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Comment One Solid Reason for Homework (Score 1) 192

I haven't been in the classroom since close to the year 2000, so I don't remember the study names. What I do remember is that there were studies, plural - studies, that showed that when you learn how to do a new task or learn new information, that using that information or practicing the task within 24 hours increases the chance of it being remembered by a large percentage. That's over 25 years ago for me, and I'm not going to claim it's at a certain percentage, but I know it was WELL over 50%. So if you learn a new process in Algebra, or a new move in ballroom dance, and you don't practice it within 24 hours, you have a lower chance of remembering it. But it was at least over a 50% increase in your chance of remembering it IF you reinforced it by going through it within 24 hours.

I preferred to use homework as practice - not as learning new material (although that might help if it includes reading for the next day's class). I also worked in psych treatment, which meant I taught more than one subject - I had the odd mix of science and math plus English (lit and grammar). So I'd assign reading overnight that gave us more chance for discussion (discussion, not lecture!), and the math I assigned was to use what we had learned in class. For science, I'd actually prefer to assign reading for what we had done that day, compared to what we would do the next day. That way students found the reading easier, it went faster, and they'd bring in a few questions the next day that we could review (before moving on to new material).

When I grew up, I was forced to go to a prep school where we had 3 or more hours of homework a night, plus we were required to stay for some form of athletics, so I rarely got home before 6 PM. With that in mind, I was selective about homework. For the time I was teaching in public schools (as opposed to my time teaching in treatment), the dept. heads and supervisors jumped on me for not giving enough homework or for assigning science material we had reviewed in class - pretty much everything about my homework system offended the dept heads or supervisors.

Comment Re:How about? (Score 3) 95

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

Comment Paywall free link (Score 5, Informative) 151

https://archive.is/uyPhk

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Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.

The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."

Comment Re:I laughed (Score 1) 56

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

Comment Re:Does this mean it'll stop sucking? (Score 1) 27

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

Comment Re:The problem with SAS (Score 1) 27

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

Comment My takes on this presentation (Score 1) 6

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

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Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.

Comment Re:Complete failure all around (Score 1) 140

You clearly do not live in the US. The legal system does NOT do anything about anything (other than child support and alimony) as outlined in a divorce decree.

And, even if they MIGHT do something, you have to wait 12+ months to get on the court's docket, paying thousands of dollars to glorified expensive secretaries in the process while you wait.

The entire system is fucking broken.

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