wdutch

As a math teacher myself I want to say... A parent taking an interest and spending some quality time with their child over a subject can have a huge impact on their motivation to learn. Props to your mom.

I've never seen so many emdashes in one piece!

When I was young I was taught that pink is a light shade of red. But what kids these days call pink seems to me to be a bright magenta.

I love iNaturalist! It's the closest thing to real-life Pokemon I know of. A friend of mine has uploaded several observations that turned out to be new to science.

I can't comment on if it was written by AI or not but I found the OP informative and quite dense with useful information. Nothing stood out to me as garbage.

The UK is still a respected "brand" in most of the world despite what chronically online people say. British education is the most sought-after in many countries for example.

a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires

It's the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.

students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself.

Hard agree! Although I'm biased as a foreign language teacher :)

Geography is a great example actually because it can be "factoid based" or it could be based on investigation. Off the top of my head, students could make rivers through sandpits to investigate erosion. Hopefully AI inspires a change to the latter approach.

I often see people online saying "We were never taught this in school!" as if the point in education is to memorize all the factoids. But we should be teaching people how to do experiments, look things up and apply critical thinking.

Oh nicely done! There was me thinking I'd done well with 38,332 / 50,000. It'd be nice if the site itself showed how well you did relative to others but I can't see anything like that, maybe I'm missing it.

It's interesting that I find loops. For example

car + stupid = idiot, car + idiot = stupid

Plug for my favourite podcast Literature and History which has convered this topic: https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-096-the-last-pagan-...

The decline in cnet might suggest people are using LLMs for product reviews and recommendations? I'm surprised because I personally wouldn't trust an LLM for that.

Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your product.

I couldn't find much context on the website but the name is very broad yet the content focuses on a specific aesthetic.

Personally, I am constantly amused in 2025 how much Vietnam loves asthetics like Frutiger Aero[1]. For example [2].

I only see the style from OP sold to tourists or on government billboards, and even then I see vector waves sneaking in too.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero 2: https://appro.com.vn/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/bang-quang-c...

I was asking ChatGPT for ideas for activities today and one suggestion was chatting to an AI Chatbot. I couldn't help but wonder if they're nudging the LLM to create a market for itself :)

I blog about really niche local history. I enjoy it because it acts as external motivation for my hobby. The idea that someone could read it makes me research thoroughly and write as well as I can. I don't mind if nobody reads it. I get a few hits but I assume that's people training LLMs.

I think vtuber sports could be an interesting genre! Real displays of athleticism and sportsmanship but with digital effects to augment it. Maybe it's already been done, I'm not particularly in touch with online trends.

That's a good example. My favorite has always been rock-paper-scissors. If `vs` is a binary operator which gives you the winner according to the game then

    rock vs paper = paper vs rock

    (rock vs paper) vs scissors != rock vs (paper vs scissors)

I no longer work in tech, but I still write simple applications to make my work life easier.

I frequently use what OP refers to as chat-driven programming, and I find it incredibly useful. My process starts by explaining a minimum viable product to the chat, which then generates the code for me. Sometimes, the code requires a bit of manual tweaking, but it’s usually a solid starting point. From there, I describe each new feature I want to add—often pasting in specific functions for the chat to modify or expand.

This approach significantly boosts what I can get done in one coding session. I can take an idea and turn it into something functional on the same day. It allows me to quickly test all my ideas, and if one doesn’t help as expected, I haven’t wasted much time or effort.

The biggest downside, however, is the rapid accumulation of technical debt. The code can get messy quickly. There's often a lot of redundancy and after a few iterations it can be quite daunting to modify.

I imagine maths teachers had a similar dilemma when pocket calculators became widely available.

Now, in the UK students sit 2 different exams: one where calculators are forbidden and one where calculators are permitted (and encouraged). The problems for the calculator exam are chosen so that the candidate must do a lot of problem solving that isn't just computation. Furthermore, putting a problem into a calculator and then double checking the answer is a skill in itself that is taught.

I think the same sort of solution will be needed across the board now - where students learn to think for themselves without the technology but also learn to correctly use the technology to solve the right kinds of challenges and have the skills to check the answers.

People on HN often talk about ai detection or putting invisible text in the instructions to detect copy and pasting. I think this is a fundamentally wrong approach. We need to work with, not against the technology - the genie is out of the bottle now.

As an example of a non-chatgpt way to evaluate students, teachers can choose topics chatgpt fails at. I do a lot of writing on niche topics and there are plenty of topics out there where chatgpt has no clue and spits out pure fabrications. Teachers can play around to find a topic where chatgpt performs poorly.

The notion of “fairness” dominates English education policy in Japan. Because of the importance of educational credentials in Japanese life, any policy that seems to favor one group or another—the rich, the urban, children with highly-educated parents, or children who happen to have acquired English fluency on their own—will attract popular opposition.

I teach ESL in Vietnam. The above quote boggles my mind. I've taught disadvantaged rural students and urban students with educated parents. Of course I tried my absolute best for the rural students, I worked a lot harder for them than for the privileged students. However, it would be madness to hamstring the students who happen to be privileged. Holding the whole country to the lowest common denominator doesn't benefit the country at all.

I thought Vietnam was very Confucian and uniform but Japan seems even more extreme. Maybe Vietnam also applies Marx's doctrine of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" to offset it.

Thanks for your great write up on this topic. This was a very interesting read for me.

I agree that it's a disorder. I have aphantasia and wish I didn't. I have low resilience due to having no ability to go to a "happy place" or recall pleasant memories. I wonder if other aphantasiacs have a similar experience or have figured out other ways to keep their mental health up.

I'd love to see research into if self-reported aphantasia correlates to depression or anxiety.

I have aphantasia. I relate to what you say about how "feel" a face when I remember it. I'd compare it to a neutral nets embedding. I'm not storing every "pixel" of an image but instead a "vector" that corresponds to the key features (although I'm not consciously aware what those features are). I couldn't describe on demand the faces of my colleagues I see every day but I know them when I see them.

I think you're right. Since LLMs went mainstream, I've seen a lot of my colleagues' presentations and thought "was this written by ChatGPT?" but I've come to wonder if it's just given me the frame of mind to identify low-effort slop that lacks any original insight but uses all the right sorts of words and phrases, regardless of if it was authored by a human or not.

They ask themselves the difficult question for every anime: which character will be voiced by Vic Mignogna.

This is a nice idea, in the past I worked as a maths tutor and was always on the lookout for good problems for students. (Maybe this is possible, I didn't make an account but ...) Seems like the scraped problems are a great starting point for a social platform where users can submit their own problems and upvote/downvote ranking mechanics like reddit, HN etc

This is a neat project! I did find the UX a big confusing. If I ask "What was your major?" the start of the answer is "Ian Woods graduated ...". But If I ask "What was Ian's major?" I get "no results".

In responds in third person but can't comprehend questions in third person?

Ah yes that event that famously took place on the island of taiwan....

Is it not entirely a chinese matter?

Well, no. It also includes Taiwan.

China are making a fuss about it but it's just an excuse for geopolitics.

I am familiar with a few south east asian languages and none would have any issue expressing "I will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" ... I think even in English if a second language speaker said "I go to barber while I in town", it's still possible to understand.

Regarding redundancy, I so think that it's important and other languages have other ways of handling it. I know that Vietnamese for example very often doubles up the verbs for example for "help" it's common to say giúp đỡ together although both these words individually also mean help.