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A special thank you to the useful idiots in the tech world who spent the last decade vilifying those of us who spoke out against Big Tech while providing them with social capital and legitimacy, oftentimes benefitting financially from the transaction.
We couldn’t have made it here without you.
@aral And there are so many useful idiots. Lots of them even nominally antifascist. But even now they keep simping for companies doing DRM and shit and spitting out condescending takes on critics.
@dalias @aral #edtech has been captured since the early days of "free" Google and Apple's dominance of schools. The language used by teachers and administrators is telling, tech coaches are see as 'evangelists' for products and services. It's mostly about how to use a product or tool and rarely about what is being produced. And every few years a new saviour arrives. Ten years ago every child who didn't learn to code was going to be left behind. Now it's AI.
@fredb @aral Basic idea is to take a few pages from a book they're reading, break up into groups, and tabulate the words that appear, then what words follow them, and do a Markov bot on paper with dice, no computers needed so nothing is hidden. The details I need to work out are balancing the order of the chain with what's practical for size to work with and how decent the output looks for candidate inputs.
@dalias @fredb @aral Perhaps before you do, go and give https://deepseek.com a try (it’s free to use) and look at how it thinks ..
@aral @dalias @fredb @martin Yeah, really. Like, I had an argument with a friend *who is a statistician* & still refused to believe that there is no reasoning going on or understanding emerging in an LLM - simply because it looks so convincing.
Pretty sure most of it is the "Mentalist Effect"; I mean, despite this having been debunked since fucking Houdini, look at how many people still believe that shit is real...
@gwozniak @jwcph @aral @fredb @martin Big externally distinguishing characteristic is whether it has access to kids' PII or the profiles are basically pseudonymous. Also the worst of "edtech" seems to be administrative (like the scummy Remind that started as parent messaging and pivoted to trying to be "Uber for unvetted private tutors" 
@gwozniak @jwcph @aral @fredb @martin Mathematics is one place where there might be some useful results, specifically because proofs are testable.
However most interesting advances in mathematics are choosing the right definitions to build stuff from, not proving something that was hard to prove. And I'm skeptical shuffling existing proof techniques according to statistical models will yield a lot of new results.