your peers isn’t. Modern capitalist society demands an efficiency of its workforce and ADHD is an inherently inefficient trait, and therefore suddenly warrants treatment.

Don’t get me wrong, medication is incredible, and has turned days I’ve barely been able to get out of bed into productive days, but that’s still valuing being productive.

Left the chat*

I’ve seen quite a lot recently saying a particularly distracting aspect of phones isn’t that they’re a screen and a visual stimulus, but a tool and a haptic stimulus.

An increasingly popular way to combat checking your phone while watching TV is to busy your hands with something. If this works and is widely adopted, we won’t need shows to have second-screen writing repetition; our brains tell our hands to use the tool, and it just so happens that the tool is full of text and speech and occupies the language center of our brains, meaning we stop listening to the show.

Also, a whole separate thing I often think about, before 2010, there were very few high budget TV shows. TV was made on a much smaller budget than film, and the writing often took a hit too, and that was just the reality of watching TV. They were also designed to hook people who were clicking around channels with lots of recaps and narrative refreshers, for people tuning in halfway through, this is like the second-screen writing issues we complain about now on steroids, straight to TV movies were also terrible for this.

Movies that were designed for Cinema revenue weren’t impacted by this or course, but even DVD revenue movies often have simpler plots and reiterate their narratives for people who are half watching while chatting or stoned or whatever.

That’s still incredibly low, I’d have assumed an enormous increase.

I can’t picture a service which beats Spotify in what they offer which isn’t just the same business model but more ethical.

Discovering music for free is an enormous benefit, and the fact that Spotify has practically all mainstream music is nice. People often cite that one quote by Gabe Newell that is “Piracy is not an economic problem. It is a service problem”, as a highlight for steam, but largely Spotify offers what consumers want in a way Netflix or Audible can’t. They have everything you want and guide your discovery in even more, and as long as their encroaching enshittification doesn’t undercut this service, they will continue to underpay artists and fund immoral activities.

The developer of Ultrakill, Hakita, said something which I’ve often thought about. “You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn’t exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had easy access to movies, music and games growing up. If you don’t have money, you can support via word of mouth”. There are plenty of independent things I financially support, particularly things I attend in person in the city I live in. I may spend £100 per month paying for art and entertainment all said and done, and when that’s spent, I will pirate everything else.

I split a Spotify family plan between 6 friends, I think that’s about £3.50 per month, and I pay for no other media services. With video, I run a jellyfin server with a “parent friendly” interface, so they can have “netflix with everything”, which I have at my place too. I don’t read that much any more, if it’s physical I just go to the library and if it’s an audiobook I’ll just pirate it. The benefit here is that even if I’m on a reading binge, that’s not even a book a week. With Spotify, I often pick something and play it via song radio, which is probably 50/50 music I know and new music. Sometimes I just stick albums on, but it’s not like that’s harder. If I had a locally hosted music repository that I’d “paid for”, I could enjoy albums, but not as easily have a radio like discovery experience.

One day, a pirate tool may appear that rivals Spotify, but until that day, I can’t see myself moving away from it.

Go to your local live music, drag shows, theatres, independent cinemas and libraries. Don’t feel obligated to pay for any internet service.

Yeah, he looked like he did on the left through the entire 2010s without changing appearance much, from Narnia 3 to Midsommar. This is absolutely styling above just growing up.

Without arguing politics, the world is sliding very quickly towards facism and being on guard against it is incredibly important. I’m not buying a laptop and putting money in the pockets of someone who may then donate to or fund facism. None of that applies to a developer of a free open source software whose political ideal world is not rapidly approaching.

I agree. Provided you aren’t betraying your own values in the work you do, there’s no shame in not taking pride in how you sell your labour. Be are not defined by our jobs.

I’ve used ChatGPT a little, particularly a few years ago but still on rare occasion now. I won’t bother giving it this prompt and wasting the processing but it probably won’t be biased, I’ve been really really surprised with how critical it is of itself. I think by the nature of the dataset it’s trained on (i.e. basically everything), it’s not really showing any major bias at the moment. It matches my energy and decries capitalism, AI, OpenAI, Sam Altmann etc in a cartoonish, toadie way.

Sadly I don’t think being an AI engineer is quite as bullshit, the obvious allegory is someone who provides the syllabus and marks the exams, rather than just doing addition for rich people.

I cannot believe character.ai was valued at over a billion.

^bubble

Making it up as you go along isn’t inherently bad. Nine times in ten I prefer a story which is planned out but basically any medium that’s open to additional seasons, novels, sequels, etc is capable of falling into this category.

It’s only really a sin when the medium promises a long form mystery while doing this, hence the fact Lost is #1 here. Sherlock Holmes was written as episodic mystery and Arthur Conan Doyle clearly never planned future stories as he went and nobody minded. Togashi, the manga author for Hunter x Hunter stumbled into his most famous arc just because he’d made his metaphysic and societies up as he went and the stars aligned, leading to the Chimera Ant arc. The Simpsons rarely ever changes it’s status quo between episodes, and therefore can be made up as it goes along, because it’s going nowhere. Breaking Bad literally changed the ending of season one to not kill Jesse partly due to the writers strikes and subsequent shortening of the season, and Mike as a character exists because Bob Odenkirk was busy.

Any medium that decieves the audience, promising a well reasoned, long form mystery without any planning of what that mystery is, is bad. Perhaps you’ll strike gold and have an epiphany as to how to bring the plot together perfectly, but that’ll just be luck. Ultimately this is an expression of consumerism; baiting the expectations of art and narrative to deceive the audience for nothing more than engagement, and therefore money.

I find it interesting how people talk about Abrams’s Mystery Box as a choice for a writing technique, despite the fact it’s objectively shit. I can forgiving it in D&D sometimes, but in a professional story, it’s ridiculous.

I was always under the impression that this is what the episode was referencing.

Coming from the UK is correct, it was literally an artistocratic flex at having literally useless land. I read a dissertation a few years back that also linked this to a Baudrillard style simulationist desire for the upper class not to see land with any practical value immediately besides their homes because they were resistant to accept that their wealth was exercised from any real action, and instead they’d pretend it was just a truth. But beyond the lawns were forests and fields, because they had to exist.

When lawns were adopted by the bourgeoisie, who only had half an acre of property, it was already trendy to have the surrounding acres of the house be only lawn. The bourgeoisie simulation was to have the house surrounded by lawns as if it were to then give way to fields and forests, which of course did not exist, just your neighbours equally ugly plot of land.

What I never understood about all of this though, is that gardens are equally cosmetic vanity. I have fond memories of the garden of my grandmother, which has a small greenhouse and two raised vegetable beds at the back, but everything else was flower beds, a pond, a summer pavillion, a small lawn, a shed and a scattering of trees and bushes. Other than the small sections for growing vegetables, it was all entirely for vanity. But it was beautiful. Hell, the small lawn was even pretty functional as the primary place to set up chairs in the sun and play ball games.

I am British, and once this island was forest and mountains from shore to shore, with meadows and plains being rare. The lawn never made sense here, and caught on less in in the Soviet Bloc as plains become more common in nature. America is a land with far more natural plains, and the lawn is further removed from it’s original status. It’s imitating an imitation of a denial of reality, Baudrillard would have a field day.

But I did mention, in my grandmother’s garden, playing ball games on the lawn. American sport is largely built on the suburban madness that is lawns. I’m not talking about sport born in urban centers like basketball, or sports from true rural areas, which I can only assume is rednecks drink driving, if watching US shows has told me anything, but Baseball, American Football and even golf are sports made for lawns. It’s hard to detangle lawns from middle class America without stopping middle class kids play sports in their gardens.

One day they’ll add vegetable gardening to the Olympics and America will be saved, and Joseph McCarthy will be stuck in hell on his fucking lawn.

I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.

I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.

MARBLED SCONES

He measured two cups of flour into a bowl and cut in the baking powder with the side of his hand. Salt followed. It hung in the flour like stone dust. He stirred it with a fork and the dry mix turned over itself and fell still. He cut the butter into cubes and dropped them in and pressed them through with his fingers until the flour took the texture of packed soil. He added a spoon of matcha. The green of river weed. The taste of old things left out in the rain.

He poured in buttermilk and cream. A little at a time. He stirred it slow with a blunt knife and the dough pulled together like it didn’t want to be one thing.

In another bowl he took a handful of flour and mixed it with strawberry powder. A drop of red dye like blood in water. He stirred in cream until it held. He pressed the green dough flat on the counter and laid the red over it and folded. Folded again. The colors turned but did not blend. Like veins of ore in a dark stone.

He shaped the dough into a slab and cut thick rounds with a glass. Each one imperfect. Some leaning. Some split. He set them on a tray lined with paper. The oven was already hot. He did not preheat it. It was always hot. Four twenty five. He watched the scones rise through the glass. They broke along the seams. Green and red and gold. They looked like they’d been dug up.

He split one open while it was still warm. He spread pistachio butter across the inside. It melted into the crumb. Then clotted cream. Then jam. The weight of it brought the top half down slow.

He took it outside and sat in the dirt to eat. There was no sound but the breeze. The sky was wide and empty. The scone was good. The scone was all right.

Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.

Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.

That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.

Although I think it’s worth saying how much dubs have improved in the last decade, I’ve always been reasonably lightly into anime, but always had the odd niche recommendation on the go. Most anime I watch is still casual in tone, so I like to have it on while doing art or something, so I’m a big dub supporter.

A decade ago, you could probably have a rule that unless you’d see someone wearing merch of the anime in public, the dub would be shit, but I think because streaming services are paying so much for dunning themselves, it’s lightened the burden across the scene.

Also if over 50% of users watch dubs, I wonder what percentage of their users solely watch high budget, mainstream anime which has perfectly fine dubs.

Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.

At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.

Gal Godot.

I’m very impressed with Lemmy here for not doing what Reddit would have and naming a long list of women. That being said, if I didn’t feel a moral obligation to boycott Gal Godot, she is so talentless that she hasn’t made anyone else’s list because it’s such a low hanging fruit.