SkoomaDentist
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I did engineering but the grading guide for such questions was generally "A perfect answer should cover almost all of [a list of points]". A question might be something like "Explain FIR and IIR filters and compare their advantages and disadvantages" (I specialized in signal processing). You can fit quite a lot of points in two pages if you don't spend the majority of it on pointless waffling like Scott always does.
Another way to look at it is that if four pages of writing is enough to get me a conference paper (and thus effectively counts as a course's worth of credits with a perfect grade), why should I spend more than half of that on an essay worth 25% of exam points?
Sure, it's different if you're studying literature or something similar where the writing itself is the point but for the vast majority of topics the point of such essay answers is simply to show that you understand the topic, not to make the grader suffer through your poorly filtered stream of consciousness.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I believe it works the same way in most of Northern Europe. Multiple canteens operated by companies providing subsidized meals for students and below market rate rental housing owned by various non-profit foundations and student unions, all with loose association with the universities (ie. you have to be a student in one of them to live in the housing / receive subsidization but the universities have no control over any of that).
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Professors in the 21st century don’t grade homework in much of the world.
I always get frustrated in conversations like this where so many Americans assume that their rather peculiar system must be the norm everywhere.
I cherished those moments during my university studies when I could spend half the assignment laying out in detail why I considered it a shitty assignment while also acing it far beyond any reasonable expectations. I suspect doing that every week in one course (edit: due to being familiar with much of the material, not for spending any particular effort) was half the reason said professor later hired me as a research assistant (the other half was that I emailed him about a beyond-state-of-art research topic with ”I have been working on this idea…”).
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Couldn’t this be trivially solved by allowing to write the answer in-person on a computer? Such system is already in use here for the national matriculation exams where the students boot the laptop from a provided usb stick that runs a customized Linux distro with only the few apps required and local exam network access.
Or just limit the length of replied. The longest handwritten answer I ever wrote in university was somewhat short of two pages and that was a rare exception. Most were one page or (sometimes much) less. AFAIK I was never marked down for being too short or concise.
A slight side note: I’ve even seen complaints of American coursework for a single course having more writing than my entire masters thesis (officially worth 5-6 months full time work) which the professor absolutely loved and praised to heavens. This indicates that there is something strange going on in the American system when so much emphasis is placed on mechanical drudgework instead of results.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.
As someone from a university system that isn’t as obsessed with liberal arts, essays and rote work, I say good fucking riddance. Almost nothing of value will be lost.
Based on previous reading of some teaching adjacent subreddits, I expect American ”professors” (iow what would be called just lecturers or teachers elsewhere) to be in hysterics as they can no longer assign massive amounts of pointless drudgework and might have to actually grade based on exam performance.
In somewhat similar vein I care not a zilch about some acquaintances’ complaints about AI coming to music and overriding everything with slop. From my point of view that already happened 25 years ago, only with human slop (aka modern trends) not just overwhelming quality stuff in volume but outright putting it in front of execution squad and pulling all the triggers at once to ensure none of it remains except as old recordings.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!
Which book is this from?
I think it’s been a decade since I last read Pratchett and should probably get back to it.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Are there any (very) old school trance / EDM fans here?
I've never much liked EDM as I find most of the music dreadfully repetitive and boring. I do however have a soft spot for some early 90s trance due to being introduced to a handful of tracks via friends in the mid to late 90s that I later found to my surprise are now considered some of the OG classics (Paragliders, Cygnus X, some other Eye Q Records singles). I've recently been looking for some more music in that style and realized that something happened to the genre around 96-98 and the music before that is much more varied, interesting and has more "air" and space in the music. After that it's all supersaw cliches, sounds overstuffed and is really quite cookie cutter. So the question goes: Did something specific happen around 1997 to the scene, other than Roland publishing JP-8000 (which introduced supersaw)?
One of the classic tracks conveniently has the original 1993 version and a 1996 remix that demonstrates quite well what I mean.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
You don’t have to read all that many anti-AI screeds until it becomes blatantly obvious they only care about themselves and want to limit competition just like the original Luddites did.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Bonus bonus points if it's then revealed later on that the handwritten manuscript was actually created by an advanced 3D printer working off a generative AI based on a prompt written by the author.
Ironically enough, there already is an open source model that does that for images, just without the 3D printing part.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
h the exception of W and Carter, two of the worst presidents of the modern era
What was so bad about Carter?
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I finished Mother of Learning
I'd like to recommend nobody103's next serial, Zenith of Sorcery but I just can't do that in good faith. We're now two years into writing with 23 published chapters and it barely feels like the plot is maybe about get started within the next half dozen chapters. If we're lucky.
So what I'll instead do is recommend you take a look at Void Herald's writings, particularly The Perfect Run. There's a reason it's #2 on Royal Road right below Mother of Learning. If you want more fantasy bent with comedy, the same author's Vainqueur The Dragon is a hoot but you'll have to do some googling to find the full story as pdf.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I'd take that deal if it got us 80s pop culture, music and movies again.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
It's a bit ironic that they managed at the same time significantly improve the graphics but also not fix the biggest problem with the landscape which is that the ground sharply alternates between being completely smooth dirt and patches of grass.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
They should have obviously gone with MEESA /s.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
if you really want executions to be a spectacle, you ought to cut the hangman's knot with the headsman's blade.
Why not guillotine?
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
while trying to have a flamewar with a heathen mac user
You're doing God's work.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
There's a difference between "Makeup used to conceal blemishes revealed by HDTV" and "Making a 60 year old look like a 30 year old" (which is what's seen here).
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I hope this helps reshore domestic light manufacturing. Not sure that it will, but that could be good.
The problem is that applies to any goods or parts that are imported. Need a $2 component to fix something? That’ll he $100 in one week and $200 starting in June. Ordering a batch of prototype pcbs (something no US manufacturer has capacity / interest in providing)? That’ll be $200 extra. The biggest freakout about the tariffs is in communities dealing with or closely associated with small manufacturing businesses as their materials costs are suddenly doubling or more.
This demonstrates possibly the largest single difference between Chinese and Western manufacturers / vendors. China is chock full of manufacturers who are perfectly happy to handle small quantity orders while Western manufacturers by and large are only willing to deal with major customers.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Have they actually gotten implemented though?
Many communities are freaking out right now as either goods or parts used by US manufacturers have now more than doubled in cost. For individuals there's the additional insanity of a flat minimum of $100 / $200 fee for individual packages where the tariff would fall below that amount, starting in one week from now.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
So you agree that having western troops in Ukraine is irrelevant for Russia’s actual safety because if they attack in force, ”Nukes fall, everyone dies”?
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Because nukes.
And how is that any different between attack from Ukraine vs attack from eg. Latvia?
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Well, we already had Palpatine as the pope 15 years ago.
How long would you say they are on average when it comes to page count? (ie. how long are those five paragraphs)
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