Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.

I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.

I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.

The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.

I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.

I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.

I have been tutoring high school students as a volunteer for nearly a decade. Most of these in early high school (9-10) can’t even write a simple paragraph. How are they going to express critical thinking when they can’t even write very simple things?

I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that! And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.

By analogy, imagine trying to train people to be Olympians. Before they can perform in their sport they need to train their bodies to build muscle and endurance. Yet they insist on bringing a forklift to the gym because they think what it really want them to do is move weights around, not lift them.

How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?

Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

They did mention being a driving instructor. Driving (and teaching students to drive) all day every day is going to put a lot more wear on the tires than a typical driver.

I never had any issues writing LaTeX with vim. I used UltiSnips and wrote a bunch of my own snippets for it. I also wrote a lot of my own macros in LaTeX.

I’ve tried. It breaks my brain too much. I’ve even used emacs without evil but the unholy combination just does not work for me.

I have the same problem with all vi/vim emulation modes in other editors. There’s always some incongruity that messes me up.

I prefer to call it the dark side!

I don’t really recommend people learn vi/vim even though I’ve been using it for years and love it. It’s a very personal thing and the time you invest into learning it might not be worth it if you don’t use its features enough.

I think it’s dependent on your personality and neurodivergence/neurotypical characteristics (I don’t know a word that encompasses all of this). If you’re the type of person who gets really annoyed/distracted by any sort of “friction” in the editing process then I think you may be a good candidate to learn vi. Otherwise probably not!

Edit: by the way I’m also a LaTeX user!

Yeah. A lot of people who use vim don’t know how to use the full power of vi. They’ll often install plugins to do things they could have easily done with built in features!

The one area where regular vi sucks though is undo. If you want multiple undo then you’ll have to at least go with something like nvi.

The issue with “easy mode” is that it can be disabled. Scammers can and will find ways to trick grandma into disabling easy mode on her devices and then get her to install malware.

The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.