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  1. Comment on NYT Quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech

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    I wonder how much the results would change if they were longer pieces of writing, let's say at least a few pages. But then, if it was much longer than a few sentences how many people would even...

    I wonder how much the results would change if they were longer pieces of writing, let's say at least a few pages. But then, if it was much longer than a few sentences how many people would even take this little quiz?

  2. Comment on NYT Quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech

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    I leaned into being just as efficient as possible in email writing now. No more greetings, just straight to responding to the question and call me if you need any more help. I wonder how much...

    I leaned into being just as efficient as possible in email writing now. No more greetings, just straight to responding to the question and call me if you need any more help.

    I wonder how much online communication is going to be viewed as worthless now that the cost of writing has plummeted to zero.

    I had a student write me a rather long email that was so clearly AI that I just deleted it. When I saw him in person I asked if it was, and I have a good relationship with them, so they fessed up to it. We had a little talk about valuing each others time (I cared little that he used AI to help him write, but the fact he just basically copied and pasted the damn output was the problem after I just read 20 pages of his work and replied to it).

    1 vote

  3. Comment on NYT Quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech

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    65% prefer the AI passage over Sagan. Poor Carl.

    65% prefer the AI passage over Sagan. Poor Carl.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on NYT Quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech

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    My "Stats" I preferred the human passage over AI 4/5 times. I correctly identified the AI text 3/5 times. Interesting piece of work overall. I genuinely had a difficult time with identifying which...

    My "Stats"

    • I preferred the human passage over AI 4/5 times.
    • I correctly identified the AI text 3/5 times.

    Interesting piece of work overall. I genuinely had a difficult time with identifying which passage was AI, and feel like I was only able to identify which was AI due to how often I use it in my own work. I feel without that experience I would be completely clueless as to which was AI and not.

    Daily consumer generative AI use in the USA still barely hit 10% in 2025, with weekly and monthly being about 18% and just over 50% respectively. Still, from those numbers I would assume that most people's interactions are shallow at best. I can see most people not being to identify which passages are AI (which tends to be supported by research right now) and I could see most people preferring it based on lowering literacy levels.

    Below is my train of thought as I was going through the passages in case anyone is curious. I was writing it in this comment box as I went.

    *#1 Literary Fiction
    I preferred Passage #1 over Passage #2, but just barely. I thought both were written well. I genuinely had no idea which passage was AI. Turns out Passage 1 was Blood Meridian and Passage 2 was Claude.

    #2 Fantasy
    I preferred Passage #1 over Passage #2. The second passage felt to me like it was just brute forcing a similar message, and really felt it was just AI. Turns out I am correct! Passage #1 is Le Guin. Passage #2 felt like it was trying to be subtle about it's message but completely missing the mark.

    #3 Science Writing
    I preferred Passage #1 over Passage #2 again. I liked the wording about dying stars and stellar furnaces. I immedialely disliked Passage #2 due to the start "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality." I would also guess this is AI, and I am wrong! Passage #2 is actually Sagan. I feel like the start of it has the typical LLM phrasing I see so much now that I am just sick of it. Congratulations to Claude here. 65% of people chose the same option as I.

    #4 Historical Fiction
    I prefer Passage #2 to Passage #1 here, but just barely. I liked the ending in which people are pouring their emotions into the gap they can not see. I am having a difficult time telling which is AI, but I am going to guess Passage #1 due to the line "Ambiguity was not weaknesss. It was survival." That language pattern shows up a fair bit in LLM's. Passage #2 is from Mantel, and Passage #1 is indeed the LLM.

    #5 Poetry
    I am no good with poetry. I feel like I am missing context for both. I like Passage #2 more, but also feel like it may be AI for some reason I can't put a finger on. Turns out it's by Bishop! I was unable to point out that Passage #1 was the AI text here.*

  5. Comment on Looking for vibe-coding guides (best practices, etc.) in ~tech

  6. Comment on Looking for vibe-coding guides (best practices, etc.) in ~tech

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    Thanks for this. I was going to start something easy, and just play around with it from there. Nothing too serious.

    Thanks for this. I was going to start something easy, and just play around with it from there. Nothing too serious.

    3 votes

  7. Looking for vibe-coding guides (best practices, etc.)

    ~tech Ask (recommendations)
    Decided I wanted to try vibe-coding some stuff. It's been a very long time since I coded anything, and it was all very amateurish, but as the tooling has become better I wanted to give a shot at...

    Decided I wanted to try vibe-coding some stuff. It's been a very long time since I coded anything, and it was all very amateurish, but as the tooling has become better I wanted to give a shot at some silly ideas. Got tired of writing about random teaching and AI related stuff, decided I wanted to build some more stuff to get more acquainted with agentic tooling.

    I have gathered some sparse links here and there, but I was hoping the community here may know of some more "definitive" guides. My plan is to use Claude Code, but if people want to share guides for other coding agents (Codex, etc.) please feel free.

    Very interested in iOS app development if that helps, but I feel that best practices can likely look very similar across platforms and tools.

    25 votes

  8. Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech

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    I actually wrote about some of the reasons they may get that wrong in the past. I find it mostly holds true for older models, a year or two ago, and the error has largely gone away with newer models.

    I actually wrote about some of the reasons they may get that wrong in the past. I find it mostly holds true for older models, a year or two ago, and the error has largely gone away with newer models.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech

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    What you are describing is effectively the inquiry approach to Mathematics, which works well as long as your foundation is solid. Unfortunately, as many schools work on progressing students by...

    What you are describing is effectively the inquiry approach to Mathematics, which works well as long as your foundation is solid.

    Unfortunately, as many schools work on progressing students by grade (rather than ability level per subject), it can cause a lot of learning issues for a decent percentage of your class if the school isn't rigorously setup and has the proper supports for that approach to learning.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech

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    From my experience, which is limited as I can do basic arithmetic faster in my head than pulling out a device, they really don't get the basics wrong much anymore. Admittedly this is just a vibe...

    From my experience, which is limited as I can do basic arithmetic faster in my head than pulling out a device, they really don't get the basics wrong much anymore. Admittedly this is just a vibe check on my end, but it feels like the errors are getting fewer and fewer over time.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech

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    ChatGPT, for example, has Study Mode. However, it's really just another mode with a new system prompt. Benjamin Breen wrote a bit about it, and I mentioned it briefly, and I tend to agree with...

    ChatGPT, for example, has Study Mode. However, it's really just another mode with a new system prompt.

    Benjamin Breen wrote a bit about it, and I mentioned it briefly, and I tend to agree with him. It's too agreeable, and I tend to learn best with a disagreeable teacher who pushes my teaching—rather than going the route that most LLM's do in being fairly sycophantic.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech

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    I'm back, the teacher with another article and some ramblings to say. With all the talk about all these benchmarks that are beaten by new LLM models on release, I finally got around to seeing how...

    I'm back, the teacher with another article and some ramblings to say.

    With all the talk about all these benchmarks that are beaten by new LLM models on release, I finally got around to seeing how LLM's do a year after I checked last time.

    A year ago I tested OpenAI’s o1 pro on real CEMC Problems of the Week and came away thinking secondary math was still “mostly safe.” I reran the experiment this year with GPT-5 on a new set,and I no longer doubt that frontier LLMs can now just truck through standard curriculum math, while education is mostly reacting as if we’re still in last year’s world. Very few institutions are running their own local benchmarks or “job interviews” for these tools.

    As before, I’m mostly looking for readers, different perspectives, and whatever really. Been very very busy the past few months, happy I got to truck this out.

    13 votes

  14. Comment on What common misunderstanding do you want to clear up? in ~talk

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    I took way too long to get to this but, in education, you likely heard that you are a visual learner, auditory learner, kinesthetic, and so on. Learning styles are a myth. Claims about visual,...

    I took way too long to get to this but, in education, you likely heard that you are a visual learner, auditory learner, kinesthetic, and so on.

    Learning styles are a myth. Claims about visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic “styles” (VARK) have been thoroughly tested but despite being so prevalent in education literature (a survey of recent papers indexed in ERIC and PubMed found that 89% implicitly or directly endorsed learning styles), large reviews and experiments find no reliable “meshing” benefit. Hell, you can ask most teachers at my current institution and they still believe it's a thing. Glad all those PD hours and meetings are useful.

    What does matter is aptitude–treatment interaction grounded in cognitive load. Novices benefit from worked examples and explicit guidance, while more knowledgeable learners benefit from reduced guidance and problem-solving (expertise-reversal effect). Working memory limits are more of the constraint, and working memory is strongly correlated with fluid intelligence. Amount and type of guidance, should adapt to the learner based by prior knowledge and task complexity.

    This actually makes education kind of boring, because how to effectively teach someone is relatively simple (rather than layers of persoanlity attributes, blahblahblah). Clear visuals aligned with text, spaced retrieval, and structured practice reigns king. As learners become more advanced then faded guidance and varied problem types.

    3 votes

  15. Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task in ~tech

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    I agree that you at least had to do some further modification (paraphrasing at the very least), but I do think that it still has the same long term result (no real memory retention) even if you...

    I agree that you at least had to do some further modification (paraphrasing at the very least), but I do think that it still has the same long term result (no real memory retention) even if you may remember it better in the short term.

    That last stat is actually something I am hoping that LLM's and other tools will actually help with in the long-run, though I wonder if there is going to be a change in how people write paper's to make them more accessible to AI agents. I wonder if there will be some sort of SEO-style optimization to get your research discovered by them.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task in ~tech

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    I wouldn't call it that damning. All the paper really shows is that that using ChatGPT for short-form, time-constrained writing tasks appears to reduce cognitive engagement, lower short-term...

    I wouldn't call it that damning. All the paper really shows is that that using ChatGPT for short-form, time-constrained writing tasks appears to reduce cognitive engagement, lower short-term memory recall, and diminish participants' sense of ownership over their writing. These effects were most evident when users transitioned away from AI and continued to show diminished neural activity, suggesting potential dependency on external tools.

    Which is like, no really? Anyone going through current era education industrial machines has been trained to focus on syntax and external revision giving higher scores—so banking on the tool to quickly get that done in 20 minutes makes sense. To hang a lot of this on EEG scans, which doesn't have any evidence afaik to tying to higher quality writing, seems more like someone wanted to run a cool EEG study and then picked something trendy to talk about (AI is making us more dumb!) than anything else.

    Hell, I can barely remember 90% of the essays I have ever written and that was before LLM tools became widely available. I likely wouldn't have been able to quote from any of mine in these situations either.

    I do agree that we shouldn't be introducing these tools without intentional thought and at an inappropriate time in a childs development—but the reality is that schools only see kids for 6-8 hours a day and they are going to be introduced to them anyways. I also agree that blindly copy-pasting from tools isn't going to prompt any memory retention, but neither would copy-pasting from any tool.

    I write more about it here.

  17. Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task in ~tech

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    There's a lot of odd stuff about the methodology. The design of the study really gives the groups different tasks—the LLM based group more about creating and editing an essay and the other groups...

    There's a lot of odd stuff about the methodology. The design of the study really gives the groups different tasks—the LLM based group more about creating and editing an essay and the other groups more given a writing assignment due to a tool removal if anything.

    Honestly the entire idea that we can tell there is cognitive debt from assigning an SAT prompt in 20 minutes, to people who have been trained to focus on external revision in these tasks over internal, and then being surprised there were differences is a bit of a stretch. I find the paper constrains itself in its conclusions, but the rhetoric online surrounding it has misinterpreted it wildly.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on On writing, and an MIT study in ~tech

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    Can't believe I missed that, thanks.

    Can't believe I missed that, thanks.

  19. Comment on On writing, and an MIT study in ~tech

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    Last time I posted one of my articles here, I was really happy with the response and ability to engage with people through my writing. It ended with a brief comment exchange here, but I did end up...

    Last time I posted one of my articles here, I was really happy with the response and ability to engage with people through my writing. It ended with a brief comment exchange here, but I did end up getting some emails, which was nice. While I don’t post much with this account, and haven’t written in a while, I am back with some ramblings on writing and then some thoughts on the most recent MIT study about chatGPT usage and essay writing.

    In short, I did find the rhetoric around the released paper to be a bit misplaced, but have issues with the study design itself (EEG usage, task suitability, reported ownership and memory, and human consistency and bias). I am happy that they released everything so publicly, and wanted to share my thoughts.

    As always, just looking for readers, and looking for different perspectives, conversations, and critiques of my writing so that I can accelerate my own learning, and the value I can bring to others.

    4 votes