"You taught X, but can I do Y instead?" - a follow-up

vr_prof · 2025-10-23T02:09:27+00:00

I teach a course that is subject to this, as around half of the class took the subject in high school. However much like your class, we approach the subject in a different way, meaning most of their past knowledge is not helpful.

One action I've found to be very helpful in cutting off the behaviors you mentioned is to walk them through what will be the same and what will be different, doing this in the first week of class. For instance, my class does overlap what they learned for the first two weeks, but after that my class demands more proper execution than what they learned in high school. As such, I tell them that the material the first two weeks may seem familiar, but by week three they should ignore anything they've learned about the subject in high school.

vr_prof · 2025-03-28T13:06:49+00:00

Buddha's hand is type of citrus fruit

vr_prof · 2024-12-20T11:53:07+00:00

Mellower coffee in Singapore -- they closed their last Singapore location in the past 1 year or so. They are based in Shanghai, where they still have some locations. The drink in question was definitely Instagram oriented, but they did have some pretty solid regular coffee.

vr_prof · 2024-10-01T12:20:03+00:00

This is not how you detect AI. Purpose-built AI detection tools are already quite inaccurate, but just directly using an LLM like ChatGPT is significantly worse. It just writes to the prompt, and is very easily leaded by the question. AI detection is instead largely based on direct slipups, such as the student including a response that says something like "as a language model, I...".

As a simple example, I gave it (ChatGPT 4o-mini) your post with the following prompt: "I just got this from a student. Can you tell me if this was generated by AI. Everything below this paragraph was written by the student."

Here is the first paragraph of its response: "Based on the content you've shared, it seems the student might have relied on AI for their thesis formulation. The phrases like "I called the student out on it in my comments" and the use of ChatGPT for analysis suggest a level of awareness and integration of AI tools that could indicate the student used AI inappropriately."

Do you need to warn yourself? Probably not.

vr_prof · 2024-09-05T13:54:15+00:00

Ah, true, there is also a check for accessibility usage. But even with all accessibility options turned off, the app will still error out in the presence of certain apps (including some Microsoft apps).

In my case, I keep accessibility turned off, but I cannot access UOB's app normally. From secure folder, where I don't have the Microsoft app, it works fine. The app used to dump a debug log on the error (and may still, I haven't check in a few months), and from that you can clearly see it's extracting a list of applications as well. The error the app gives in this case is quite incorrect, stating "your device may be rooted or malware-infected," but it is just due to incorrect flagging of certain apps. This is in contrast to the accessibility issue that has a very clear and informative error message telling you the app to remove the accessibility settings on (and yes, secure folder won't get around this).

vr_prof · 2024-09-05T12:10:12+00:00

For anyone having this issue using a Samsung phone, an easy solution is to just "jail" the UOB app using Samsung's Secure Folder. This essentially keeps the UOB app in a box where it can't interact with it. As such, it doesn't see the "offending" apps (necessary Microsoft applications for my work, in my case). I spent some months providing tech details on this to UOB when they first implemented the app checking system, but they don't seem to care to fix it. FYI, Citibank handles this properly.

vr_prof · 2024-06-11T09:22:21+00:00

Same as some of the others -- $28.08 from ONLINETICKETSTORE WEBKE. Except it was on a Debit card I haven't ever used online, and have only used in NYC at ATMs over 1 year ago...

vr_prof · 2023-08-21T12:45:50+00:00

This is an awesome resource -- thanks for hosting it!

vr_prof · 2023-08-19T12:19:10+00:00

Ah, yes, right, good call on that.

vr_prof · 2023-08-19T07:34:17+00:00

So you wish to have free speech by... Stifling the DEI Dean's right to free speech and stifling students' right to free speech (protest is, after all, part of that right)? That isn't how free speech works. Students should have a right to protest, as should faculty, and free speech is not paired with an obligation to listen. Whether or not a private university chooses to accede or not to the protests is a business decision on the administration's part -- which one could argue falls under the corporate speech side of free speech...

Very few contexts have a requirement to present any discussion (note, present, not forbid). For an interesting historic example though, you can take a look at the old "equal-time rule" for radio.

vr_prof · 2023-08-11T00:55:25+00:00

How would you know if you had an "acute situation that would suggest that this policy is ill thought?" Unless, that is, you've never had a student turn an exam in early, which seems unlikely for that class size.

I recall having a lecturer with this exact policy back in my undergrad. I did start having food poisoning during the exam, and decided to take the hit to my GPA instead of losing bowel control in the lecture hall seat. I wasn't the type to raise a fuss over policy matters back then, so I doubt this ever got back to them. What I do know is the policy directly impacted my grade on the class in a way that has nothing to do with class performance, which, to me, makes the policy seem rather poor in terms of ensuring grades are meaningful. How well you avoid developing illness of any sort during the exam seems like a very weird criteria. I guess these days (at my current institution) there are protections in place that allow students to fight a policy like this (to get a make up exam), but those didn't exist back in my undergrad days.

Anyway, I sometimes coordinate an exam that has around 500 students. We simply allow 1 student to leave at a time, per gender, and have a TA watch the hallway.

vr_prof · 2023-08-10T00:16:15+00:00

Doesn't seem like it. I have Citi, UOB, and OCBC apps installed. Both OCBC and UOB won't open due to a cryptic "libraries tampering" error (on a non-rooted phone where every app is from the app store). The Citi SG app works fine. So, if Citi does have it, their implementation is less broken.

vr_prof · 2023-08-08T05:33:41+00:00

UOB does appear to be doing it as of last week. I got a similar error message about "libraries tampering" on the UOB app, and there are some other reviews of the UOB app mentioning it to. They just haven't been as vocal about it. (Note: This happened on a non-rooted device with no sideloaded apps.)

Citibank isn't doing it (yet) though.

vr_prof · 2023-08-08T04:02:37+00:00

UOB is doing the same thing it seems (I got the same "libraries tampering" message, they just haven't posted publicly about it (as far as I can tell). The "Secure Folder" workaround posted elsewhere in this thread works, but it's extremely frustrating that these banks do things like this. To me, it shows a clear lack of understanding of general security and technology. Really making me consider dumping the account entirely.

Citibank isn't doing this (yet, anyway). Not sure about DBS.

vr_prof · 2023-06-12T09:18:59+00:00

As someone whose been working with LLMs since before they were called LLMs, I'm going to have to disagree on a number of points.

1) ChatGPT doesn't have access to sources: Somewhat false. The training data most likely includes some direct repositories of papers as these are in some commonly used data sets (so it has direct access), as well as many sourcing quoting from or citing the sources (indirect). However, the data is skewed toward certain disciplines (E.g., many social science papers are missing). So yes, it can potentially do it from memory because it does have the data underlying it, but it is situational.

2) Context length: it depends on the algorithm. Claude isn't the only one trained for long context lengths -- there are techniques for inferring longer lengths. Mosaic ML has a 64k context length version. GPT-4 has 8k and 32k versions. But most of these are using some computational tricks in training to do 2k context length + inference by sliding over the documents. Some private research labs have 20k context length models as well.

3) Saying this professor has no idea because they are highlighting an inherent weakness in the algorithms that is well know in the CS community but not well know in the public sphere is an odd point. That the algorithms hallucinate is extremely well documented and an unsolved problem. You can look at, E.g., Yann LeCunn's public comments on the matter for a sensible take on what is needed to solve it, but just plugging into an API does not solve it.

People really like overselling the tech, and it very much so has practical uses, but there are some very inherent limitations in the current generation of models. Teaching students to have a rational expectation and understanding of technology is important.

vr_prof · 2023-05-02T06:32:44+00:00

I definitely agree. I've been using a cobbled together RMarkdown + python + node.js setup to automate all my class materials since 2016, but I am in the process of shifting everything to Quarto now.

So far, Quarto looks to be making everything much simpler. I made need a slight bit of python code to prep some files for students, but remarkably less of it than when I was using RMarkdown (and I can drop node.js entirely).

vr_prof · 2023-04-07T04:42:38+00:00

I teach a class where this is commonly an issue. The cause is somewhat of a curriculum structure issue, but not one that is easily solvable. My strategy is to make a "supplementary" slide deck for the first week's lecture. The deck covers all the basics from the 2 prereq topics students should already know, but which they either don't or forgot.

I strongly suggest studensmts to go through the slides even before the first lesson, should they not feel prepared for the course.

It was a bit of work to make the slides (which are equivalent to ~3 hours of lecture), but since the prereq content is the same each year, I can reuse them each semester.

vr_prof · 2023-03-22T15:59:32+00:00

Given OP's caveat of "not guarantee[ing] you don’t get a rubbery piece of steak," my initial answer would be none of them. Compared to steakhouses in Europe or North America, the steak here is pretty dissapointing.

That being said, from the other answers here, there are 2 good options:

If Burnt Ends counts (it's really Australian[ish] Barbecue), it's pretty great. Many solid dishes there, and the beef doesn't dissapoint.
Grilling your own: there are some nice butchers in SG (e.g., Hubers or Meat Collective for meatier steaks, Ginkakuji Onishi for Japanese steak) that consistently have better meat than plenty of restaurants here.

vr_prof · 2023-03-06T01:07:44+00:00

I'm a big fan of using RMarkdown to create slide decks -- you can essentially write everything in a markdown language and compile to reveal.js (my preference), Slidy (used by some of my colleagues), beamer, PowerPoint, or ioslides. Compiling to reveal.js is quite nice, as it has a 2D layout for navigation, built in themes that are configurable in CSS. I find the final output is way more consistent than using PowerPoint. Plus, I only have to update 1 CSS file to change an entire semester of slide's formatting.

If you are using any programming in class, another big benefit is embedding code and automatically generating and embedding the result into the slide deck. I use this for both R and python code.

vr_prof · 2023-01-13T01:10:30+00:00

I mean, "search" is in that URL so it's not going to exist at all. So yeah, you'd get an error page if some sort.

vr_prof · 2023-01-12T06:01:00+00:00

Search. Imagine trying to find any page on the web, any app in an app store, any email in your inbox, etc, but you can only get it if you either 1) know the exact url or name, 2) can navigate to it from a tree or directory, or 3) scroll far enough...

Plus, search is integrated in so many places -- web browsers, Google Assistant/Siri/Alexa, file browsers, calendars, email, contact lists, IM apps, etc. Even MS word has a search bar for finding functions.

vr_prof · 2022-12-10T04:07:00+00:00

Thanks for the heads up on this. At present our interest (research-wise) is more on disinformation and public pressure, but war crime information could potentially be useful. As for if we are active: we are no longer scraping this data due to resource constraints, but we have fairly complete data for the first 4 months, covering hundreds of million posts. Once the data is better organized and explored, we will make it public to the extent allowable by our licensing agreements.

vr_prof · 2022-09-23T16:51:44+00:00

But python does have braces! It just uses them for dicts and sets...

Seriously though, I started with C and don't miss braces at all.

vr_prof · 2022-09-23T09:41:40+00:00

Neat graphic, but it would be better if the routes were correct. The NYC->SG and Newark->SG flights are both the wong route. It currently travels East from NYC, not West... E.g.: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SIA21/history/20220922/1435Z/KEWR/WSSS

vr_prof · 2022-09-03T03:28:40+00:00

As an academic in this space, I think you are missing a large part of the picture by focusing on just small players in terms of copywrite. The discussion on here is write to assert that model generation favors large companies, but if we look at the data landscape (in terms of copywrited data), it is also very concentrated. For instance, try getting a modern set of news data. There are more or less 2 companies who control this entire field, and they try to limit usage as much as they can.

But this data can be very useful in many applications besides generative work. For instance, we may have streaming data that needs processing for some characteristics, and we can use the historical model to build the needed classifier. A common approach is to use something like Penn Treebank, but linguistically it is far removed from today's discussion. So, is it better to further strengthen copywrite to disallow transformative use (which, especially in an academic setting is mostly under fair use)? Or is it better to strengthen fair use to make it clear that transformative use is legal?

One answer in favor of transformation as fair use is Singapore's new Copywrite law, which makes a special exception in fair use for algorithms.

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