dwim | Member Posts

1. UK sanctions Israeli ministers over Gaza comments: (tags:uk israel gaza )
2. Rough sleeping to be decriminalised in England and Wales: (tags:homelessness England law )
3. The pictures that show why the UK has run up a £49bn repair bill: (tags:UK infrastructure OhForFucksSake austerity )
4. Krakencoder predicts brain function 20x better than past methods: (tags:brain algorithms )

Reading this article on advice to teachers in the UK about using AI, they suggest using it for things like "marking quizzes" and "generating routine letters".

And what really annoys me about this is that it's a perfect example of where simple automation could be used without the need for AI.

The precise example in the article is "Generate a letter to parents about a head lice outbreak." - which is a fairly common thing to happen in schools. So why on earth isn't there one standard letter per school, if not one standard letter for the whole country, that can be reused by absolutely everyone whenever this standard event happens? Why does this require AI to generate a new one every time, rather than just being a standard email that gets sent?

Same with marking quizzes. If children get multiple-choice quizzes regularly across all schools, and marking them uses precious teacher time, why is there not a standard piece of software, paid for once (or written once internally) which enables all children to do quizzes in a standard way, and get them marked automatically?

If we're investing a bunch of money into automating the various processes that teachers spend far too much time on, start with simple automation, which is cheap, easy, and reliable.

Also, wouldn't it be sensible to do some research into how accurately AI marks homework *before* you tell teachers to use it to do that? Here's some research from February which shows that its agreement with examiners was only 0.61 (where 1.00 would be perfect agreement). So I'm sceptical about the quality of the marking it's going to be doing...

andrewducker

My brother Mike got me this for my birthday, and it just takes a weight off my mind being able to say "bring the steam temperature up to 95 degrees and hold it there"

(Control over oil temperature when frying eggs is also awesome.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

I spent the day feeling bad for lacking focus, and wondering why I couldn't get anything done.
And then I slept for an hour on no notice.
And now I'm very wobbly and all of my muscles gently ache.
So I think I'm going to chalk it up as "The Plague" and hope I feel better tomorrow.

andrewducker

I see we're back at the "Labour attempt to introduce a mandatory ID card" stage of history*.

My feeling last time, was that the main problem that they always have is that they *start* with the cards being mandatory.

If you start with "Here is a thing that makes your life much easier, that you can carry about if you like." then that will get you 85% of the way there. And then, once you have a voluntary ID card that's not causing any problems for anyone, and that 85% of the population is using to make their life easier, *then* you move in and say "The only people who don't carry an ID card are weirdos and troublemakers, and they're causing friction in the system, we could make it all run more smoothly if only they *had* to carry one."

But no, they always try to go instantly from "Nobody has an ID card." to "Everyone must carry one at all times." - which forms a coalition of all sorts of people from across the political spectrum, and ends up being far more politically costly to them than if they'd just boiled their frog slowly.

(None of which should be taken as me taking a position on ID cards. I'm just constantly bemused by their inability to get things done by trying to rush them through in the most authoritarian manner possible.)

*Younger readers may not remember the fuss in 2006 (repealed in 2011)

vass

Books
Finished Jazz Money's how to make a basket. Mostly I liked it. Some of the concrete verse didn't work for me, but that's a me thing, not a problem with the writing.

The book's main theme seemed to be time travel: back before her land's invasion or back to her father's childhood or simply travelling minute by minute; the wish to change the past and the impossibility of doing so.

( more )

After reading

skygiants' review of KJ Charles' Death in the Spires I remembered that I had bought a copy of that when it came out and hadn't read it yet. Read it.

( more )

Games
I hear that Long Live the Queen is getting a followup game, Galaxy Princess Zorana! I'm excited. (Long Live the Queen itself is current on 70% discount on Steam if anyone reading this might be interested in a fun visual novel game. It's pretty and pink and really astonishingly lethal.)

Slay the Spire: I did a few daily climbs. I'm finding them more fun than the regular runs at the moment.

Tech
Still working on the laptop. In the meantime I bought a webcam and plugged it into my desktop so that I could still attend Telehealth appointments. Got complimented on how I looked: turns out that a room with better lighting, and a better-positioned camera, really do make a difference. Go figure.

Household
My laundry area now has a shelf above the washing machine. I took the opportunity to do some decluttering of that area, and it looks much nicer now. So nice that now I want to paint the wall behind it. /o\

Weather
It's fucking freezing.

Links

Petition: Justice for Kumanjayi White. (Police killed a young disabled Warlpiri man outside a supermarket in Alice Springs.)

Why I Revealed My Kink On Television: Meghan Cherry, a Seattle comedian, on her recent audience appearance on Game Changer. (Some of her own comedy work can be found here.)

Cats
Currently headbutting my hand while I'm trying to type.

andrewducker

1. Craftlings - Lemmings meets Settlers meets Terraria: (tags:games video trailer )
2. Autonomous drone from TU Delft defeats human champions in historic racing first: (tags:automation drone ai race )
3. What are people doing right now?: (tags:people humans visualisation viaLinkMachineGo )

andrewducker

Terribly comfy under these trees.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

British Voters are happy that UK net migration is down. But they still think it's too high. Sadly, there is no information about how much immigration voters would like, but I suspect that they think that zero is good. And probably that negative is better.

And a fair chunk of this is because Labour and the Conservatives are both backing the idea that immigration is a bad thing. Lib Dems are in favour of being more humane about it than either of them, but only the SNP seem to have a policy that recognises that if immigration doesn't go up the economy is fucked.

Britain is aging. With serious economic consequences, with insufficient people entering the workforce to make up for the people leaving it, and increasing healthcare costs.

If we want the economy to function then either we will have to have more children or to bring more people in to work here. Those are the two options. And nobody has successfully managed to get a developed society to do the former*. So either we deal with an insupportable economy or we increase immigration. But neither of the big political parties wants to deal with the Daily Mail screaming at them, so we're going to spend the next few years doing the economically** stupid thing.

* Except Israel. Who we are unlikely to emulate.
** Obviously I haven't touched on the moral case here.

andrewducker

1. What are the effects of congestion pricing in New York City?: (tags:newyork transport )
2. What Democrats sound like trying to appeal to young men right now: (tags:politics USA democrats video satire funny )

andrewducker

I occasionally see people complaining that Edinburgh Council hate cars. And, to be fair, I suspect that some of the council members do dislike them (The Green Party are not known for being big car fans). But the Green Party don't run the council (it's currently Labour supported by the Tories and Lib Dems - but their policies about cars vs buses are very similar to the SNP administration), so why is it that people think the council as a whole hate cars?

It's because the council has very little choice.

In a very rural area cars make total economic sense and buses make very little. There aren't enough people travelling between any two points at a given time to make it worth running buses that often, so buses either don't exist, or only connect larger areas rarely. And because they don't run that often, you can't just wander out and leap on to one to get where you need to. So you pretty much *have* to have a car.

Once you more urban you have a situation where buses are running regularly on key routes, so if you live on them then you'll be able to rely on a bus to get too/from work/school. And if you're doing that enough that you're paying for a bus pass, or that you're able to get to most of the places you want then a chunk of people don't need cars any more.

And then, as you get even more urban, you reach a key point where there are *lots* of buses. And to manage the concentration of people in the city you run out of space on the roads, at least at key parts of the day. You now have traffic jams at rush hour. And that's because you have vehicles that are 4.5m long that are carrying one person and other vehicles that are three times that length that are carrying 100 people. If you want to keep those 100 people moving then one of the most efficient ways of doing it is to get the incredibly wasteful vehicles carrying only 1 person out of the way.

Now, this is problematic. If you do it before you have decent bus routes set up for people to switch to then there will be a lot of resistance. You clearly need to hit a critical point to make it doable. And obviously you need some exceptions. But *something* like it is inevitable as people get more concentrated together. You simply cannot fit everyone in the roads if they are using cars, you need something more compact than that.