definitemaybe

@definitemaybe@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And so the Tragedy of the Commons plays out, yet again.

  There’s no cost to being a selfish asshole, so it’s sadly not surprising that many individual actors are destroying the public Internet. Like, how can we align incentives to stop this? Regulations/laws are mostly pointless since the very same tactics used to dodge bot detection also make it incredibly hard to identify the originator.

  The only other disincentive with a real cost, that I can think of, would be to poison the data fed to scrapers, so they get bad data? That seems expensive to set up, though.

  I think TFA has the best solution idea: make it easy to scrape all the useful data using a low-cost standardized system. Then there’s no incentive to scrape the website using a stupid, expensive crawler in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is Too Expensive⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been sitting this from the rooftops, but nobody seems to be listening. LLMs do not create enough value to justify their cost, and their costs rise exponentially for small, incremental gains. It’s a money pit.

  Worse, it’s a massive sunk cost masquerading as investment. Inflated equity validations are propped up by an illusion. I know that timing a crash is impossible, but I literally don’t understand how anyone paying attention doesn’t see what’s coming.

  It’s going to be bad. 80% such market declines aren’t atypical, historically.

  And this isn’t even touching on the Republican dismantling of the American government apparatus and spending billions in a war to disrupt global supply chains of critical resources.

  It’s going to be really bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA | Google Cloud Blog⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly my thoughts, too. QR codes are a great tool, but also an incredibly valuable and opaque vector for scams.

  The was one recently where they put scam QR stickers over parking payment signs, so users gave their credit card details to scammers. How are you supposed to catch that, as the end user? It’s not like you know the URL you’re supposed to be going to.

  Normalizing scanning QR codes just to access a website is going to be abused by scammers in no time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google says 75% of the company's new code is AI-generated⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m vibe coding a fairly complicated bash script to fully automate upgrading a web server at work. For context, I have over 2 decades experience in programming/data analytics/tech, but I’m a Linux and server admin newbie.

  It’s comically bad at it. Like, I had to tell it not to post passwords to the production database to console and plaintext log files. Then, about a dozen prompts later, it does it again. The restore script rm-ed things (as sudo) before checking that it had a valid backup file to replace it with. It keeps deleting the comments in the code snippets I send it to update/fix, even when explicitly told to keep the comments. I asked it to prepend time to live commands (i.e. not “dry run” echos), and then it deleted them all again when I asked it to refactor something unrelated.

  It’s been great learning for me, and I’m definitely getting this job done faster and to a higher quality than I could on my own, but holy hell these scripts would have been a disaster if someone just ran them “as is”. I’ve needed to fix dozens of errors that could have really screwed things up.

  I wonder how often people go through their vibe coded outputs with the careful attention and care it needs. I’m guessing infrequently. LLMs are just word prediction machines; they don’t understand anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI job scams are booming – and I was fooled by one. Here is how to avoid them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fully automated targeted scams are new. That wasn’t possible before. The cheap scalability is the scary part.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI job scams are booming – and I was fooled by one. Here is how to avoid them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When I received the first email from my “headhunter”, I was drawn in by how professional and customised it seemed. The writing was of a good standard and the sender was clearly familiar with my profile. It felt personal. Even five years ago, says Rosser, you could often spot a scam just by looking at the grammar. “But they’re so clever now.”

  “The growing accessibility of AI means that criminals have way more leverage than they ever did before,” Webb says. “They can produce these scams much faster. They can make them more relevant, and there’s a much higher level of sophistication.”

  This was the most interesting part, to me.

  In the past, scammers deliberately made their pitches obvious, so only “suckers” would fall for them. With AI, it’s now available to make the whole thing believable.

  And that’s truly scary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I skimmed most of this thread and didn’t see anyone mention that Steam actually supports third party stores. They let developers sell game keys on other storefronts for free (with limits, granted—the number of keys they can generate depends on sales on Steam, I think.)

  Fanatical and Humble only exist because Steam handles all of the games delivery infrastructure for them. That’s, like, the opposite of monopolistic behaviour. Name another tech monopoly giving their services away for free so other directly competing businesses can profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I keep forgetting how useless Epic is.

  Every once in a while, I want to scan my Epic library to see what’s there… and it doesn’t even seem to have a library feature? I need to use a separate app just to see all my games on their storefront.

  Then, occasionally, I’ll want to check out what people are saying about their free game offers… and they don’t have reviews?

  They don’t support Linux.

  Their Android app keeps redirecting to their website for basic functionality.

  Do they even have a method for devs to show patch notes or have updates? I have seen any.

  I mean, great that they’re giving developers a bigger cut, I guess, but 88% of nothing is worse than 70% of actual sales. Why would I, as a customer, ever try to shop there? It’s a terrible UX missing many features I have grown to expect.

  So, yeah. The author of this article gets it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why the AI backlash has turned violent⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Great article, and the author brings receipts.

  I want to preface this by saying I’m not an AI doomer. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that a word prediction machine (LLM) is capable of intelligence. We’re no closer to AGI with LLMs than we ever were.

  I also think AI has its uses; it’s a great tool, for narrow, constrained use cases. Editing text and vibe coding simple scripts, for example—but even in incredibly simple cases, it gets shit wildly wrong very frequently.

  But the benefits are massively outweighed by the harms. Coaching suicide. Filling the web with AI slop. Reputational harm from not catching hallucinations. Semantic ablation.

  We’re not getting rid of AI; the models are here to stay, and anyone with $2K of hardware can run a decent model at home. But that’s also going to be the end of the AI bubble. There are no natural moats to protect a monopoly. OpenAI will never be profitable since the value they create is less than their operational costs. It’s a money pit.

  So, in a sense, I guess I am an AI doomer —the inevitable collapse of the AI bubble is going to cause a major recession, at least as big as the '08 financial crash, and these tech bros are doing massive harm both now and when the economic fallout lands. No surprise people want them dead.

  But I’m not worried about LLMs turning into SkyNet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google will begin punishing sites for back button hijacking in June⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes the monopolistic does something better for everyone. I’m this case, it’s selfish, of course, because they want people to clock the back button to get back into their advertising platform “ecosystem”, but it’s nice to catch a W from "Don’t be evil [when you’re building marketshare]” Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Luna Removing Paid Games And Offering No Refunds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is Prime Gaming going to be affected?

  My read is that this is shutting down all free access to Luna game streaming. I don’t read anything that implies this will affect game codes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would you do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have time to get into the full 13 (? iirc) steps of Liljedahl’s Thinking Classrooms approach, but it’s exactly designed to meet the needs of students like you. Since highlights:

  • Students are randomly assigned to a new group of 3 daily
  • All students work on vertical whiteboards, or equivalents
  • The teacher presents a math task that starts easy-ish, but requires some work/thought to figure out
  • If 30% of students in the room understand the task, then it will quickly trickle between groups
  • The teacher circles exemplars of great thinking; students are not allowed to erase these until the next debrief
  • The teacher regularly cycles back to get students to explain their work to the class, showcasing and explaining the bits the teacher circled
  • Start over with a more advanced task/“next step”

  It’s an incredibly effective teaching method for secondary math. And there’s clear motivation every step of the way for what you’re doing and why it matters.

  And the teacher only explains about 5-10% of the material; everything else is explained by the students as the carefully curated progression of activities guides them through discovering the math themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon upsets ebook lovers by ending support for old Kindle devices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Totally agreed, but authors are straight fucked if they try. Popular authors in my genre of choice have tried, and they all say it was a financial disaster for them, and that they can’t afford to be a full time author author KU income. And readers will follow where authors are, since those are the books they want to read.

  Amazon’s monopoly on self publishing is probably illegal, but until regulators notice, network effects and anticompetitive practices from Amazon reinforce their monopoly.

  Like, my options are, literally:

  • Stop reading almost all of the best books in the genre of books that I enjoy, or
  • Pirate the books, or
  • Read on Kindle Unlimited

  Authors have also said that they’re so dependent on The Algorithm, that praying their books hits them double, from the lost revenue and from the reduced visibility. So that’s a double dick move.

  I hate it, but here we are.

  At least I read so much that Amazon pays authors like 10× what I pay to subscribe, so that’s pretty cool. (~300-400 books/year adds up to a lot of KENP pages!) And I’m not paying $3-5K/year for books to buy them all, sorry. I can’t afford that!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would you do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, examples like that are good, of course. But, frankly, abstract examples like that won’t do much to motivate the students who need the most help to get motivated learning math.

  I like to interject little anecdotes like that, too. One of my “go tos” to “why are quadratics useful” goes something like “Well, they come up a fair bit, so I could give you some examples—and I will, as we with through the unit, but the real reason we teach quadratics is because they’re the simplest non-linear function. This is the first steps into looking at functions that aren’t a straight line. And the tools you use to work with quadratics are super important for understanding all the really cool functions you get to learn on the next couple of years…”

  That’s basically your example, but one step lower and more directly applicable to students, imho. The Taylor Series thing I usually only drop in grade 11/12 (pre)calculus classes, mostly as a hook for the math nerds that they have really cool things to look forward to learning in post secondary. It’s a terrible application to use to try to motivate learning about polynomials for a student who couldn’t care less, lol.

  Really, we need to intermix all approaches, depending on the students in the class. At private prep schools, leaning into academic needs works well. In a non-academic math stream, both your example and my examples will go over like a lead balloon.

  But, regardless, motivating students to be excited for math, and the excitement of finally figuring out a tricky concept/problem? That’s what we need more of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would you do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If by “practical application” you mean “motivation for learning the skill”, which is I think the way you’re using it, then yes. But that’s not the usual definition in math education, and not what most people mean by it.

  Like, for example, to introduce quadratics, a good progression might be to challenge students to build a table of values and graphs for x², then x² + 3, then graph x² – 5 without a table of values, then 2x² vs. 5x² vs. ½x², –x², etc.

  And if you have a Thinking Classroom, every student in the class is working on figuring out that progression collaboratively in small groups. The teacher guides students to discover the math themselves through a series of examples, and mostly interacts with the students by asking questions, never getting them the answers.

  That’s not “a practical application of quadratics”, in the usual definition; that’s a learning activity sequence (paired with a set of interrelated pedagogical practices).

  A good, practical application of quadratics is more like a Dan Meyer “3 Act Math” lesson on predicting the trajectory of a basketball shot. Also cool, good teaching. But not a great way to introduce quadratics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would you do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Citation needed.

  Seriously, though, that’s not what the research is showing. Peter Liljedahl’s research, for example, supports that a very effective way to teach mathematics is by having students actually think about math, instead of just passively receiving info dumps (as is common in most traditional math classes). See Building Thinking Classrooms for details but, in short, it’s a method of getting students playing with math concepts for almost the entire class time every day.

  No “practical applications” needed. Counterintuitive, but it’s a highly effective practice.

  What’s core to practical applications working is student motivation, and practical applications are one easy to induce motivation. But it’s often not the best option, especially for inherently abstract skills.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would you do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That kinda breaks down in practice, though. Math is hard for a lot of students. Adding an extra layer of domain-specific application on top of an already confusing topic just makes it worse.

  Like, we need polynomials for huge swathes of higher-level math. My favourite application of polynomials is that most continuous functions can be approximated by a Taylor series, which makes some functions that are otherwise impossible to calculate a derivative or integral trivially easy. It’s elegant, beautiful, and deeply practical.

  And completely useless for a grade 8 student learning about polynomials for the first time.

  Sure, there’s lower-hanging fruit for practical uses for polynomials, but they’re either similarly abstract (albeit simpler) or contrived. Ain’t nobody making a sandbox with length (3x + 5) and width (2x – 7), eh?

  I could go on. At length.

  Point being, yes, practical applications are better. BUT (and this is a big but) only when there are simple practical applications.

  Instead, recent math education research supports teaching fluency through playing with math concepts and exploring things in many ways: symbolically, graphically, forwards and backwards, extending iteratively with increasing complexity, etc. This helps students develop intuition for math concepts and deeper understanding. Then, and only then, teach the standard algorithms and methods, as students will appreciate the efficiency of the tool and understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

  Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon upsets ebook lovers by ending support for old Kindle devices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The challenge is the monopolistic death grip Amazon has self publishing.

  For many genres, authors get almost all of their income from Kindle Unlimited. KU requires exclusivity. The result is entire genres of books that are almost entirely Kindle exclusive.

  So, the only real options for readers of these genes is either Kindle Unlimited (or buying on Kindle, I suppose) or piracy.

  Some authors release serialized content on Patreon or a similar paid or free platform, but those platforms often only get first drafts, are difficult to navigate to get full books, and only cover a subset of authors anyway. And books get “stubbed”, which means everything past the 10% mark gets deleted to comply with Amazon exclusivity, so this is only even an option if you read the whole thing as it is being written. (FWIW, it’s also crazy expensive if you want to sort authors; it can easily cost hundreds of dollars monthly with all the subscriptions.)

  So, if you want authors to get paid for their work, then, realistically, you’re stuck using Kindle.

  It sucks, but that’s the reality until regulators prevent Amazon from forcing exclusivity for inclusion in the KU program.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon upsets ebook lovers by ending support for old Kindle devices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s still easy/cheap to buy new or used legacy USB data cables.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon upsets ebook lovers by ending support for old Kindle devices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  One wonders whether these old devices just don’t have enough telemetry built in for Amazon’s liking.

  I think it’s likely more about DRM.

  Old Kindles are incompatible with Amazon’s .kfx format ebooks and newer, stronger DRM. With an old Kindle, it was trivially easy to rip Kindle books to retail-quality epubs.

  With these devices ceasing to work with Kindle books starting next month, that loophole closes.

  Also, old Kindles will continue to work with already-downloaded Kindle books and DRM-free books, but new files can only be added by USB cable, not using Amazon’s services.

  The newer DRM also has working exploits, but it’s not nearly as easy, and they’ve indirectly hinted that one of the remaining methods may be closing soon. But, fundamentally, static media DRM (books, music, movies) is inherently beatable; the full content gets displayed to the user, so it can be intercepted and ripped. Worst case, someone will make a screen-capture app that uses perfect OCR to recreate the book. That’s already a solved problem, basically, it’s just horribly inefficient.

  So Amazon will continue to play whack-a-mole, turning millions of devices into e-waste, without even causing a blip for book pirates and those needing format shifting for accessibility.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The era of invincibility is over’: the week big tech was brought to heel⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The article highlights how the UK is moving to ban infinite scrolling access autoplay videos. So, thankfully, those changes are coming in at least some jurisdictions.

  That said, the article also helpfully points out that the Republican administration has stuffed their science & tech advisory panel with Meta and Google execs, so I’m doubtful that the US will regulate anything reasonable.

  I’d like a ban in effect for children below 16, but enforcement should be a misdemeanor on the parent. It should be a social worker coming to discuss with the parents the known harms of the platforms and let them get away with a warning, but that there will be fines if this damaging behaviour continues with an automatic 1-year (or whatever) follow-up. Basically, treat it the way it’s treated if parents are giving cigarettes to their children.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The US government just banned consumer routers made outside the US⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’m not too worried for enthusiasts. imho, this is a bigger deal for the 99% of the rest of everyone. So, like, kinda a big deal.

  And, like, the erosion of civil liberties and human rights, and the rise of fascism. If you care about those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For the love of the game...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t need to ask. It’s clearly explained in simple terms in the summary of coverage. It’s not even hidden in the fine print.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 15th⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m enjoying Backpack Hero, too, but I agree that it’s too easy. That might be needed, though, since there are so many items that it’s hard to get the items you need for a specific strat. Like, the other day I got a legendary bow and my build was already OP enough that I could afford the space to pivot and grab the bow, but then I only ever saw 1 arrow until the end of the run. So, it was easy enough that I could beat the run with 5 dead inventory slots the whole time, but “hard” that I could never implement a build pivot.

  Regardless, it’s pretty fun, and it being a bit easier makes it more chill. I might go back to Backpack Battles instead, but I’m intimidated by needing to know all the meta builds to have any chance of longterm success in runs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle Layoffs: Tech giant to slash 30,000 jobs as banks pull out from financing AI data centres | Company Business News⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t look into it in detail, but might this be more specific to RAM/video cards? With costs of those components skyrocketing, whoever is committing to buying those is going to have a hard time forecasting.

  So maybe they’re offloading that risk? Kinda like a futures contract, but for computer chips.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly the point.

  I run teacher training on this stuff, and that’s always a core part of the message: education is about relationships. Damaging your relationship with a student over an accusation of AI use is backwards; instead, come with curiosity.

  Also, AI writes poorly, so you don’t even need to call them out on it. And then when they (inevitably) include a source or fact hallucination, return the paper and explain that the error needs to be fixed, and why. That’s your “in” to explain ethical use of AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just one more square bro⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The downvotes are, I assume, from the *WHOOSH* sound as the point flies over your head.

  This is the optional packing of 17 squares in a minimum-size larger square. Of course it’s not optional everywhere. It’s specific to 17 squares packed in a square.

  The joke is that there’s no reason to choose 17 squares as, clearly, a rectangular* array is optimal.

  *squares are, of course, rectangles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen and paper instead⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Educational research is a bit of an anomaly, in that it has the lowest replication study rate of any “real” scientific discipline. There are lots of reasons for that, but it means that you can cherry pick individual studies to support just about any pedagogical (teaching) practice.

  That said, the evidence is pretty clear that there is higher retention for most learners when writing by hand. Even writing with a stylus on the screen seems to lead to lower retention. There’s something about the multisensory input learners get from pencil and paper that seems to make a difference.

  That said, that doesn’t mean there’s no places for Ed tech. In particular, students learn how to write better when they can edit their text, which happens a lot faster with a word processor. Digital science labs allow for quick exploration of a topic in minutes instead of needing a full class period for setup and clean up.

  But it should only be used when appropriate, imho as a K-12 educator and parent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Donald Trump just shared an AI video to Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why not both?

  That’s basically the Republican playbook, in general:

  Focus all your messaging on “wedge issues” that appeal to your (prejudiced) base, then pass laws that enrich the wealthy at the cost of their base. Deflect. Blame others. Distract. Lie. It’s all distraction, and it’s all vile.

  I reject your false dichotomy. It’s also not 4D chess; it’s business-as-usual Conservative politics, and the Republicans are some of the best in the world at it because they now own most of the traditional media and the text platforms used by “influencers” and most alt media.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I hear "% is a mathematical operator" one more time...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I assume you’re nerd baiting* with that, but it’s infuriating how many math teachers actually teach that.

  It’s not that complicated. x² = n isn’t the same thing as x = √2 because then square rooting isn’t a function, which is asinine. (Similarly to why 0! is defined to be 0, because otherwise it’s a stupid notation that would need a piecewise function definition for just about every single application of the factorial function.)

  *link to xkcd: Duty Calls