Fuck AI

What brings me back to my uni days is getting a 0% on an AI assignment because the lecturer ran a poorly written script and if you crashed that script, he'd have to manually restart it (which was what he was upset about.. doing his job. He didn't even check the code, or try to run each test independently).

And now AI is about writing buggy code that regularly crashes and performs poorly.

The crap I learnt in AI turned out to be totally useless anyway (especially Lisp, which we had to learn ourselves and nobody ever uses)

I once had a professor who claimed she passed a high level language course without attending a class or studying it. She was fluent in an adjacent Romance language and knew a little of some other overlapping languages. Basically walked in to the final and got a C+ on cognates alone.

Writing has electrolytes that plants crave!

We used to knock out ten pages at four in the morning without punctuation.

I'm so sad. People are becoming so reliant on AI that they can't write (nor read) more than one sentence

Shit, I'll write a 10 page paper as an internet reply to a topic I'm only just finding out about.

When I was at a party in college a friend was bumming the vibes because he had an English paper due the following Monday and he was stressed out.

I asked him what the topic was and it was any play studied in the course. I asked him which play he knew best and if I recall correctly it was The Importance of Being Earnest.

I chatted with him for a bit, asked him why he liked the play, what it meant to him, what parts he thought were most important, and what he thought was the ultimate point Wilde was making.

After about a half hour I wrote the outline on the back of a placemat.

Intro: state what point your essay will ultimately try to make, and summarize how you'll get there (1 page).

For each "way" that you'll get there, write three paragraphs: your point, what in the text supports your point, and how that point supports the thesis in the intro. (1.5-2 pages).

Do that for each of the four "ways". (6-8 pages total)

Explain why those dozen paragraphs illustrate and support the claims you made in the introduction.

Suffice it to say, the party roared on, he likely wasn't able to think on Saturday but on Sunday I guess he did a pretty good job of bullshitting his way to nine single spaced pages, and he got a B, which was above average for him in that class.

That structure, intro, points, references, supports statements, conclusion, can literally be blown out into a thesis or even a book, as long as you have a clear idea of what you're trying to say and how you intend to back it up, and you can write coherent (dare to dream, interesting!) prose to explain everything in between.

What people are missing is that that process is actually fun. Trying to figure out how you can make a point in an interesting way that is backed up by references that you can argue in support on your point is actually interesting and fun, you just have to stop thinking about why you can't/won't and just throw yourself at it.

This was painful

I did a twenty page "research" paper for philosophy the night before having read one page from the dude. And got a b+

I remember for my senior project in college having done so much work that documenting it at the end resulted in like 30 pages. That was without stetching it. I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary at that point. Kids these days...

I wrote 10 pages single spaced by accident after failing to read an instruction that asked for double spacing. Writing that much about intercellular communication 25 years ago took flipping weeks at the library

I tried reading Infinite Jest for the first time.

In a pre-LLM world, this kind of word waffling nonsense would seem impressive, but as someone who picked it up to see what it's about in a post-LLM world.... I have few good things to say about this style of pointless writing.

It's something that I used to excel at too: a long litany of rhythmically satisfying prose that showcased your penchant for picking out the perfect words to soothe the literary soul whilst saying absolutely nothing at the same time.

Then I learned how to write to clear English, and realised that I valued plot over filler most of all in a story.

I'm sorry, Mr Wallace, I just can't read your book any more.

I had an ethics class in college where we had to write a 10-page capstone paper for part of the final.

The teacher wrote an outline and description for what she wanted, and encouraged everyone to work on it for a few hours a week to make sure they finished it on time.

I waited until the last day of class, banged it out in about an hour and a half, and submitted it around 15 minutes before it was finally due.

Got an A, with a comment about how great the work was. Kids these days.

Bro I was writing 10+ page papers in Jr High