https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSoqddxoCl8

One could do all sorts of fun abstractions with the simulation data. =3

    | Name                                 | Semi-private eval | Public eval |
    |--------------------------------------|-------------------|-------------|
    | Jeremy Berman                        | 53.6%             | 58.5%       |
    | Akyürek et al.                       | 47.5%             | 62.8%       |
    | Ryan Greenblatt                      | 43%               | 42%         |
    | OpenAI o1-preview (pass@1)           | 18%               | 21%         |
    | Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet (pass@1) | 14%               | 21%         |
    | OpenAI GPT-4o (pass@1)               | 5%                | 9%          |
    | Google Gemini 1.5 (pass@1)           | 4.5%              | 8%          |

There are university students now in their 3rd year that paste chatgpt's javascript program into their c# code (also written by chatgpt) and ask me why is everything red and its not "working".

I think it is a problem of designing for the 'average' student, which of course does not exist.

The academia focuses too much on the abstract languages and constructs, but the reality is, the code will run on a man-made digital computer, which has certain properties, it uses memory in a certain way, has a clock, and is discrete, certain things are possible, and others are not. No matter how much we pretend, the equal sign (=) leaks through, and that in itself creates infinite confusion in people who pretend to get it.

I think hyper individualistic approach is the solution. My daughter for example really dislikes scratch and various graphical languages, but she does really well with machine code and assembly and c. When we were working on a chess game, and she said: "WAIT! the queen is just rook + bishop", we went into how can we actually structure our code to express that. The journey is completely non linear. Sometimes we go back, sometimes forward.

Hopefully AI + teacher can help with that. But the truth is, some kids get various concepts, like recursion or references and values, naturally, some never get it. And we are trying to teach them the same thing at the same time for the same duration, and just move on.

SICP is best for some, PDP11 machine code for others, godot or roblox lua for third, and so on. The problem is we don't know which is which :)

PS: Some of the things I made to teach my daughter: https://punkx.org/

I have a feeling that this issue might be amplified by the facts that

1. many US-American students are monolingual.

2. I have observed that many native English speakers are less interested in their own language than native speakers of other languages for their mother tongue.

For 1: If you are used to learn multiple (natural) languages, you are very used to the fact that (nearly) identical words can have very different meanings in different languages (false friends).

Examples:

sensible [en] vs sensibel [de] ("sensitive" in English)

bite [en] vs bite [fr] (a vulgar word)

So for me there is nothing surprising about the fact that "=" means different things in mathematics vs programming languages that use = as an assignment operator.

For 2: There exist quite a lot of English words that can have very different meanings depending on the context (arbitrary example: "left" can both mean a direction, and be the simple past and past participle of "to leave"). So what is so difficult about the fact that = means something different in a C/C++/Java/C#/Python program than in a math equation?

The articles says roughly that "while we know what to strive for, we are falling short of achieving our goals." It doesn't make the claim that we know how to teach programming.

Now, unrelated to what the article says, I wanted to bring up this point: there are several ways we know how to teach something, and they apply better to different disciplines. For instance, the approach where we do lecture-lecture-lecture-seminar-test is what's used to teach subjects that require very little hands-on work (eg. law, history etc.) Then, there's lecture-lab-lecture-lab-lecture-lab-test approach, which is better suited to subjects like biology or electrical engineering etc.

Some subjects have their own tradition of teaching that's mostly unique to them. Eg. painting is taught by assigning students to the professor's workshop, where they, basically, live for a few years. No formal "teaching" takes place, but the workshop's master interacts with students whenever he/she feels fit. Or, conservatory students who, usually, spend hours in one-on-one training with their teacher practicing their instrument of choice.

What I think is happening in teaching to program is that because the field originated in math + engineering faculties, the tradition of how to teach it was borrowed from that space too: lectures + labs + tests. But, I think, that programming is more similar to painting in the way how it's done and how it could potentially be taught. So, instead of short-term labs and tests, it would be beneficial for the students to have long-term projects, possibly worked on in groups, where interaction with the teacher happens when the teacher inspects the work done so far and decides to provide feedback.

The drawback of this approach is the grading that will not be defined formally and will be grounds for disputes between the students and the teachers. But, I still think it would've been better than the sequence of short-term assignments that must be worked on alone, because the later doesn't welcome and sometimes precludes the use of industry tools (s.a. version control systems, bug trackers). Essentially, today, those who are taught to program aren't taught how to use programming tools at all. Which is very weird to anyone coming from a school with a practical slant, where studying the tools would've been an essential part of the training.

thats not the only thing it says, but it does say it:

> The conclusions to be drawn from the points made throughout this paper are reasonably obvious: We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level.

It also does states that somehow we know how to teach programming, and the discussion is around finding an incremental improvement given the learnings so far.

I am not really sure how teachers get hired, how they are interviewed and assessed, but the system is clearly not working; particularly in subjects that the learning curve is not a curve (like math, or physics or cs)

-- Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Everything in the average is infinitely reduced, even if you make a chair, a perfect chair for one is torture for another. So we compromise for all.

It is the same with user interface, or education.

Now however I think we can break out of this, with new unique interfaces for each individual, or teaching every child what they are struggling with, be ahead or behind the other children, there is no need to teach quadratic equations to 1 million kids in the very same time in the very same way, some get them in the first lesson, some in the last, and some never get them.

even if its not an app, everything is so cheap and small now, 1mm camera and microphone, and very tiny ear piece (invisible with longer hair), or even earless headphones, realtime whisper turbo and groq llama3.3 can absolutely pass most interviews and answer most questions

even without the tech, i am sure people are now cheating on face to face interviews as well

i worked at fairly big company, and did maybe 500 interviews, i never knew how the candidate would look in advance, so i dont see why cant someone else shows up to the interview, pass it and then the real person shows up for the job

Their friends who have kids?

People still talk to other people.

there are more extreme cases

This article has screenshots from the conversation. While the outcome is definitely more extreme, the actual conversation between him and the bot when it came to the message that encouraged him to go through with it is a little more questionable. He didn't ask it if he should kill himself directly, he told it he was going to "come home" to it, and it told him that he should.

But the bot being a roleplay bot could easily respond as if that's just a part of the roleplay, and his character was literally going home. It isn't responding with a prompt indicating that it's responses might effect a real person that way.

I would say what could really make it damning depends on the rest of the conversation, which will likely come out in court, and seeing if suicidal tendencies are present within its context window.

Midjourney avoided having to make a frontend at first, meaning they launched faster. Once they got product/market fit, they built a web frontend, which is now better than the Discord interface. Seems like a pretty smart strategy, that worked well, for a completely bootstrapped company that never raised VC.

On his first day of work he missed the bus, so he called our boss and just said "I missed the bus, the next one is tomorrow morning, see you tomorrow".

Working on any kind of problem with him is absolute joy, from outages to designing new features, including once when the server burned down and everything was lost.

or various accidentally quadratic functions

of course they shouldnt, but such is life

Also, "perfect storm of bad coding" is the norm for games, and not the exception, no?

sadly after few years faster CPUs are normalized and we write sloppier code that makes the programs slow again

then amd has to work on next generation of speculative execution innovations and almost AGI branch predictors :) and we go again