Seminar2250 @ Seminar2250 @awful.systems

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4 mo. ago

maybe this just betrays that i don't know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once

sorry my friend, that is really brutal. wishing you the best. ❤

imo academia in the us selects for self-serious mini-tyrants. people unable to sleaze their way to an equivalent position in the job market, so they go with a position where their subordinates have no agency or recourse for inappropriate behavior and are entirely dependent on them for their funding and their career progress^[by standing up to my piece of shit advisor, i have left with just a master's degree after five years, despite definitely having enough research completed under this advisor to leave with a phd. i chose to stand up for myself and try to end this cycle instead of adding an acronym to my title. arguably a mistake, idk, there is a robert frost poem about this.]. the university system here seems to only care if a professor brings in grant money --- if so, they can do whatever they want.

e.g. a year ago a student of mine with a documented, legally required accommodation was just straight denied it by a professor in my department. this poor student had to go through some equal opportunity claim just to have his accommodation met, and the professor is still there, having suffered no consequences.

maybe i should apply to a phd program outside of the us. i speak spanish (but slowly, y como un gringo) 🤷

😭

university where the professor physically threatened me and plagiarized my work called to ask if i was willing to teach a notoriously hard computer science class (that i have taught before to stellar evals as a phd student^[evals are bullshit for measuring how well students actually learn anything, but are great for measuring the stupid shit business idiots love, like whether students will keep paying tuition. also they can be used to explain the pitfalls of using likert scales carelessly, as business idiots do.]). but they had to tell me that i was their last choice because they couldn't find a full professor to teach it (since i didn't finish my phd there because of said abusive professor). on top of that, they offered me a measly $6,000 usd for the entire semester with no benefits, and i would have to pay $500 for parking.

should i just be done with academia? enrollment deadlines for the spring are approaching and i'm wondering if i should just find a "regular job", rather than finishing a PhD elsewhere, especially given the direction higher ed is going in the us.

this is going to take up the rest of my evening, now i'm reading about the Pólya conjecture for the first time

this rules 💗

what worked for me teaching an undergrad course last year was to have

• in-class exams weigh 90% of the total grade, but let them drop their lowest score
• take-home work weigh 10% and be graded on completion (which i announced to the class, of course)
  • i was also diligent about posting solutions (sometimes before the due date --- it's a completion grade after all) and i let students know that if they wanted direct feedback they could bring their solutions to office hours

\ it ended up working pretty well. an added benefit was that my TAs didn't have to deal with the nightmare of grading 120 very poorly written homeworks every four weeks. my students also stopped obsessing about the grades they would receive on their homeworks and instead focused on learning the grades they would receive on their exams

however, at the k-12 level, it feels like a much harder problem to tackle. parental involvement is the only solution i can think of, and that's already kind of a nightmare (at least here in the us)

is the deniability you are referring to of the clanker-wankers (CW^[unrelated, but i miss when that channel had superhero shows. bring back legends of tomorrow]) themselves or the clanker-producers (e.g. sam altman)?

because i agree on the latter^[i.e., someone like altman would say "you're prompting it wrong" to skirt accountability or create an air of scientific/mathematical rigor], but i do see CWs saying stupid shit like "there is more to it than just writing a description"

edit: credit, it was @antifuchs who introduced the term to me here

edit2: sorry, my dumbass understands your point now (i think). if i wank clankers and someone tells me "that shit doesn't work," i can just respond "you must have been prompting it wrong". but, i do think the way many users of these tools are so sycophantic means it's also a genuine belief, and not just a way to escape responsibility. these people are fart sniffers, after all

people who talk about "prompting" like it's a skill would take a class^[read: watch a youtube tutorial] on tasseomancy because a coffee shop opened across the street

This is an excellent sneer, thank you for sharing! <3

Beads.

wish i had thought of this before clearing out my inbox 😞

hackneyed; stale

you seem like the kind of dork whose brain literally explodes when you read this sentence

clanker

edit: this may be used to refer to the chatbots themselves, rather than those who fondle chatbots

holy shit how have i never heard of this paper

thank you for sharing!

this is gonna live in my head forever without paying any rent and i am upset

is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it's one thing if it's gaming-related^[i guess. not really, fuck discord.], but when i'm at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say "ask for help in our discord server", i feel like i'm in a fever dream and i'm going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt

ugh cybersecurity is already a fucking nightmare i should have braced myself

an unintended side effect of this is people who can't or don't want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a "privacy-respecting fashion" (see, for example, soatok's post on this^[https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/] ), it's still a bad idea.

additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal^[e.g. "steam porn games" → "this person's existence is inherently sexual" → "ban lgbtq content"]