timothyrice.org
τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν
ὥσπερ γὰρ τὸ σῶμα χωρὶς πνεύματος νεκρόν ἐστιν, οὕτως καὶ ἡ πίστις χωρὶς ἔργων νεκρά ἐστιν
Non est beatus, esse se qui non putat.
📍 Portland, OR
timothyrice.org
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And the logic is stupidly simple. Let people move to places where they can be more productive. That's it. Imagine we disallowed this inside the country. It'd be a disaster. Massive wealth destruction. But we do it every day worldwide.
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Humans will adapt, both culturally and technologically. There will be a time of adjustment, during which people will be snookered until the norms can change, but that's no different than any other new tech.
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This is the same problem we've had with every new generative technology, I think. Printing press lets anyone put anything they want into print and distribute it widely! Radio lets people broadcast anything they want to an entire city! And on and on.
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It was really fun when I was 22! I doubt I would enjoy it much in my late 30s, though.
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Certainly, you definitely need to make sure it's an enduring interest.
I apply this heuristic to non-hobby activities as well. I cut my own hair and recently spent $150 on a professional quality trimmer and it's been worth every dollar, even if I use it once a week.
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One of my recurring life lessons of late has been that for activities you are invested in, you should buy the highest quality tools possible. It's *always* worth it and the difference between a professional quality and consumer quality tool is immense, even if you use it very sparingly.
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What is this referencing?
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This lecture from @adapalmer.bsky.social was eye opening in this regard. Turns out that every time we have a new "generative" technology, the same problems always pop up!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNMv...
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What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
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One of the things I've done at my employer is build a list of the names of the humans who are directly responsible for maintaining the different tools that I use. When one breaks IM the responsible person directly to ask for assistance. Not what I'm supposed to do (tickets!) but it works much better
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Ah okay, that makes a lot of sense. Knowing that you're talking more about customer service than say, raising a child, helps me understand your perspective.
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Could you provide an example that illustrates this point? I'm not totally sure what you're saying.
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The more fundamental problem is that classroom assignments are the type of work that LLMs are *best* at: Questions built with an answer in mind, often a fairly simplistic answer, designed to be easy to grade.
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I mean, seems pretty easy to just ask the LLM to provide links to citations and go take screenshots after the fact. In a year or two it'll probably be able to do that on its own if you ask.
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It's been nothing short of incredible for helping me understand technical questions! Lately I feed it in some complex mathematical statement and ask for an explanation of what it's saying in plain language. The LLMs are *really* good at that sort of thing.
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(This should hold true for all potentially dangerous equipment. Firearms being one of the more obvious examples to come to mind.)
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Big agree, registered owner of the vehicle should have some skin in the game regarding the safety of its operation.
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My life has gotten appreciably better since I made the choice to give up almost all videogaming, and my wife and I have subsequently completely forbade it in our household for our children.
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Every day I am more and more convinced that video-game addiction is a social malady that's being almost completely ignored. Likely because it's almost entirely victimless.
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This seem inevitable for all art forms, imo. Someone will make an amazing comic with all illustration done by AI, someone will make incredible AI music, someone will write a novel using AI. Given the rate of progress we're currently seeing I can't imagine any other possibilities.
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I know it's your brand and you're really good at it, but do you ever think you should spend less time online?
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I wonder if this sort of citation scavenger hunting that is required when researching will be work that can eventually be passed off to an LLM in some capacity. Seems plausible, at least.
It's kinda astonishing how much "knowledge" has this problem.
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Do you think this fiasco will ultimately draw more or less attention to summer reading lists?
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www.smbc-comics.com/comic/surprise
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It's very telling to me that people whine about ChatGPT's climate impact, but not Youtube's or Netflix's.
What's the comparative climate impact of using ChatGPT 5 times a day (probably about my typical usage) vs. scrolling TikTok for an hour?
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A scant 100 years ago the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world were dying because they literally didn't wear socks!! That's INSANE to think about.
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On June 30, 1924, Calvin Jr. played tennis with his brother on the White House tennis courts without putting on socks and developed a blister on one of his toes. The blister subsequently degenerated into sepsis. He died a little over a week later at the age of 16.
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My go-to for these stories is Calvin Coolidge's son:
The Coolidges had two sons: John (1906–2000) and Calvin Jr. (1908–1924).
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Is this related to the oft. repeated claim that half of Americans are "living paycheck to paycheck"?
It's fascinating to me how people are unwilling to apply basic sanity checks to information they're given. 60% is a gigantic number!!
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*colors at home
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Home team should get to be resplendent in their colors, away team wear generic boring old monochrome jerseys.
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As I understand it, this came about because it was hard to do laundry back in the day, so the road teams would wear the jerseys that didn't need to be laundered as much. But it's 2025! We don't have that problem anymore!
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I will go to my grave insisting that teams should wear their colors and home and white on the road.
This is something I think the NFL gets very right and basketball very wrong.
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A cousin to the AI prophets who have spent their whole life praised for their intellect convinced that the only thing standing in the way of godhood is a lack of sufficient intelligence.
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It seems like there's been a trend towards more objective grading standards that moves like this would undermine, but if you really want to grade entirely on how much the students learn, it seems to me that this would be the most effective approach.
It's also impossible to cheat (with current tech)
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Is there talk among your faculty about switching to say, oral examination? Or weighting a large (>30%) portion of the course grade on in-class participation?
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And like, I get that it's bad optics to put half the freshman class on academic probation and it might make your cash flow shaky if you expel 25% of your enrollment, but if your rules don't have teeth what good are they?
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But Universities seem to be unwilling to blanket fail huge swaths of students. So you end up in a position where everyone cheats and nobody is punished, which of course just incentivizes further cheating.
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Why do you think Universities seem unwilling to punish cheating as per their documented policies on it? As far as I can tell, cheating is supposed to be met with very stiff penalties, often resulting in failure of assignment and/or course.
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In other words, I don't think AI is the problem. Students were already doing things like taking the easiest possible classes, using chegg, begging teachers to give them answers in advance, and other things that are spiritually no different. ChatGPT just exposes the problem.
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I think there's other interesting issues at hand. For instance, if I want to listen to audiobooks narrated by Darth Vader, what sort of weird ethical problems will that create?
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I have to believe that eventually the text-to-speech tools will get good enough that they'll be able to fool almost everyone. Maybe they're not there today but in 10 years? Almost certainly.