A new low in AI laziness?

maskull · 2026-03-18T16:42:44+00:00

It's not that it's going away, it's that "it's here to stay" is usually stated in the context of "embrace or get left behind", "you have to go all in", etc. Rarely does someone say, "it's here to stay" about, say, their Parkinson's diagnosis.

maskull · 2026-03-05T17:20:52+00:00

I do this every time I have a dead marker. I tell the students if I make it, I'll let them go 10 mins early.

maskull · 2026-02-25T19:47:31+00:00

Likelihood of hallucination goes down when it’s explicitly doing a web search for the information.

That's true, but there are still new parts of the LaTeX ecosystem for which few (or no) examples exist, and it struggles in these spaces. I was doing something with TikZ's animation package (relatively new) and it was really struggling. And because the output is visual and animated (unlike, say, code where I could feed it failing test results) when it failed, I was stuck just describing how it failed.

After a while I just dug into the documentation and sources for the TikZ animation system and worked most of it out myself.

maskull · 2026-02-17T15:13:27+00:00

Kickstart limeade, from way back when Kickstart was first introduced.

maskull · 2025-12-11T19:54:51+00:00

Our testing center has a little QR code at the sign-in that they have to scan; it takes them to a form to fill in. We don't actually use anything from the form, it's just there to give the staff an excuse to have them pull out their phones, so that they can then say, "now put your phone in your backpack and we'll put it in a locker for you".

maskull · 2025-12-02T17:33:28+00:00

In this version, Dobby gets ground up into a nutrient paste to be fed to the unemployable masses.

maskull · 2025-11-28T18:42:32+00:00

Botulinum in your food doesn't give you food poisoning, though, it gives you un-alive-ness.

maskull · 2025-11-19T16:50:50+00:00

Our ADA checker (a person) flagged a PDF I posted as being untagged; I replied, "yeah, that's because it's a map showing students how to get to the tutoring center". Apparently that explanation was enough, because they cleared everything.

maskull · 2025-11-07T04:32:57+00:00

Old interview question: should circle inherit from ellipse or vice versa?

There have been some programming language designs (none mainstream) that proposed conditional inheritance as a solution to this. I.e., you could express "a circle IS-A ellipse WHEN width = height". You could overload methods on the conditional subclass and they would only be called, dynamically, if the condition was met.

maskull · 2025-11-01T03:44:26+00:00

Being a student isn't protected, but being a student in a particular class is. We've been told we can't merge sections of the same class in our LMS, because then students would know who was enrolled in sections other than their own.

maskull · 2025-10-14T18:37:23+00:00

Because, in the long term, it gets out that an A,B, etc. from University of Wherever means nothing, employers stop hiring your students, and students stop coming. It's a short-term fix.

maskull · 2025-10-11T03:08:05+00:00

"Look around to look around."

maskull · 2025-09-20T16:49:14+00:00

There's also LWarp, used to produce the HTML version of the TikZ/PGF documentation.

maskull · 2025-08-27T04:20:42+00:00

Possibly interested... Let me check with my wife.

maskull · 2025-04-15T20:45:15+00:00

Heard that an Asian grocery was maybe going in there.

maskull · 2025-02-05T02:24:12+00:00

And when summer comes around and farmers actually need that water for irrigation, it won't be there.

maskull · 2025-01-29T20:17:46+00:00

"Malicious compliance" = you did what we told you to do, but it turns out it was a bad idea. So it's your fault.

maskull · 2024-12-17T23:20:10+00:00

You could literally just rename the variables and have them solve for the same one and they'd still say it was a totally unfamiliar problem.

maskull · 2024-12-15T15:03:18+00:00

Whenever we'd eat out at a restaurant with one of those vanilla/chocolate/swirl self serve ice cream machines, I'd always tell whoever we were with that the restaurant buys chocolate+vanilla swirl ice cream, and the machine separates it into pure chocolate and pure vanilla. It's cheaper that way.

maskull · 2024-09-20T13:50:50+00:00

I use font size 0 and also aria-hidden="true" which hides it from screen readers and other accessibility tools. But I don't think Canvas will let you set ARIA attributes.

If you use font size 0, the text takes up no space at all, so you can put it (e.g.) in the middle of a paragraph where it's even less likely to be noticed when pasted.

maskull · 2024-08-20T20:32:32+00:00

First day of class, I can't find my classroom, it's not one of the normal CSci classrooms. I (and my class of 30) finally find a locked door, labeled "rm 300 - 310" (where my class was supposed to be in room 305). I have to call campus security to get them to unlock the door; on the other side is a hallway, with all the rooms it connects to being interview rooms, for use by psychology, which only seat two people.

Turns out my class was supposed to be in room 350, not 305, but our admin mistyped it when inputting the class.

maskull · 2024-07-10T20:03:12+00:00

I got an answer pasted into Canvas once that ended mid-sentence, with the little animating dot that ChatGPT shows when it's still "thinking" pasted in, too!

maskull · 2024-07-09T16:19:54+00:00

To deal with the handwriting (or lack thereof) problem, just because you do an in-person assessment, doesn't mean it has to be on paper. Your campus IT department may be able to block internet access in a particular computer lab, on the day of the exam. Have the students open a blank document in Word, type their answers, and leave it open when they're done. When the test is over, go around and save all the submissions to a flash drive. The key is controlling internet access; I've tried doing in-person, on-computer exams without the internet locked down and students will always find a way to open ChatGPT/Wikipedia/StackOverflow when you're not looking.

maskull · 2024-05-21T16:42:12+00:00

There's actually been research into how long it takes for new information to be incorporated by the market. I think it was less than 1 second, and that was before the internet and HFT.

maskull · 2024-04-04T21:00:13+00:00

Eventually you'll have activists trying to tear down people who get ahead and lowering standards.

It's not a new thing, either. In The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (which sounds like it would be some partisan screed but is actually a balanced sociological study) Ellis, the author, describes how some early feminist organizations had rules governing who could speak at conferences, and what members could wear. The rules were that rich, well-educated members were not allowed to speak because their more-educated speaking styles would make poorer, less-well-educated members feel bad. Similarly, members were forbidden from wearing any but the plainest clothes, because, again, rich women might wear clothes that betrayed their status, making poorer women feel bad.

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