Skip Navigation

pnutzh4x0r

@ pnutzh4x0r @lemmy.ndlug.org

Posts
126
Comments
38
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

    Jump

  • Sure, some people acquire the capability through repetition. But all that matters in the end is if you are capable or not.

    I guess the question is how do you develop that capability if you are cheating or using a tool to do things for you? If I use GrubHub to order food or pay someone else to cook for me, does it make sense to say I can cook? After all, I am capable of acquiring cooked food even though I didn't actually do any of the work nor do I understand how to well, actually make food.

    The how is relevant if you are trying to actually learn and develop skills, rather than simply getting something done.

    No, the point is to get an irrelevant piece of paper that in the end doesn't actually indicate a persons capabilities.

    Perhaps the piece of paper doesn't actually indicate a person's capabilities in part because enough students cheat to the point where getting a degree is meaningless. I do not object to that assessment.

    Look, I'm not arguing that schooling is perfect. It's not. Far from it. All I am saying is that if your goal is to actually learn and grow in skill, development, and understanding, then there is no shortcut. You have to do the work.

  • AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

    Jump

  • Sure. If you do enough basic math, you start to see things like how 2/8 can be simplified to 1/4 or you recognize that 10 is not a perfect square root or how you could reorder some operations to make things easier (sorry, examples from my kids). Little things like that where you don't even think about it... it becomes second nature to you and that makes you a lot faster because you are not worrying about those basic ideas or mechanics. Instead, you can think about more complicated things such as which formulas to apply or the process to compute something.

    As another example, since I teach computer science, a lot of novice students struggle with basic programming language syntax... How exactly do you declare a variable? What order do things go? How does a for loop work? Do you need a semicolon or parentheses, etc. If you do enough programming, however, these things become second nature and you stop thinking about it. You just seemily, intuitively, know these things and do them naturally without thinking, even though when you first started, it was really complicated and daunting and you probably spent a lot of time constructing a single line of code.

    Once you develop a foundation however, you don't need to worry about these low-level things. Instead you worry about high-level issues such as how to organize larger pieces of code into functions or how to I utilize different paradigums, etc.

    This is why a basketball player, for instance, will shoot thousands of shots in practice or why a piano player will play a piece over and over for many hours. It's so they don't have to think about the low-level mechanics. It becomes muscle memory and it's just natural to them.

    I hope that makes sense.

  • AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

    Jump

  • Thanks for the thoughtful response.

    Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource.

    I generally agree. That's why I'm no longer banning AI in my courses. I'm allowing students to use AI to explain concepts, help debug, or as a reference. As a resource or learning aid, it's fine or possibly even great for students.

    However, I am not allowing students to generate solutions, because that is harmful and doesn't help with learning. They still need to do the work and go through the process, AI assisted or not.

    This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that's always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because 'you won't always have a calculator' or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it's one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill.

    I disagree with your specific example here. You should learn to do math in your head because it helps develop intuition of the relationship between numbers and the various mathematical operations. Without a foundational understanding of how to do the basics manually, it becomes very difficult to tackle more complicated problems or challenges even with a calculator. Eventually, you do want to graduate to using a calculator because it is more efficient (and probably more accurate), but you will be able to use it much more effectively if you have a strong understanding numbers and how the various operations work.

    Your overall point about how a tool is used being important is true and I agree that if used wisely, AI or any other tool can be a good thing. That said, from my experience, I find that many students will take the easy way out and do as you noted at the top: "blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results".

  • AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

    Jump

  • The how is irrelevant.

    What I usually tell students is that homework and projects are learning opportunities. The point isn't for them to produce a particular artifact; it's to go through the process and develop skills along the way. For instance, I do not need a program that can sort numbers... I can do that myself and there are a gazillion instances of that. However, students should do that assignment to practice learning how to code, how to debug, how to think through problems, and much more. The point isn't the sorting program... it's the process and experience.

    How do you get better at say gymnastics? You do a bunch of exercises and skills, over and over.

    How do you get better at say playing the guitar? You play a lot songs, over and over.

    How do you get better at say writing? You write a lot, some good, some bad, over and over.

    To get better at anything, you need to do the thing, a lot. You need to build intuition and muscle memory. Taking shortcuts prevents that and in the long run, hurts your learning and growth.

    So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted. Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.

  • AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

    Jump

  • Maybe. It is true that people who would have cheated in the past are now just using AI in addition to the previous means. But from my experience teaching, the number of students cheating is also increasing because of how prevalent AI has become and how easy it is to use it.

    AI has made cheating more frictionless, which means that a student who might not have say used Chegg (requires some effort) or copied a friend (requires social interaction) in the past, can now just open a textbox and get a solution without much effort. LLMs have made cheating much easier, quicker, and safer (people regularly get caught using Chegg or copying other people, AI cheating can be much harder to detect). It is a huge temptation where the [short-term] benefits can greatly dwarf the risks.

  • Windows Critical Vulnerability: CVE-2024-38063

    Jump

  • Based on what I can tell (I don't usually use Windows), a patch was released on August 13th. As long as you are current with your Windows Updates, this shouldn't be an issue.

  • Trying out [SerenityOS]

    Jump

  • What are your thoughts on SerenityOS?

  • What is your default sort?

    Jump

  • I'm a masochist, so I usually do "New". Lemmy is small enough that I can usually get through most of the new posts in a reasonable amount of time.

    That said, if I want to a bit chiller experience, I will use "Scaled" which sometimes bubbles up something I might have missed.

    Finally, I will use "Active" if I'm really bored and what to see what most people are engaged with... but that is pretty rare.

  • What distro do you use for your servers?

    Jump

  • I currently use Ubuntu for all my machines (desktops, laptops, and servers), but I used to use Void Linux on my machines for about 6 years, including on a couple of VPSes. Since you are familiar with Void Linux, you could stick with that and just use Docker/Podman for the individual services such as Matrix, Mastodon, etc.

    In regards to Debian, while the packages are somewhat frozen, they do get security updates and backports by the Debian security team:

    https://www.debian.org/security/

    There is even a LTS version of Debian that will continue backporting security updates:

    https://www.debian.org/lts/

    Good luck!

  • The Open Source Computer Science Degree

    Jump

  • Not a bad list. Off the top of my head, I would say it is missing two things:

    1. Discrete Math (formal logic, sets, probability, etc)
    2. Theory of Computing (not just algorithms, but things like Turing machines, NFAs, DFAs, etc.). These may not be strictly the most practical courses, but I think a Computer Science degree would be incomplete without these.

    The "Introduction to Operating Systems" link no longer works (redirects to "Autonomous Systems" courses). Instead, I would recommend using Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, which is the textbook I use in my OS course.

    Finally, something like The Missing Semester of Your CS Education would also be a nice extra.

  • TIL about privacy guides

    Jump

  • basic UI programming in linux

    Jump

  • For higher level widgets in ncurses, you can use a library like textual or urwid.

  • Lemmy predicts: Chromebooks will become the new Thinkpads

    Jump

  • I'm not so sure... for the following reasons:

    1. Despite using a version of the Linux kernel in ChromeOS, Chromebooks don't always have the best hardware (ie. driver) support from the mainline kernel used by most distributions. That's why there are niche distributions like GalliumOS which provide tweaks to support the touchpad and audio devices in many Chromebooks. It's similar to how Android is Linux, but it's not standard Linux as we are familiar with (so the hardware support is different).
    2. Many Chromebooks have really poor specs: low-wattage CPUs, small amounts of storage, low amounts of RAM. While they may be newer, they are actually probably less performant than older laptops. This has changed in recent years with the new Chromebook plus program (or whatever it is called) which mandates a reasonable set of baseline features, but that is talking about current Chromebooks and not the ones from the COVID era.
    3. Related to the previous point, many Chromebooks are not serviceable or upgradeable while Thinkpads and some recent laptops are. You are unlikely to open up a Chromebook and be able to replace say the RAM or SSD, which would be a show stopper for a lot of people that like Thinkpads.

    So... unfortunately, I think this take is a bit of a miss and I dont' really see it happening. I would be happy to be proven wrong though since my kids have two Chromebooks from the COVID era :}

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Wayland Merges New Screen Capture Protocols

    Jump

  • No, most likely Pipewire would be used to implement the protocol for various compositors.

    Think of the protocols as high-level descriptions of interfaces (or designs) that specify what needs to be implemented to support a particular feature (in this case capturing images of a "screen"). Looking at this one, it describes a ext_image_capture_source_v1 object that has various methods such as create_source and destroy. Different compositors could then implement or support this interface with whatever technology they wish (most will rely on Pipewire).

    This is already the case with the existing screensharing protocol. For instance wlroots uses pipewire buffers in xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.

  • How Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops (and why it's called 'Project Sputnik')

    Jump

  • Not a fan of the XPS line (expensive, not great thermals, and meh port selection) and I have never own one (though I've seen others with them). That said, I have a few of their Latitudes (currently using Latitude 7420) and one Precision and those run Linux really well.

    One thing most people don't realize is that Dell does support Linux (ie. Ubuntu) beyond the XPS line and you can buy Latitudes or Precisions with Linux support OOTB. Additionally, Dell ships firmware updates via LVFS on their XPS, Latitude, and Precision lines. The support isn't perfect, but I have been happy with using Dell hardware and Linux for over a decade now.

    PS. You can get really good deals via the Dell Outlet (my current laptop is refurbished from there), and you can usually find a number of off-lease or 2nd systems or parts on Ebay (very similar to Thinkpads).

  • AMD Ryzen Powered Framework Laptop Linux Testing Held Up By BIOS Issue

    Jump

  • Kinda disappointing as it shows a lack of care and support for Linux, but hopefully the fix will come out soon.

    I look forward to seeing the Linux numbers.