godfuckingdammit You know how sometimes you read something so stupid that so many stupid chinstrokers just sit and stroke their chins over and everyone ignores the fact that we're all stroking our chins over something so fucking stupid that it fucking wakes you up at night? So my knee-jerk reaction was this dumb-as-a-sack-of-hair "imagine how calculators changed math class" canard that Mister Chicken just gently waved his hands over must be a misquote because fuckin' hell had Sam Altman actually said that surely someone would have eaten him alive for it. So what did he actually say? Here it is at 15:14: "What do you tell educators what are misconceptions of what you're working on how can you kind of allay their concerns?" "We adapted to calculators and changed what we test for in math classes, I IMAGINE" what do you tell people concerned about plagiarism, allow me to phrase this in the most softball possible way I tell them to suck it ____________________________________________________________ Let's start from a "changed what we test for" perspective because this mfer right here grew up with a casio melody 80 as the only interesting thing to play with as a small child, barreled right the fuck into trig tables and was probably in the last class in the school district to be instructed in the use of a slide rule. Yer goddamn right. One year we were being taught how to use a slide rule, the next year we were being encouraged to buy TI-81s. This, of course, was an easy fifteen years after every fucking parent you knew had bought an HP-35 because it was a nuclear weapons lab after all. So like... we were being taught trig tables two entire goddamn decades after the ability to go home and mash the sin button solved that shit because you know what? Trig tables are what the problems were written around, and as soon as you could get a TI-81 for, I think, $90? they started dropping the chapter on how to read trig tables. Eventually. Took years. They were still in the back of the book ten years later. Thing is tho your approach to math does not change appreciably whether your answers come from a calculator, a slide rule, a bunch of trig tables or brute-force calculation. What changes is your source of error and your methodology for computation. THE ANSWER IS THE FUCKING ANSWER. Gather 'round children while I share the tale of the floating point bug. You see, long after the bleeding edge was on their fifth, sixth or seventh computer but before hippies started making kitsch out of AOL CDs, the world was shocked - SHOCKED! to discover that one in nine billion computations might, might! fuck up in the fifth decimal place. This of course cost Intel half a billion dollars because computers aren't supposed to fuck up. Those were the halcion days when Team Eternal September were juniors in college, though. When popular conception of computers had gone from Tron to Heartbeeps to Hackers. When having some knowledge about computers was cool rather than a reason to accuse people online of being Russian hackers. Fuckin' chatGPT sucks balls at arithmetic. Look at this mealy-mouthed legalspeak: The answer is "approximately" to the eighth decimal place because OpenAI knows their shit sucks ass at math and if they just wing out to a goddamn calculator every time they might miss a chance to give you the answer in the form of a dragon or some shit. _________________________________________________________________ The first time I ever heard the phrase "live my truth" was when a sociopathic liar on my TV show was caught in a sociopathic lie and when he was asked about his sociopathic lie he responded that he was "living his best truth" thereby implying that it wasn't that he lied it was that there is no truth, there are no lies, what does reality even mean, maaaaan and everyone was too polite to go "you're a fucking liar" because they were fucking simps. Not "here's my official class photo with a chicken" simps but simps nonetheless. This is the reason STEM kids will always and forever be fucking merciless towards any dipshit with a liberal arts degree: sometimes the answer is the answer. These are not the same: And the difference killed 114 people. So the answer is the answer is the answer except in liberal arts where the answer is a subjective performance in response to prompts that is graded and judged on largely subjective standards. Professor Chicken is all about whether a freshman who has never gotten laid can write a better essay about a snowball fight than a robot without even beginning to grapple with the difference between the subjective evaluation of creative writing and the objective evaluation of mathematics. Primarily because Saltman told him it was okay to do so. Kind of. Not really. Saltman actually told him to STFU but he's a fucking simp so he took that to heart and wrote a lesson plan whereby freshman can burn off one of their English GREs feeding tokens to ChatGPT. And this mfer is so far up his own ass that he can simultaneously say "the upsides for school districts and colleges are clear" and quote one of his students as saying "Reflecting on the fact that 3 credits at UVA costs me $5000 and 2100 minutes, I do not believe I grew enough through this course for it to be worth it.” THERE'S NO FUCKING SYNTHESIS HERE It's fuckin' Sam Bankman Fried logic: What are the odds that Shakespeare is any good? the math says he sucks so why should I read him? __________________________________________________________________ Make no mistake - the Eloiification of the human race is going to have winners and losers. wow, ChatGPT wrote a marginally better essay than a Freshman english student, time to tune in the Kick-Me-In-The-Balls channel. The people who can ignore the fishing lure are going to eat everyone else for lunch. "Nathan?" "Drew?" They got everyone else's number. They recognize the sham for what it is and have moved the fuck on. I wonder how much carnage they will leave in their path because this chucklefuck doesn't even realize how fucking stupid he is.Speaking about AI in the classroom, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described ChatGPT as “a calculator for words.” This analogy indicates the magnitude of change that ChatGPT is poised to bring about—imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable—but it also indicates that change itself, even radical change, is not necessarily scary. Most AI skeptics would admit that math class survived the advent of the calculator.
