I have very few issues with Firefox. The two that I suspect are:
1) Google-owned sites seem to just chew CPU on Firefox. In particular I'm thinking of GMail and Youtube, both of which I'm a heavy user of, and also Maps. But no non-google sites seem to have this problem.
2) I'm constantly getting websites saying "This is your first time using this device, are you sure you're you?", and I haven't tried whether it's better on Chrome, but it's pretty crazy because I've literally never used your stupid site with any other device, and I used it with THIS device just last month you idiots. I'm just blind guessing that this is some kind of problem as a result of Firefox privacy choices, like maybe the site doesn't know how to use cookies in a way that doesn't trigger anti-tracking. For example banks.
But Firefox can keep thousands of tabs open at once (thousands. plural. not kidding, not exaggerating.), it has working uBO, and the frequency of "just because we wanted to" UX changes is much lower. It's just a better choice all around.
The "fast inverse square root" is absolutely 100% all about performance. For it to make sense to use as a counter-example, you need to show alternate code that still meets the contract (the contract being: be as fast as this code), that is longer, and clearer.
I was saying that shorter code is not necessarily more readable. But what you're talking about is optimisation and I'm fine with that, uglier code for higher speed (or whatever). But is that refactoring? I don't think so. I may have led you a bit down the garden path here.
> a bit dramatic. there has to be an adjustment of teaching/assessing, but nothing that would "ruin" anyone's life.
If you don't have the power to just change your mind about what the entire curriculum and/or assessment context is, it can be a workload increase of dozens of hours per week or more. If you do have the power, and do want to change your entire curriculum, it's hundreds of hours one-time. "Lives basically ruined" is an exaggeration, but you're preposterously understating the negative impact.
> is it spam if it's useful and solves a problem?
Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam. I'm not claiming that your product is spam -- I'll get back to that -- but your reply to the spam accusation is completely wrong.
As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage. There's already garbage on the internet, we don't need LLMs to generate more. But yes, I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty, and although that's kind of blech, it's still better than not having the good suggestions.
>Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam.
I think it has a lot to do with it. I can't see how generating educational content for the purpose of enhancing student outcomes with content reviewed by expert teachers can fall under the category of spam.
>As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage.
I like to present concrete examples of what I would consider to be useful content for a k-12 teacher.
This would align with Year 9 Maths for the Australian Curriculum.
This is an extremely valuable tool for
- A graduate teacher struggling to keep up with creating resources for new classes
- An experienced teacher moving to a new subject area or year level
Bear in mind that the GPT output is not necessarily intended to be used verbatim. A qualified specialist teacher with often times 6 years of study (4 year undergrad + 2 yr Masters) is the expert in the room who presumably will review the output, adjust, elaborate etc.
As a launching pad for tailored content for a gifted student, or lower level, differentiated content for a struggling student the GPT response is absolutely phenomenal. Unbelievably good.
I've used Maths as an example, however it's also very good at giving topic overviews across the Australian Curriculum.
Here's one for: elements of poetry:structure and forms
Again, an amazing introduction to the topic (I can't remember the exact curriculum outcome it's aligned to) which gives the teacher a structured intro which can then be spun off into exercises, activities or deep dives into the sub topics.
> I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty
This is a result of poor prompting. I'm working with very structured, detailed curriculum documents and the output across subject areas is just unbelievably good.
There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?
Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?
>Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?
I didn't could you point them out?
>There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?
As a classroom teacher I can tell you that piecing together existing resources is hard work and sometimes impossible because resource A is in this text book (which might not be digital) and resource B is on that website and quiz C is on another site. Sometimes it's impossible or very difficult to put all these pieces together in a cohesive manner. GPT can do all that an more.
The point is not to replace all existing resources with GPT, this is all or nothing logic. It's another tool in the tool belt which can save time and provide new ways of doing things.
> The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high.
This claim is interesting, if true. Can you back it up? I spent 15 minutes on research, and my preliminary findings, using US statistics (I'm not American but it's just easier to google American stuff) suggest that:
a) about 42 Americans die to dog attacks per year (about 0.13 per 100k population) (very high confidence)
b) it looks like about half of those are kids under 17, with ages 1-4 over-represented (very high confidence)
c) most of those kids-dying-to-dogs deaths are not due to unrestrained dogs in public, but rather infants in their family homes, dying to dogs owned by the child's parents (low to medium confidence)
For example, WP gathers media/journal reports on dog fatalities, and has 16 records for 2023 (so presumably about 1/3 of the fatalities for that year). 6 of those are children. Of those 6 children, 4 died to the family pet, the other 2 died to neighbours' dogs while in their own home. Extrapolating from that that suggests that the number of American children killed by poorly restrained dogs, other than their own family, is roughly 6. Out of around 10k child fatalities per year in the US.
That doesn't seem "very high" to me, but that's just a matter of opinion. Do you have data that shows a different pattern?
[edit] Forbes: an estimated 800,000 people each year must seek medical attention after a bite. Hospital bills can be very expensive, and an ER visit could necessitate a dog bite lawsuit in order to recover monetary compensation for damages.
My sister in law was one of them, when she was five or so. Unprovoked run-up-and-bite from an off-leash dog. Had to have a tear duct rerouted and other work on her face. Messed up their finances really bad for a couple years, like “parents not eating dinner tonight, because there’s only one can of spaghetti-o’s” bad (they were fairly poor to begin with)
Yeah, the injury stats are way higher than death. I just couldn't find a fast way to disambiguate serious injuries from not-so-serious-but-we-still-care injuries from the sort of bite that really just merits a fake apology and everyone gets on with their lives.
At the other extreme, I've had first-hand knowledge of a case where someone taunted a dog repeatedly over many months (stupid kid, stupid dog-owners, lots of mistakes were made), eventually the kid got bit, didn't even need stitches, but they called animal control.
So. Non-fatal dog-attacks have a very wide range of impact, and I had no idea how to disentangle those.
Oh, after all that writing I just did, I went back and re-read your source. In 2022 there were 17,500 home insurance claims related to dog bites, at an average cost of $64k. That sounds like a pretty reasonable proxy for serious injury due to injuries from dog bites from pets, the sort of pets that could plausibly have been inappropriately not-on-leash (remember we're discussing whether or not it's "incredibly dangerous and irresponsible" to ever have your dog unrestrained).
Sure, I agree that 800,000-hospital-visits number isn’t really a great picture of what’s going on. The deaths number was just so very far under what I was sure was the serious-harm figure that I thought it worth bringing in the non-death attacks, and a (probably reasonable-ish) estimate of cases that prompted treatment was first thing I saw that looked close to what I was looking for.
The 17.5k stat’s interesting—I think you’re right that it may at least be in the ballpark for an estimate of unrestrained dog attacks. Some would generate a claim, some wouldn’t, some claims wouldn’t be for unrestrained dogs… yeah, probably a good starting point. I like that one, good eye.
I’d guess most attacks of that 800k aren’t from strangers’ dogs at all, but friends and family’s dogs. Simple matter of opportunity and time exposed.
I'm not the other guy, and I don't have data, but the risk might be far higher outside the US.
These days, Americans mostly treat their dog like a family member. If you travel to developing nations, you're far more likely to run into packs of dogs roaming around. Packs of dogs will do things that a solo dog might never consider.
It still happens in developed countries, but it's far more common these days to see it in poor, developing countries. They probably don't have the infrastructure to collect relevant statistics, either.
Yes, I agree with you, and poorly-fed dogs might do things that a privileged pet might never consider. And, a fortiori, packs of poorly-fed dogs.
But the comment I was responding to was from a commenter whose bio says they're in Philidelphia, responding to a comment that I think was probably pretty developed-country, on a story from a Brit living in America. So I think we're talking about the developed-country context.
I'm not disagreeing with the text of what you wrote, though.
My sense is that dogs prioritize pack/family togetherness ahead of freedom. They don't value all other people (and to a dog, "people" means dogs, humans, and sometimes other species), but also they do not only value their "owner". They value their family, their pack. They want to be with those they want to be with, in action and in rest.
After that, they value things like food, exercise, curiousity, and the absence of immediate pain.
Most dogs, that haven't been traumatized, seem to have a pretty reasonable attitude toward personal safety: you mustn't let fear rule you. But some dogs, that have been traumatized, can be inordinately concerned with what they perceive to be their personal safety, in some cases to the point of (understandable, tragic) derangement.
Maybe you know something particular about metabolic treatments. But if this is just a structural argument from more or less first principles, I think it's structurally weak. There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation.
For example, chemotherapy is poison, just poison that is hoped to poison the cancer much more strongly than the patient. But it always hurts the patient.
Another broader example, fevers are bad for you. But in many situations, they're worse for a pathogen that has infected you, so your body tries a fever in response to some immune observations. This is why you should generally not treat a mild fever, unlike a too-intense fever. Not medical advice, I'm not a doctor.
But maybe, unlike me, you have specific knowledge of the medical issues and you have more-specific reasons to argue that metabolic attacks can't work on cancer?
>There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation
It's not an assumption, it is knowledge based on a general understanding of how cancer functions.
Even without that knowledge, you should be able to observe that people dying of cancer eat less than is needed to sustain their bodies, and such behavior does not slow down the progression of cancer.
I used to have a coworker, a senior dev of decades of experience, who insisted that MacOS was a real Linux, "just like BSD". Sigh.
Of course, this belief probably had no downsides or negative consequences, other than hurting my brain, which they probably did not regard as a significant problem.
1) Google-owned sites seem to just chew CPU on Firefox. In particular I'm thinking of GMail and Youtube, both of which I'm a heavy user of, and also Maps. But no non-google sites seem to have this problem.
2) I'm constantly getting websites saying "This is your first time using this device, are you sure you're you?", and I haven't tried whether it's better on Chrome, but it's pretty crazy because I've literally never used your stupid site with any other device, and I used it with THIS device just last month you idiots. I'm just blind guessing that this is some kind of problem as a result of Firefox privacy choices, like maybe the site doesn't know how to use cookies in a way that doesn't trigger anti-tracking. For example banks.
But Firefox can keep thousands of tabs open at once (thousands. plural. not kidding, not exaggerating.), it has working uBO, and the frequency of "just because we wanted to" UX changes is much lower. It's just a better choice all around.