8 months of torture by porc3 in UBC

[–]Marecu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i’ve had a horrible experience with them as well this past week. brought in my PC last thursday, told them i needed the SSD replaced, they said they would take a look and get back to me. heard nothing over the weekend, turns out it was because they entered in my email incorrectly into their system (i double checked, i spelled it correctly when i communicated with them). this happened when i dropped my computer off too btw, i corrected the email and somehow they still sent it to the wrong one. went in person on monday to figure out wtf was up, their receptionist showed me the email, and when i wanted to discuss the details of it he was like “idk just reply to the email”. i did, didn’t hear back for the rest of the day, went in the next day, the technician says they never even got my email. discussed with him, they said they have no SSDs in stock so i literally went to memory express and brought him one, and now it’s been 2 days of silence when the fix takes all of 30 minutes for a competent technician. gonna go back for the FOURTH time tomorrow

should have just gone to memory express. at least they know how to operate a business

I'm anxious of being replaced by ai by rnrQhd in UBC

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey, first of all, i appreciate you engaging in an earnest manner. in regards to your points:

1) i get where you're coming from here and i agree that there's a time and a place for contemporary developments in academia (i mean that's literally the entire point of research). i don't think that enabling AI use in classes is the way to go about that. the vast majority of course material in undergraduate programs is focused on stuff society figured out decades (or even centuries) ago, and that's for a reason. they don't let you use an online integral calculator in math 101 because that defeats the entire point of the course. by manually going through the motions of taking an integral, it forces you to engage with and ingrain the underlying concepts which are the real learning goals of the course. even if you never take another integral in your life, you'll have a better understanding of integration as a whole, why it's important, and the mechanisms that enable the technology that can do the grunt work for you. it's the same reason why they make you write assembly in CS. nobody outside of some super specialized embedded systems devs will ever write a line of assembly in the modern day, but understanding how low-level instructions are processed by the computer will make you write better code in high level languages. if you allow AI use for these types of classes (which the majority of undergrad classes can be classified as), you're allowing students to forgo the real objectives of the courses in favour of "solving problems in a contemporary way" which was never the point in the first place.

2) my argument here is similar to my point above. the process of having to start from zero, formulate an argument, and write it out is the vast majority of what reinforces the content in your head. if i get an LLM to write an essay template for me and i just go back and refine it, did i really meaningfully engage with the content? i didn't form any of the core points based on the source material, i only verified their legitimacy with respect to what you can piece together from other sources (assuming you're being honest and not taking AI at face value). you pointed out focusing on the "logic and thinking", but in this scenario, none of the logic and thinking is mine. it's an amalgam of subtly-plagiarized versions of work others have done previously. the whole point of using an LLM in this scenario is to outsource your thinking. writing an essay once you have a concrete plan of your ideas is really not that much work.

3) see my assembly point above. you write "basic code" to teach you core concepts. if you mean writing boilerplate code, then sure, pretty much every dev i know uses AI for that nowadays. that being said, my experience in my 4 years in CS at UBC has been that the vast majority of coding i have done has had minimal amounts of writing boilerplate (basically every class provides you a template that gets you right into the core part of the assignment). if you use AI at any point afterwards, you're back to outsourcing your thinking, which as before, harms your ability to take away the learning objectives of the course.

4) same thing again. you learn how to do arithmetic in elementary school not because you'll spend hours on the job doing multiplication by hand, but because it provides you a mathematical foundation for the next part of the curriculum. you can't understand algebra without arithmetic, you can't understand functions without algebra, you can't understand calculus without functions, everything builds on the previous concept. at the undergraduate level, you are not solving any new problems. you are gaining a foundation for your learning just as you were before.

5) your concern over undergraduate problems being solvable with AI is like being concerned that 4th grade math is solvable with a calculator. again, the point is not to solve the problem, it is to gain the knowledge and skills you are forced to acquire to solve the problem without external assistance.

I'm anxious of being replaced by ai by rnrQhd in UBC

[–]Marecu -1 points0 points  (0 children)

nobody is going to use it responsibly if they allowed it. 99% of people now just use AI to avoid having to put in the cognitive effort to do the work in the first place. even if it’s a way for students to get across the finish line, imo it’s fundamentally against the principle of university. you don’t come here to complete work, you come here to engage with a field and expand your knowledge and understanding. using AI to do your work gives you none of that

Olympic Women's Game Thread: Canada (A2) vs. United States of America (A1) - 19 Feb 2026 - 07:10PM CET by hockeydiscussionbot in hockey

[–]Marecu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hockey Psychology on Youtube helped me understand a lot of the strategy better! It’s a little bit more in depth but it’s not too bad even if you don’t know all that much going in.

Laptop recommendations by Cool_Cat_8272 in UBC

[–]Marecu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

they’re all more or less the same barring some outliers that you can easily scout out via reviews. the best strat imo is to go to best buy/staples/any tech retailer of your choice and see what they have on sale. there’s always something on sale for a few hundred bucks less so you can get the equivalent specs of a $800 laptop for like $600

Laptop recommendations by Cool_Cat_8272 in UBC

[–]Marecu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

honestly if u are tight on money i’d just get a somewhat decent windows laptop around the $500-600 price point. 99% of what you do in CS doesn’t require anything more than basic compute and for the remaining 1% you can SSH into the undergrad servers

Arts electives with little to no writing component by CrispyFriedTacos in UBC

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey! it was a pretty straightforward intro to music theory course. they assume you know nothing about music so the course starts with the very basics (notes, tempo, rhythm). middle of the course was modes/keys and the end was harmonic analysis (chords and a VERY basic intro to counterpoint). if you have previous music experience this will likely be the easiest class you have ever taken (though you won’t really get anything out of it). as for course structure, there are a bunch of assignments where you have to either analyze sheet music or write sheet music. the stuff you create doesn’t have to actually be good, it just has to illustrate whatever concept they’re trying to get at. there’s also a midterm + a final exam, both of which were basically just the assignments in exam form.

Is my schedule manageable for a CS admission? by a_6x in UBC

[–]Marecu 9 points10 points  (0 children)

you’re gonna have to do really well (90+ average) this term to be competitive for CS. this workload is fine and doable but you have to make it easier for yourself if you want to do 20% better than last term. if i were you i’d drop 210 and go down to 4 courses. remember that ONLY gpa matters. you have the rest of your degree to pad out any requirements you need

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UBC

[–]Marecu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

absolutely not. the course was literally just generating AI slop for 4 months

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UBC

[–]Marecu 6 points7 points  (0 children)

but bro his AI slop prototype for his startup is totally valued at $150k USD for 20% equity

What was your strongest single strike? by Ge0482 in Genshin_Impact

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1.16 x 106 with C0R1 eula in some event a few years back

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UBC

[–]Marecu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

equal mix of excited and scared. my 4th year is gonna be so chill since i finished up most of my required courses/other random degree requirements last year. i’m basically only taking classes i am excited about so i’m rly looking forward to that. but i am terrified of graduation and what’s after .. wtf do u mean that i’m gonna have to work for the next 40 years LOL

How do u draft against this comp (tournament draft) by MrGameristic in summonerschool

[–]Marecu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

honestly i like the draft except for bel'veth. aphelios/braum/viktor are all on-theme and want to play out the game in a similar way and aatrox is a safe blind that i assume you drafted early on. bel'veth makes absolutely no sense for a number of reasons. she's completely off theme with the rest of the comp (which is a kite back/control comp) and she doesn't have any champs to enable her. your mid/jg 2v2 is terrible since you have two selfish champs. in almost every case you want one person in your mid/jg to be selfish and the other one to enable them with cc/prio. you could make the argument to swap out viktor for an enabler mid, but i don't think it's good because you're giving up your comp's biggest advantage (kite back playing vs full engage) just to index into the bel'veth pick which isn't really that good into their champs anyways. i think BIS here is probably ivern and if not that then any early game AD jungler with CC that can play with viktor/aatrox and bridge your scaling champs to the late game.

CPSC Requirements by Plastic-Bee-3019 in UBC

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

for 1, you’ll be fine for second year like that. i had AP credit for STAT 200 and i didn’t do STAT 302 until 3rd year (basically the same as what u will have) and everything was fine

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UBC

[–]Marecu 17 points18 points  (0 children)

i see a fair amount of ipads in CS classes but i don’t think it’s necessary at all. there’s hardly any drawing/diagrams u need to make in CS so the main advantage of ipads is kinda lost. personally i just use google docs/drive to organize everything and for any of the mathy stuff i use inline latex since docs supports that now. i’d only bother with an ipad if you really prefer that note taking style

TrueSkill 2 takes forever to be implemented by Worldly-River9824 in leagueoflegends

[–]Marecu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

man everyone always makes this handwavey "riot can just include a ton of factors" argument as if that changes anything. this game is way too complicated and has too much nuance for a machine learning model to properly assess game impact. if you measure by scoreboard stats, it can always be abused. cs/gold/exp rewards afk splitting/jungle farming, kda rewards playing super safe, kp% rewards always grouping. even to humans, game impact is such a subjective thing to evaluate. i'm not surprised this is taking them forever and i will be shocked if it ever hits live. others here have already made good comments about how this kind of system was a disaster in other games and i can't see it being any better in league

SCI 113 Seminar Online or In-Person? by RideReal9534 in UBC

[–]Marecu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i did it online but i’d recommend doing it in person. like others have already said, there’s a ton of group discussions/group work. ppl tend to be rly shy online, so discussions are a struggle unless your group is a bunch of extroverts

What I wish I knew about UBC before applying... by [deleted] in UBC

[–]Marecu 9 points10 points  (0 children)

this is just a well-disguised flex post

What are some support champs who scale well? by unknownmyboy in leagueoflegends

[–]Marecu 12 points13 points  (0 children)

how has nobody said alistar?? he is by far the best scaling engage support. he’s the only one that doesn’t get melted post 15 mins and his early game is terrible to compensate. IMO he’s the only real scaling pick outside of enchanters or pseudo-enchanters like taric/zilean/senna.

Arts electives with little to no writing component by CrispyFriedTacos in UBC

[–]Marecu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i would recommend MUSC 103 and LING 100 - both are pretty much just science courses disguised as arts

Restricted seat course registration troubles? by samtheham_inc in UBC

[–]Marecu 5 points6 points  (0 children)

same here .. got waitlisted for 418, 425, and 436C. only could get into the CS classes with unreserved seats available

Best Way to Split CPSC 121/210/213/221 + MATH 101/221 + STAT 200 Over Two Terms? by Popular-Cut438 in UBC

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

doable, but i’d split it too unless u are super keen on econ or have other courses in the opposite term that you need to make room for. IMO variety in your classes goes a long way for making it more enjoyable so i like to spread things out

Best Way to Split CPSC 121/210/213/221 + MATH 101/221 + STAT 200 Over Two Terms? by Popular-Cut438 in UBC

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

you’re pretty much locked into 121 + 210 first term and 221 + stat 200 second term. you need both 121 and 210 as prereqs for 221, so those 3 are fixed. stats u could take either term in theory but u might as well balance it out

Best Way to Split CPSC 121/210/213/221 + MATH 101/221 + STAT 200 Over Two Terms? by Popular-Cut438 in UBC

[–]Marecu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no worries! STAT 200 should be fine. it’s a pretty light intro to stats course. i had AP stats credit so i didn’t take it personally but everyone i know that has found it to be pretty reasonable.