Education has a fundamental incentive problem. I want to embrace AI in my classroom. I've been studying ways of using AI for personalized education since I was in grade school. I wanted personalized education, the ability to learn off of any tangent I wanted, to have tools to help me discover what I don't know so I could go learn it.

The problem is, I'm the minority. Many of my students don't want to be there. They want a job in the field, but don't want to do the work. Your required course isn't important to them, because they aren't instructional designers who recognize that this mandatory tangent is scaffolding the next four years of their degree. They have a scholarship, and can't afford to fail your assignment to get feedback. They have too many courses, and have to budget which courses to ignore. The university holds a duty to validate that those passing the courses met a level of standards and can reproduce their knowledge outside of a classroom environment. They have a strict timeline - every year they don't certify their knowledge to satisfaction is a year of tuition and random other fees to pay.

If students were going to university to learn, or going to highschool to learn, instead of being forced there by societal pressures - if they were allowed to learn at their own pace without fear of financial ruin - if they were allowed to explore the topics they love instead of the topics that are financially sound - then there would be no issue with any of these tools. But the truth is much bleaker.

Great students are using these tools in astounding ways to learn, to grow, to explore. Other students - not bad necessarily, but ones with pressures that make education motivated purely by extrinsic factors than intrinsic - have a perfect crutch available to accidentally bypass the necessary steps of learning. Because learning can be hard, and tedious, and expensive, and if you don't love it, you'll take the path of least resistance.

In game design, we talk about not giving the player the tools to optimize their fun away. I love the new wave of AI, I've been waiting for this level of natural language processing and generation capability for a very long time, but these are the tools for students to optimize the learning away. We need to reframe learning and education. We need to bring learning front and center instead of certification. Employers need to recognize this, universities need to recognize this, highschools and students and parents need to recognize this.

This is the start of the use cases I wanted to see take off with Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin. Much like the previous era of distributed content with user-hosted voice servers and forums, having larger communities/organizations run their own instances and avoid trying to treat the space as one big pool of content is the real use case here. The fact that you can cross-instance subscribe and post makes it viable long-term.

It also gives "free" verification of information's sources based on the domain, the same way that (modern) email gives you an extra layer of confidence when you see a verified domain. I would love the see the Government of Canada, CBC, Universities, all starting their own instances and utilizing them in unique and interesting ways. With enough adoption, official provincial/municipality instances could pop up to make organized communities easier.

It feels to me like a starting move away from the autocracy that the platform economy has created. It's not universal, but I absolutely push back against too many instances trying to be "general purpose Reddit replacements" because that seems like a fleeting use case for what it can eventually become, and it just confuses the whole abstraction of what these decentralized socials afford.

While the data might be cherry picked, one thing that can't be displayed here is motivation. In Canada, a decent number of people have guns, but you can't carry firearms with you, you have to take highly specific routes while transporting any restricted hand guns. The role of guns is sport shooting and hunting and it's highly regulated for those.

In the USA, guns are intended to be used to kill other civilians. Owning a gun for self-defense purposes is buying with the intention that you may one day use it to kill another human. Not an enemy combatant in war, but a fellow citizen with a gun.

It's only a feeling, but I feel like that might be the biggest distinction between the USA and other (omitted) high-gun-per-capita countries. Guns in the USA aren't for mitary drafting or protection against a national invasion.

There's also the matter of training and licensing. A buddy in the USA was staunchly opposed to gun licensing. When I said that in Canada, it just helps ensure that people know how to maintain their gun and use it safely, he said, "Well the people who don't take the time to learn how to maintain it and use it safely just shouldn't get it in the first place", which I'm sure is a popular enough sentiment, but it's also the argument for licensing. The zero barrier for entry approach is also a problem.

I'd love to see more nuanced stats than this 4-panel comic is presenting.

Yeah, but the whole show is told from the perspective of his frequently envious friend, Ted, and Ted is regularly shown to be an unreliable narrator. The blonde character also gets long-term, deeply involved with Ted's primary romantic interest, and there are hints that maybe blonde one's exploits are overstated because Ted's still not over it or otherwise remembers it through a negative perspective.

I was once teaching a student introductory programming when I was in my undergrad.

The problem was to draw two circles on the screen of different colours and detect when the mouse is inside of one.

I said, "So our goal is simple: Let's draw a circle somewhere on the screen. Consider what you'd tell me as a human - I've got the pencil, and you want to tell me to draw a circle of a certain size somewhere on this paper. We have three functions. Calling a function will draw a shape. Each function draws a different shape. We have rect(), circle(), and line(). Which of these sounds like the one we want to use? Which would get me to draw the correct shape?"

".... Rect?" "Why?" "It draws a shape." "What shape would rect draw?" "I don't know." "Guess." "A circle?" "Why do you think that?" "We need to draw a circle." "If I said that rect draws a rectangle, which of the three functions would we want to use then, to draw our picture?" "Rect?"

I've now been teaching for many years, and those situations still come up a lot. When I put up a poll in class, with the answer still written on the board, about 25% of people in a 100+ student class will get it wrong - of people who were not only admitted to a competitive university program, but have passed multiple prerequisite courses to be here.

Not only is it unknown gaps in knowledge, there is just a thought process I haven't been able to crack through that some people really can't see what is immediately before them.

This mouse? Believe it or not, file.

There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can't remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it's really helped me as an intro lecturer.

Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It's easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.

I 100% agree for the meme, but just warning that this isn't really a strong argument. I'm going to straw man here, but: "I'm against the Protect the Children Act", "You're literally saying you're against protecting children." "No, I just disagree that the Act is actually about protecting children and is more about government surveillance and corporate control." In their heads, they've already prepared the argument.

Basically, by them seeing it as a unified organization that stands for more than just being opposed to fascism, they see it as a crafted doublethink instead of realizing they are the victims of a different doublethink, to butcher the use of the term. It's hard to cut through that.

I almost exclusivity self-checkout for groceries, and it had drastically sped up my checkout time as most people in my area opt to use traditional checkout and the stores are still keeping lots of lanes open (just closing the express lanes). The last 3 times I've used a non-self checkout, each time I was double charged for items or didn't have reduced prices applied and didn't notice because I was bagging.

+1 to safety razors in general. The disposables always used to make my neck and chin look like a horror film, not for lack of research on using. Switching to safety razors, I only shave around my beard so I use the same blades for a long while and shave infrequently, and I've been using the same pack of blades that I bought 5+ years ago. A little cardboard and metal, way less waste, I have a huge supply of razors so I haven't thought about buying in ages, and I get a way better shave after just a little practice.

And the waste reduction can't be understated.

For me, it tracks, but the caveat is a high increase in burnout accumulation. No self regulation needed? No problem. Except when you can't self regulate healthy work amounts / dealing with demands.

Geode colouring matched Ace Flag colouring.

Even thinking about ASD as a possibility for me is a very new thing, so I don't know with any certainty I fall here, but learning about "high-functioning" autism as being "successfully masked" has made me seriously begin exploring this. Psychiatrists were hesitant early on to entertain any discussions (edit: of any neurodivergence) because I'd been so successful in school and career, even though I was always dying inside feeling like an imposter in society and not knowing who I am and why every interaction feels so difficult and requires so much effort. Why does just existing feel so deeply uncomfortable?

I wrote off the idea of high-functioning ASD because I certainly didn't feel high-functioning, despite my successes, because of the feeling of claustrophobia in my own skin. I wrote off any other higher needs because I didn't have those needs and I'd exhausted a lot of time and effort to not need those supports... Which in hindsight, is probably not typical.

Neurodivergence is so often defined by the ability to fit in and avoid disrupting typical society and norms. I wasn't depressed enough because I went into work enough days. I wasn't ADHD enough because I wasn't disrupting other people's lives and breaking social rules and got good grades. I wasn't autistic enough because I learned to to navigate social situations (read: only engaged in social situations where I'm in a position of control or known mutual interest).

"High-functioning" for whom?

Anyways again, I'm new to even remotely considering autism for me, so I apologize if this is wholely unrelated and unrelatable, but whatever flavour my brain is, it tastes a lot worse than it smells (only figuratively... As far as I know).

Hah, yeah I learned I wasn't so much a night person as much as someone who indulges in revenge sleep procrastinating and doesn't get enough alone time in the day.

Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn't currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.

If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.

It depends what "From Scratch" means to you, as I don't know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about...

• Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
• Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
• Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they're more general purpose and you'll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting "Making the game", but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
• Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images... that same as previous, but you'll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

If you're new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here's a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you'll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it's a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

I'm a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn't have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there's lots of info out there.

If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they'll often run slow, they'll take more time to get started on a project, and you'll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you'll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you'd like, but similar caveats to previous; there's likely a low ceiling for the quality you'll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.

I know it's controversial, but moving away from "guys" when I address a group and more or less defaulting to "they" when referring to people I don't know.

They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I'd never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn't state pronouns.

Switching away from guys was natural, but I'm in a very male dominated field and I'd heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with "Guys", so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.

I'll just add that routine is in itself a major challenge - for me, I don't have routines as much as I have laying things out in a way that reminds me to do things regularly. For my meds, I just take it once in the morning, but the one routine I try my best to maintain is flipping the pill bottle upside down. If it's upside down, there's a high chance I either took it, or forgot to flip it before bed, but it's a visual reminder so that I don't need to actively remember to take them on routine, but if I see the pill bottle in a state, I know what action to take.

That's probably one of the hardest things I've seen family members try to understand. I'm not trying to imply anything about you, this is just a related example, but I've had family members see my ADHD family members as just being lazy or intentionally ignoring things, or thinking they're just selfish or whatever. The problem is, even if it's beneficial, a part of ADHD is not having control over where your memory and focus is being put. You may want something, but that doesn't mean you'll sustain attention or effort to achieve it, and conversely you may place it in places you really don't care about to a very consuming degree...

I think he's basically saying that it's racist to "artificially" integrate communities, because (I think he's saying) if they need to be integrated, then that's the same as saying that black folks are necessarily inferior. I don't think he's trying to say they're inferior, but that laws forcing integration are based on that assumption. So he can be well educated and successful because he isn't inherently inferior, therefore there is no need for forced integration.

... Which is such a weird stretch of naturalism in a direction I wasn't ready for. Naturalist BS is usually, "X deserves fewer rights because they are naturally inferior", whereas this is "We should ignore historical circumstances because X is not naturally inferior".

Start a game of monopoly after three other players have already gone around the board 10 times and created lots of rules explicitly preventing you from playing how they did and see how much the argument of "well, to give you any kind of advantage here would just be stating you're inferior, and we can't do that."

Man probably got angry at his golf handicap making him feel inferior and took things too far. Among other things.

It's tough as a computer science professor from a related perspective. Lots of students arbitrarily hating anything AI related because of this, including all of the traditional techniques from the 60 years prior to the rise of LLMs and diffusion models, and others misconstruing or discounting any AI class that isn't LLM or diffusion related.

I never like to say technology is inevitable, as the inevitability argument is one of the best marketing tools major companies have to justify their poor ethics and business models (see: the gig economy founders, the "Momentum" mindset). It's clear, though, that there is quite a paradigm shift occuring.