I loved em-dashes --- I still do (as you can see, I'm partial to AP style ;)) But most people never understood the difference between hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes in the first place. Or that The King's English uses en-dashes where US English uses em-dashes. Merriam-Webster has a short and amusing -- to me -- article on this topic [1]. So all kinds of "dashes" are rolled into the "em-dash is an AI tell" hysteria.

That LLMs use them all the time is also a good indicator that there are alot to be found in the training material.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/how-to-use-and-under...

Well, people are not trying to take Fox News off the air for their many incidents of amplified disinformation, so maybe people think freedom of speech should be protected, even if people disagree with said speech?

Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.

> other is a news outlet

They specifically argued that they are an entertainment broadcaster in court defending Tucker’s show.

It is flabbergasting, indeed. I'm no friend of China, because it is an evil dictatorship, but as a business man I prefer dealing with China over the USA nowadays. At least China is predictable, even in its corruption.

Oh, come on. HN complains about excessive data hoarding all the time. Now it's wrong to not hoard data? This is just another damned if you do, damned it you don't situation and, predictably, the outrage option is voted to the top.

Strong disagree. You want to keep track of how many times I go to the bathroom each day, and how much toilet paper I use each time? I complain about data hoarding. You're handling my money? You'd better not lose it, and you'd better keep accurate records, and you'd better keep them forever.

And in these specific cases, 20 years ago? They weren't handling stuff with computers 20 years ago? They didn't keep backups of that? (Another commenter notes a 10-year record keeping requirement in Europe, so in that case it may have legitimately been removed.)

But it's worse with the government. It wasn't 20 years ago, you just did it. And you don't have records? That's theft.

Why would you need to know anything about 20 years ago. In a sense financial data is even easier. There is a ledger and if you have kept 10 years of detailed history that is plenty.

Why so complicated? Ask yourself how you find out if someone is living in country foo. By looking at the postal address, of course. If the shipping or billing address is in country foo, e.g. Germany, the shipment is subject to country foo's law. Just block potential customers from addresses in countries you don't want to deal with. It's really easy.

This works for physical goods. For SaaS stuff, if you look at the billing address only, you’ll just get a ton of users from 67 Keysmash Lane, Anytown, 10000 CA, US. (Yeah that’s not a real zipcode for CA, but don’t tell me you’re validating those and don’t even look at the IP addresses :-)

This could give you plausible deniability perhaps, if you do want users from Germany, but don’t want to deal with German laws, and are willing to argue in the German court that you didn’t know these users are from Germany because they’ve said “I’m not from Germany, pinky promise”. (Or if you have no intention of ever being in Germany and are sure that Germany can’t get to your bank accounts to fine you.)

No, I'd look at IP addresses before validating zipcodes, true ;) What I'm thinking is, if someone wants to deceive a service provider about her billing address, that's a social problem. Social problems are insanely hard to fix with technology, if at all.

So what is reasonable to request from the service provider here? Checking billing address and IP is reasonable, but beyond that? Maybe bank account? But in Europe a German can have a bank account in France, it is not even a big deal. Maybe taxation should follow bank accounts? I have an account in Luxembourg, so I'm set ;)

Why do they have to choose? That's not a problem of inflation, but of wealth distribution or, if you will, our system of economy.

People make it sound as if Munich flip-flopped on Linux. The then ruling social-democrats and the greens started the LiMux project in 2003! The social-democrats and the conservative christians ruling in 2020 switched back to MS Windows. The current administration is mandating open source but not specifically Linux.

I use Linux since the year 2000 and it has been ruff in the early days, no doubt. The desktop competition were MS Windows 2000 and XP, often lauded as peak MS Windows. Apple had all but disappeared. But 2020 I'd wager that average KDE desktop vs. average MS Windows 10 desktop would be a draw. Today it would be a KDE desktop win, but that's more due to MS Windows 11 suckiness than the leaps and bounds Linux made.

So, Excel is just the poor man's shadow IT? I like that picture.

By the time it takes to make a custom filtered table non extensible UI for an api, the excel guy is finished three times over

I can’t count the number of demos I’ve seen that were “small team, multiple sprints” to produce something that could have been done in a lazy afternoon in excel by a single person.

It’s a common pattern in enterprise IT to take a useful spreadsheet and turn it into an application. Without fail, they turn into a forever chase of excel features re-implemented (and poorly) on some front end. Entire teams dedicated to features that would be two clicks away in excel ootb.

Yes, I have already three such projects on my CV, failed attempts to replace Excel.

The root cause for failure is always the same, not understanding all use cases for 100% of the department users instead of only the representative group present during UI/UX sessions, coupled with the human natural resistance to change.

Indeed. Sometimes it's hard not to think about gaslighting in this field.

Oral exams don't scale at the beginning with hundreds of students per course, agreed. So make them in-person written exams, German universities managed that just fine a few decades ago. Oral exams were reserved to advance from Grundstudium (basic) to Hauptstudium (main).

In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.

They do scale if the examiner is an LLM.

The article mentions study content that AI has got confidently wrong. That’s going to be some crap markings.

If the ai is good enough to do the homework, it should be good enough to check the homework.

I mean some people are good at Tetris and some aren’t. Tetris can tell you which ones are which.

That’s the problem though - the article has an example of the AI screwing up the homework and the students don’t notice even when warned.

Maybe the Germans were right? One in-person test, preferably an interview, at the end of the semester should be enough to motivate the smarter part of the bunch to make sure they understand the issues at hand. The rest is chaff anyway. Don't optimize for chaff.

As was sort of offhandedly mentioned in the article, all pre-LLM research into what results in students actually learning the material (as a distinct thing from passing the class) has landed pretty solidly on the side of frequent, low-stakes exams having better outcomes than rare high-stakes exams. The best students learn the material regardless of how you evaluate them; some weaker students will benefit from more frequent nudges to keep up rather than trying to cram at the end, some students simply won't realize they're falling behind without regular feedback, and some students successfully cram at the end and pass the class without retaining much of the material. The final group often expresses a preference for the one-exam-at-the-end model despite being disserved by it if the goal is to learn and not merely pass.

That's entirely fine. Have midterms that are also interviews. Have labs where TAs interview students vocally every few weeks, etc.

I had that a variation of that experience. This was mostly in the pre-AI days. Homework assignments were mandatory but only counted towards exam admission not the final grade. Much better for motivation.

When I was a student, nobody cared if you did your home work. The teacher would go through the home work in the next class, and if you didn't do it, you would just lose the opportunity.

Then there was the written exam at the end of each course, which constituted 100% of the grade. The only reason that got abolished was because it made too many students fail, and the board hates that. So that became a race to the bottom, and apparently, we can still go lower.

It's reaching levels where most uni diplomas don't matter any longer. The only thing that will then matter is your network. That's the end of social mobility.

"Don't optimize for chaff." is being chaff a permanent state of a child or person?

I think I understand what you mean though, and I kind of agree. I just don't like the use of the word chaff, like something you would discard permanently.

I'm pretty sure I was "chaff" at some point (maybe multiple) in my life growing up.

It may not be permanent, but by the time someone goes to university it's not the instructor's job to fix them.

Funny to see this comment, that's exactly how studying math in Cologne was. On the very first day one of our profs said:

"This is math, you can find all solutions to the course problems in old material since I've been teaching here for 20 years, but know this you're cheating yourself and at the end of the semester you're taking a three hour test on pen and paper so good luck"

I see zero reason why AI should impact teaching. You can grade exercises as information to the students as to how well they're doing, but simply have an exam at the end of the course. Needlessly to say like 60-70% flunked through Analysis I and Linear Algebra. But they're adults and they're there voluntarily, so why is this an issue

They pay as much tuition as the wheat and the schools want them to keep paying said tuition.

One test is too stressful and may be affected by bad luck. I'd recommend many small quizzes. You can use LLMs to grade.

> You can use LLMs to grade.

The article gives examples of LLMs being wrong. An AI grading of an AI submission would presumably give a good mark, to a wrong answer.

It's terrifying that some people actually do think this. Not you obviously, but I had enough conversations with other people.

on the off chance you’re being sincere: the article mentions that they allow free retakes of the oral exam

I agree.