my point is who is going to provide that supply sufficient to drive prices down. Builders - wouldn't. Government? I don't see it, at least not in US. In USSR we had government provided housing, and still there was shortage and a lot of other drawbacks to such an approach.
Many users may not care which bridges they drive over, but I personally would like to avoid driving over the original Tacoma Narrows bridge[1] or any others of similarly flimsy engineering.
Unsurprising, agents' solution to everything is writing more code. They'll happily reinvent the universe (a really crappy one).
Bug? More code. Unexpected behavior - read the docs? Couldn't find anything. Let's try another 1000 lines of workarounds. Still doesn't work? Write another 1000 lines to monkey-patch behavior. It sort of works now.
The actual solution is removing those 2000 lines and passing the correct argument on line 25 which is clearly documented. Most humans would never do that because we're too lazy but it's so easy to generate slop at an exponential rate and blow up the LOC metrics.
I think that in my career I have absolutely seen multiple times people making absolutely horrible architectural approaches where passing a parameter would suffice. Inventing and building basically whole universe instead of doing a bit of research.
With LLM coding I already have seen agent pointing out easier solutions because agent is not scared of or tired by reading existing code. Whereas most of developers want to write „their code” not read someone’s else’s code.
> something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world
I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.
Yes, this is what I meant University is both academic in the sense that it is about research for the respective field(s), but it is also in a very real sense the last educational institution for many students who end up outside of academia. I am not saying that academic rigor needs to be replaced with a self-help group, what I say is that we can look for win-win-situations that help both in an academic sense and are practical outside of academia.
Of course I can't catch all of my students deficiencies (alone for the reason that I can't discover all), but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal. As a software developer I have met people who worked a decade in the field, did good work and they haven't heard of a fundamental concept in networking before. Everybody has their gaps, even people I worked with who are the most knowledgeable people I have ever worked with sometimes have gaps in basic stuff. Maybe your former teachers neglected them, you never really had to apply it, or whatever. Normal.
Good teaching means you quickly recap the required knowledge before you apply it. I can't recap simple arithmetics, but if we need integration or trigonometry I will recap in a beginner course.
An important aspect of University is that it is more free than school education. That means it teaches people to organize their own learning to a much higher degree (which you also may need after you graduate or drop out). If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.
> Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.
This is why I LOVED getting my MS. Just computer science all the time! Heaven! None of those pesky, worthless general ed classes!
I was just a dumb college kid. I'm convinced I'd have done better in life overall if I'd taken those GE courses seriously and made the effort to be a more well-rounded individual. How many chances do you get where your whole job is just learning shit? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.
I go back and forth; part of what bothers me is how I'm paying for these GE courses.
Like, for example, I took a multicultural film course in college the first time around. I love movies, I love analyzing everything about movies, I love discussing themes and metaphors that are in movies, and I even love writing long essays pondering movies, and I enjoyed the class.
That said...is a multicultural film course really worth ~$1200 and like 10 weeks of my time? Maybe to some people, but it certainly wasn't for me.
After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".
As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.
Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.
I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.
But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.
I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."
I try to lecture as little as possible. No slides. Quick highlights discussion of the reading, maybe a coding demo, and then students work on coding challenges in class, in groups if they want. I circulate and help out. I'm lucky to have small class sizes at this university. I couldn't pull it off in a class of 300.
As an educator, this is exactly what I struggle with. I'm pulling out all the stops to give students every chance to do the hard work and not lean on AI. But there's a good chunk of the class who don't listen to reason. I haven't figured it out yet. They know, logically, they can't pass an interview, but that's apparently a "tomorrow" problem.
The smart ones either use it not at all, or use it to positive effect, like you're saying.
> But there's a good chunk of the class who don't listen to reason. I haven't figured it out yet. They know, logically, they can't pass an interview, but that's apparently a "tomorrow" problem.
These people should be doing manual work, not intellectual work. There is no shortage of manual work available.
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