Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects.
How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.
I personally use chatgpt for initial discovery on these sorts of problems, maybe ask a probing question or two and then go back to traditional search engines to get a very rough second opinion(which might also lead to another round of questions). By the end of that process I'll either have seen that the llm is not helpful for that particular problem, or have an answer that I'm "reasonably confident" is "good enough" to use for something medium to low risk like potentially killing a plant. And I got there within 10-20 minutes, half of that being me just reading the 'bots summary.
> How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out?
Such an odd complaint about LLMs. Did people just blindly trust Google searches before hand?
If it's something important, you verify it the same way you did anything else. Check the sources and use more than a single query. I have found the various LLMs to very useful in these cases, especially when I'm coming at something brand new and have no idea what to even search for.
Eh, for something like this the cost of it being wrong might be pretty small, but I'd bet odds are good that its recommendations will be better than whatever I might randomly come up with without doing any research. And I don't have the time to do the research on normal old google where it's really hard to find exactly what I want.
I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.
I am not so sure. I've ran 98 on bad hardware, and it crashed regularly. So much so, that I installed linux on it already in 1998, and that was much more stable. It only crashed now and then. No doubt in both cases the poor hardware was the cause of it.
Anyway, two years later I got a brand-new laptop with good hardware that was running 98se. As far as I remember, it didn't crash during normal usage. By then I was studying computer science, and would sometimes write or run programs that would make it crash, but that was on me. I did dual boot in Linux, and that didn't have any problems on that machine either.
Fun fact, I still have that laptop, it's over 25 years old now, but it still works and runs Windows 98se!
The odd thing is, you can do quite some bold/italics/superscript in Unicode nowadays. Because, at least from the ASCII letter range, they have been used in symbolic ways in Mathematics, etc., and have been added to Unicode as symbols rather than bold variants of letters. For example:
, !
, !
ᴴᵉˡˡᵒ, ᵂᵒʳˡᵈ!
So, there's almost no bold/italic punctuation. And non-ASCII Unicode letters aren't "supported" this way either. But you can get quite far with "formatted" ASCII letters in Unicode, if you're so inclined.
Of course, hackernews or the font it uses (?), doesn't seem to support the bold and italics Unicode symbols. Although it does seem to support the supperscript ones.
HN actively erases unicode regions to prevent emoji abuse and other zalgoing. Sites and apps do it nowadays, just not with emoji. It's the other side of your point – unicode can do too much and it's not a regular text, so you can't search within that sort of bold, validate, etc. So people choose to work with a subset, which may still leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231608
In my experience, once teachers retire or move on, or a course gets mothballed, it's only a matter of time for course websites disappear or become non-functional.
If the course website was even on the open web to begin with. If they're in some university content management system (CMS), chances are that access is limited to students and teachers of that university and the CMS gets "cleaned" regularly by removing old and "unused" content. Let alone what will happen when the CMS is replaced by another after a couple of years.
I wonder if there's an Aaron Swartz of paywalled university course material out there? Someone (or a group) downloading, datahoarding, and sharing every collection of courses they can get that you need a university login to access?
I did follow a curriculum set by Dijkstra's students. In the first trimester, we learned to program in Pascal, so we knew what programming was. The next two programming courses, in the second and fourth trimester, "programming" meant proving programs correct. Using pen and paper. Often in one-on-one sessions with our teachers where we'd to demonstrate our proofs. Or the teacher would state a problem and then continue to derive a correct progam by construction, writing slowly on the blackboard. These programming courses were supplemented with logic, discrete mathematics, and other formal methods. And we had continuous mathematics courses as well, practical labs, electronics, databases, and whatever you'd expect in a computer science and engineering curriculum.
For most students this wasn't easy, particularly compared to the way most of them were comfortable programming on their own by trial-and-error hacking away at a problem. Proving programs correct by construction takes a different skill. At the same time, it wasn't particularly hard either once you got going.
I don't think this way of teaching and learning programming was very useful or practical. With Dijkstra's students leaving the university, or otherwise losing primacy at the computer science faculty, Dijsktra's ideas faded away from the curriculum. Since then—I returned twenty years later to teach at this university—, the curriculum is very like any other computer science / engineering curriculum. And students seemed to have as much trouble with it as before.
What I missed about the curriculum when it was gone, was the consistency it brought into the curriculum. The curriculum felt as one continuous track to some clear idea of what it meant to be a programmer in Dijkstra's style. If you liked that idea, the curriculum was a great guide. If you didn't, it felt as a waste of time.
And in some very flat countries, those landfillhils become nice recreational landscape features, for example, the "Col du VAM"¹ in Drenthe, the Netherlands.
I've taught in classes of 12 and of 32, the differences in students' behavior, and in reaction my own was huge.
Similarly, I've taught classes where students just came back from an hour of PA and classes that were the second class of the day. The former group of students had always trouble concentrating and focusing, whereas the other group would sometimes have trouble getting up to steam in many activities.
Similarly, I've taught classes that were obligatory for students and classes that were electives. Again, the differences in students' behavior was quite pronounced.
Given constraints and practicalities of our educational system, it is difficult to offer each student the best courses, activities, support, etc. they each individually need. Instead, you often end up compromising. Which isn't great. Particularly for students performing above or below average compared to their peers.
Anyway, just a frustrated ex-teacher here. Thanks for listening.
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