Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 195 Posts
  • 775 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it’s the teacher’s responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?

    To be clear, I’m not blaming anyone here. I think it’s a tough problem and frankly, I’m not a professional educator. I don’t think it’s the teacher’s responsibility and I don’t blame them for a second for deciding that nah, this isn’t worth my time.

    This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point.

    Completely agreed here. I would have just failed the students for cheating if it were me. But to be clear, I was talking in more the abstract, since the article is written more about the conundrum and the pattern than it is about a solution. The author decided to quit, not to tackle the problem, and I was interested in hearing them follow that thread a bit further as they’re the real expert here.


  • While I think there may be more to pull apart here, I think we’re missing the necessary context to weigh in any deeper. How many assignments there are, what the assignments look like, whether they feel like just busy work, how much else is going on in the students life, etc. I think it would be telling (albeit not all that surprising as some are still just looking for a degree at that level) if they were using chatgpt on their doctorate, but even in that case I would perhaps argue that learning to use chatgpt tactfully or in ways which aren’t the direct writing might be useful skills to have for future employment.


  • Is it because they don’t give a shit? Or are the stakes too high and they don’t trust their own abilities? Do they have the time to even try between their work shifts?

    Likely a mix of all these factors and more. I think the author fails to critically examine how much skill is necessary for the average person and sets a bar of mastery for which many of her students are clearly uninterested in clearing.

    While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is. I’m guessing these are not individuals who are honestly pursuing a career in writing as those individuals would likely be much more engaged on the subject and willing to grow their skills (unless it’s purely a means to an end- the acquisition of any degree). Using a tool which obscures stylistic choices may be “good enough” for these individuals and being able to accommodate the use of this tool effectively would necessarily require a shift in teaching style which gets them asking questions of the output. She recognizes this, but rather than questioning her teaching style it’s written off as a failure of the student’s ability to withstand the ‘temporary discomfort of not knowing’.









  • Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.

    While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?


  • As @[email protected] already mentioned, completely open to making changes here, but I’m curious to gather some more of your thoughts. People includes human in the definition, are there not some who would disagree with its use because of this? Sapient is a word derived from the Latin word for wisdom. Wisdom is most certainly a human concept, and I doubt many would consider non-human life “wise” and certainly some might withhold that designation from otherkin because of their beliefs. While sapient has been used in science fiction as a way to somewhat dehumanize the concept of intelligence, I’d argue that humans might not be all that great at determining what intelligence is. Over the last 100 years our concept of what life on Earth are intelligent has changed drastically. Sentient is perhaps the least problematic of these suggestions, however even it refers to the ability to experience feelings or sensations, which are both also ultimately human concepts - whether someone would consider the ability to detect magnetic fields as a feeling or sensation is much more debatable than the senses that humans have (sight, hearing, etc.).

    I know some who identify as otherkin and plenty of folks who might be closer to that constellation of identities than I am, but I’ve never had a discussion around this particular topic - how to best refer to you and others like you when creating documents meant to apply to them. I think we want to do our best to accommodate your needs as well as the needs of those similar to you, but given the issues I’ve raised above I could see how accommodating you might not accommodate others and we could easily get trapped in an endless revision cycle. I don’t know that you have an answer for me, but if you get a chance could you share your thoughts on the above? Is there a path forward in which we can still create a document which is clear enough that anyone who possesses the ability to read and understand English will understand our intentions? Or is there a cutoff point at which “enough” comprehension is acceptable because an attempt to widen the language will make comprehension more difficult?








  • I suppose to wrap up my whole message in one closing statement : people who deny systematic inequality are braindead and for whatever reason, they were on my mind while reading this article.

    In my mind, this is the whole purpose of regulation. A strong governing body can put in restrictions to ensure people follow the relevant standards. Environmental protection agencies, for example, help ensure that people who understand waste are involved in corporate production processes. Regulation around AI implementation and transparency could enforce that people think about these or that it at the very least goes through a proper review process. Think international review boards for academic studies, but applied to the implementation or design of AI.

    I’ll be curious what they find out about removing these biases, how do we even define a racist-less model? We have nothing to compare it to

    AI ethics is a field which very much exists- there are plenty of ways to measure and define how racist or biased a model is. The comparison groups are typically other demographics… such as in this article, where they compare AAE to standard English.