I live in Philly as a transplant. The place seeks validation more than does DJT.

I only had a cassette tape deck for my TI 99/4A

Weird - I posted the following earlier but it has disappeared.

Not sure what this adds to or detracts from my position (besides the unwarranted invective). You said exactly what I said. Homer's tools are interior, belonging to the mind itself - although you had some newspeak like cognitive technology and oral engineering. And his poetry was passed on orally for generations, which means that people had to memorize it - which is the point of the mental tools you mentioned: tropes, repetitions, rhymers, epithets, etc. I argue that these mental tools are of the sort that should be learned and sharpened, so to speak (and in hindsight, I forgot to mention imagination), because they are proper to thinking.

Note that Socrates went further than I ever would in the Phaedrus and argued that writing itself is deleterious to thinking on the grounds that it destroys memory - and also interestingly enough on the grounds that the inventors of a technology are the last people who can truly judge its benefit. That is, he argues that writing technology replaces the individual's thought with their parroting a thought that they poorly understand. I understand his point, but do not share his concern, which Plato also clearly did not share.

As a professor, I can say that students are definitely letting the tools do the thinking. But that is not secret knowledge.

My complaint though was that the parallel with the saw is the issue. Saws saw, but LLMs do not think (I need not repeat this issue). Students who use them do not think through LLMs. LLMs are a black box wish-fulfillment machine. They are not used to record thoughts, but rather to generate output that students confuse with thought. And, pace Socrates, that is the greatest threat to thought.

Some of my family puts up stuff I like to see, but that is about the extent of my involvement. I am a serious amateur photographer, but never got around to posting anything.

Never posted on it. I know, cool story bro.

My point about coding - which I have been doing for fun since the 1980s (I am on /. after all) - is that it was taken as obvious that it was the future-proof skill. Not many people would argue this now.

As for tools - a tool is task specific. A carpenter without a hammer or saw is clearly at a disadvantage. And carpenters have always had these tools. But Homer, for instance, did not even have a pen or ink. He composed orally. The tools of thinking are experience, memory, and logic. My point is that thinking per se requires no external tools. It is the ultimate in freedom.

I do have them type them up at home so that they are legible, but I have them work from pictures of their essays that they take before they leave class, and I keep the hand-written originals. So I guess I am not completely tech free, but that is a tiny compromise.

I now do all hand-written assignments, and one of my students asked me the other day if I could read cursive.

The great men in question have all worked through the thoughts of those upon whose shoulders they stood. Even if you could make a case that LLMs understand the words they use (they don't: we all know they simply predict the likelihood that certain words will appear in a certain order in a certain context based on massive training), you certainly could not argue that those depending on LLMs (and in this case, we're talking about university students) have exercised the same care as, say, Newton did in in working through Kepler.

I banned all tech from my classroom before the pandemic, but had to bring it back for obvious reasons. Now it's banned again. This is the only answer to the issue. Don't give me that shit that I am not preparing my students for the future. First, none of us know the future. Second, coding was to prepare students for the future. If I can get my students to think autonomously, and learn how to articulate their thoughts persuasively, and not simply copy the educated guesses of LLMs, my students come out ahead.

That's a much worse answer as it helps feed the algorithm. Kill the expectation of ever finding the fake book.

Life is a fatal illness. I know the facts as reported so far. I've prioritized my survival strategy. I prefer the versatility of the gas flame.

You're correct. Most home stoves, even gas, are useless for true wok cooking. Buy a wok stand for a propane tank and cook outside.

I do it in that or less on my gas stove, and I need to use a smaller flame to match the pot size.

On my my list of worries, death by gas stove emissions is pretty low.

The basis of what is licit in law and ethics has never been personal will, although your will does make you culpable or praiseworthy for any normative act, whatever the case may be.