Interesting take on AI hype from Freddie deBoer.
Some say AI is the greatest invention of all time. I don’t get it.
Anyone who cites AI as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, above plumbing, should try spending a month without the latter.
Notes
Quote from Seneca that resonated with me.
“I say, let no one rob me of a single day who isn’t going to make a full return on the loss.” —SENECA
It’s not just red dye no. 3. It’s all our stuff.
RFK Jr. has the potential to do what Sinclair did in the early twentieth century: to shift the vibe, and spark the public into demanding companies remake their products for the twenty-first century. America cannot claim to be exceptional while making inferior, toxic products. The process will take decades to fully mature, but Americans have never been afraid to insist on better. It’s time that we do that now, and demand a Great Reformation.
Hopefully TikTok will be banned as scheduled.
And even if parental controls worked and parents chose to shield their kids from bad stuff, they can’t because TikTok’s content moderation is poor. An internal study found that the “leakage rate” (of bad stuff getting past moderators) is as follows: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.” For those who think that social media is relatively harmless, we urge you to read the quotations and internal studies described below, in which employees of TikTok discuss the vast and varied harms that they are causing to literally millions of American children each year.
Easily use AI to convert handwritten notes to text
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
It dawned on me today as I was taking notes on a video about weekly reviews that I could probably upload a picture of my notes to Claude and ask it to transcribe them into text. And, even with my poor handwriting, it did a great job. I also asked it to format it as a bulleted list with sub bullets, which it did. If my handwriting was slightly better it would’ve done an even better job.Testing youtube shortcode. Here is the video from my previous post.
I thought that large language models might asymptote in their capabilities. If that’s true then it doesn’t seem like we’ve reached that limit yet.
An incredibly snowy and peaceful Christmas Eve.
Excellent little coffee shop. Worked on migrating my old blog posts to micro.blog and tweaking some settings. Hoping to make a new space on the internet for my thoughts as Twitter is a hellscape and Nostr isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. ☕️
Check it out: z-cress.micro.blog
The pace of change in AI tools is spectacular and it’s incredibly difficult for educators to understand the tools, determine how to integrate them, consider policies around them, consider long term impacts on learning, figure out if or when the service will cost money, etc. And about the time that’s figured out there’s a new set of tools or updates or something new to think about.
It’s simultaneously an exciting time to be an educator and a difficult time to be an educator.