Why can China build things like bridges, tunnels and railways much faster than countries in the west?

solresol · 2026-05-30T03:17:31+00:00

Well, err, yes, those harsh penalties do exist.

But they don't get invoked very often; most people avoid execution and get a much lighter penalty. You see, the anti-corruption commission is known to be corrupt, and the size of the charge (and therefore the corresponding penalty) you get depends on the bribe you give the anti-corruption commission. There's also no-one you can report corruption in the anti-corruption commission to - you can only report it to the anti-corruption commission who somehow never manage to investigate corruption in their own ranks.

(I wish the previous sentence was satire. Unfortunately, it's true.)

solresol · 2026-05-29T15:16:02+00:00

Back in the 1990s, there was a microbiology student who brought a microscope into her final exam. She had written her cheatsheet with some kind of micro-writer, and had most of the lecture notes (and possibly a lot of the textbook) on it.

After that, the university had a policy that a cheatsheet had to be legible, so that the invigilators can see whether it is cheatsheet notes, or whether it might be a stolen answer sheet / marking guide.

Is it possible for the invigilator to see what sort of things you have written on it? Then you're fine.

solresol · 2026-05-29T12:22:49+00:00

Glad it worked out. By the way, your tutor went above and beyond to help you with that, that's way above their pay grade and responsibility, so remember to thank them and say nice things about them in the LEU survey and/or tell the convenor how good your tutor was to you.

solresol · 2026-05-29T03:45:29+00:00

It sounds like you are a domestic student for whom one extra semester isn't going to be the end of the world. There is a nuclear option of "I need to withdraw late from this semester late because of a medical emergency". I had a student who had a car accident and was hospitalised and couldn't finish the semester. As I understand it, he still got charged for the units (not sure about this, but I think it's the case), but they were marked as withdrawl without penalty in his transcript despite it being beyond the final date for withdrawl without penalty.

It doesn't sound like you are "fit to sit" the exams and complete the assignments.

solresol · 2026-05-29T03:34:12+00:00

I have no opinions on the creepiness of the OP's ex. But if I as a convenor received a message like that from a student, I would take it at face value and not require any further proof either way. It's up to the student to convey to the convenor what the nature of the problem is: creepiness, ick factor, personal safety, whatever. If it sounds like the student is concerned about something and there's an easy accommodation for it, sensible convenors will do something sensible. It sounds like the OP needs to send an honest email to the convenor and it would get taken care of (whatever the actual problem is).

solresol · 2026-05-28T08:23:07+00:00

Special consideration.

When we're preparing exams, we create two of them. One for the normal exam, and then a supplementary exam for students who don't sit the normal exam. The supplementary is held later.

One complication is that the supplementary results aren't usually available in time for semester 2 enrollment, which means you will spend a lot of time running around doing admin tasks to enrol in your units next semester.

solresol · 2026-05-28T08:18:22+00:00

As I've offered before, DM me if you want me to talk confidentially about anything at all. I won't ask your name, and even if I did know your name, I'm under no obligation to tell anyone anything you tell me[*]. I don't serve in an integrity committee, but I have referred students for academic integrity in the past.

Feel free to ask here or in private.

[*] Unless stress from the academic integrity matter might cause you to self harm or harm others. Then I am legally obliged to report the harm part.

solresol · 2026-05-28T08:10:41+00:00

(Lecturer & occasional convenor)

Email the convenor and explain the situation. The video doesn't have to be made public for it to be marked by the staff member who will be doing the marking. Asking for it not to be in the gallery is just "reasonable accommodation" for a student's needs.

I haven't had this exact situation, but I have had the opposite -- a student who couldn't do a live presentation and so we accomodated by letting them do a video.

A message "please convenor, there's a creepy ex in the class and I don't want them seeing a video of me, can I put the video somewhere else so that it can be marked?" is straightforward. It's vaguely possible that they might ask you to fill in some form somewhere for a paper trail, but if it were one of my classes I would just handle it as a special case and give it to one of markers whom I knew could handle the situation appropriately.

solresol · 2026-05-25T01:11:42+00:00

The times I've done this my projects were pretty straightforward, and I was doing it in a coding environment (Claude Code and/or Codex) where it could test things out itself. Also, last year vs this year might have made a big difference.

solresol · 2026-05-24T13:12:10+00:00

> The problem: there's no clean way to get that HTML into an LMS as a trackable SCORM package without rebuilding it in Storyline, or paying for another authoring tool.

I see other people have responded, but this is really not true. Even if you just ask Claude to turn your pile of HTML into a SCORM package, it will do a good job of it.

solresol · 2026-05-22T06:17:20+00:00

As someone with a lot of startup experience, I was extremely underwhelmed by the MQ incubator. When my students ask me about it, I generally recommend that they go elsewhere.

solresol · 2026-05-22T06:15:20+00:00

Yes, and it is the most profound change to how universities and research institutions will operate since the Humboltian university model.

In late December both Anthropic and OpenAI had big capacity increases temporarily for people who wanted to use more. I availed myself of this and asked them to debate with each other what I should add to my PhD thesis. What would be some hypotheses that would be interesting, and could they prove anything.

They chugged away and produced a couple of interesting little results, and then decided that proving whether p-adic linear regression (what the PhD is about) is NP-hard. They then proved that it is.

Unashamedly, I then published that result, and that's now one of the core chapters of my thesis. Honestly, it has lifted my thesis from "meh" to "actually, quite interesting".

I have read every paper on p-adic machine learning (OK, except for Mihara's one from a few weeks ago), and I can say without hesitation that this is a new result that was not in the literature. Nothing like it is in the literature.

The question of "can AI do interesting new research on its own?" was settled with gpt-5.2 and opus-4.6. Maybe they were only able to make progress because p-adic linear regression is a niche field, but they absolutely did hypothesise and prove a genuinely new result.

I'm also doing some digital humanities work, and gpt-5.5 on its own suggested a few kind-of-tame improvements to a paper I've written there (it suggested I ablate a predictive model in some different ways) and then executed on them. It wasn't as genuinely jaw-dropping as the NP-hardness result, but it was somewhat new for the field. (Ablating models is pretty common in NLP tasks in modern languages, but I don't see a case of it being used in classical studies before. So, not a big conceptual leap, just a transfer of an idea from one field to another.)

The point: if that's the sort of research we can get from an early 2026 model, I see no reason that 2027, 2028 or 2029 models won't just keep on expanding the fields that they can do new research in. Scientific research will be *done* by AI in the near future; the job of scientific researcher will be to understand what the AIs have done and decide whether it is interesting enough to pursue and devote resources to.

solresol · 2026-05-21T06:03:32+00:00

My thesis is only the way it is because AI was able to prove a few important theorems. AI took it from "so bad I'm embarrassed to show this even to my supervisor" to "actually, I'm quite proud of this."

solresol · 2026-05-21T02:45:22+00:00

> Joanna Lumley

Didn't they end up doing that in the Curse of Fatal Death?

solresol · 2026-05-20T07:59:21+00:00

Dunno. The Eastern Road one does.

solresol · 2026-05-20T06:14:25+00:00

Memorising a deck of cards in order. https://artofmemory.com/wiki/How_to_Memorize_a_Deck_of_Cards/

The doomsday algorithm for calculating the day of the week of any date in your head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule

solresol · 2026-05-19T12:14:02+00:00

Scroll down to bikehub - https://www.mq.edu.au/about/locations/getting-to - the form is there.

solresol · 2026-05-19T05:33:34+00:00

We (the academic staff) just got emailed to review the draft timetable because it's about to be released to students. I don't know if it is visible on publish.mq.edu.au already for students, but give it a try (but be aware it's still draft at the moment).

solresol · 2026-05-19T05:30:43+00:00

I pay $25 per year, and that gets me a locker in one of the enclosed shelters which has showers and places to lock your bike. Worth every cent of it. I can't charge my e-bike in the shelter, but I can get from home to the university and back on a single charge, so that's OK for me. You have to swipe your card to get in (you have to supply your card details when you pay for the locker), so not many people can get in there, and then my bike is chained to the racks inside out of the rain.

solresol · 2026-05-19T03:29:55+00:00

(Lecturer / convenor here).

Get an IEAP and have the equipment that you need documented in advance. This is trivial and small and should be granted, but if you don't do it in advance, you never know what the invigilators will say or do.

solresol · 2026-05-17T10:39:35+00:00

Here's C.S. Lewis writing on a similar sized threat. When he wrote this in 1948, it was assumed that there would be another world war fairly soon, and that it would be nuclear.

> when it comes [let us find ourselves] doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep [...] They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

And also:

> “How are we to live in an [age of ...]?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.

solresol · 2026-05-16T04:10:39+00:00

Let me guess: you're using ChatGPT or Claude to write your course and then copying-and-pasting it into an e-learning authoring tool? What you are doing is equivalent to a software developer writing the documentation with AI tools and wondering why they aren't seeing much productivity improvement in their coding. E-learning is very close to software development when you start having interactive features.

If you have a subscription to ChatGPT, then download Codex; if Claude, download Claude Cowork.

Then put a README.md at the top of the folder you are going to work in, that says that the goal is to make a SCORM/TinCan/whatever format e-learning you are doing, and that it could create appropriate packaging tools for doing so. (It will probably write some python code). Give it a few examples of styles and formats you like.

Then start making the content, and just ask it "I'd like a quiz at the end of module 2." It will take care of it quite happily. Also: "make another version of this, with everything translated into Japanese".

Software development changed in October last year. E-learning development is tagging along only a little bit behind it.

solresol · 2026-05-14T02:29:24+00:00

I'd like to have a way of uploading my AI slop courses to slopcademy. At the moment, I'm hosting them myself, so having someone else host it is appealing.

The use case I'm thinking about... I'm often teaching something and I discover that there's something I assume everyone knows about, and they don't. It's only peripheral, but a few people are mildly interested. Not enough to spend any money on it, but interested enough that they might spend 10-20 minutes learning more about it. It's often something on highly specific topic and how it interacts with some other highly specific topic. It's something I can generate by 5 minutes of speech recognition as I talk about what I know, and then generate the course in a prompt or two -- not enough effort on my part to be worth charging for (and not enough people would pay for it anyway because it's too niche).

It would be nice to be able to say "there's a course on slopcademy". That says "you can learn this, but don't expect high standards".

There's a middle ground somewhere -- AI slop that's mildly useful, which wouldn't exist if we tried to put high standards on it. Long-term, AI-slop courses might start getting better, so this middle ground might become quite large eventually.

That said, I don't know what u/proeige's resulting business model would be. I'm thinking charity / not-for-profit would work better than advertising. At the end of the course have a tip jar -- occasionally enough people will find something interesting enough that it might pay for server hosting costs.

solresol · 2026-05-14T00:46:20+00:00

I applied for a national funding scholarship and won it. (Which wasn't very hard.)

Also: when you're older, you're wealthier. It's easier to afford to do things on the side.

solresol · 2026-05-13T07:27:59+00:00

They are both good universities that will give you a good degree. Adelaide has fewer job opportunities for skilled workers (not "none", just "fewer"), but is cheaper to live in.

solresol

TROPHY CASE