The first example also reveals the crux of the issue. The actual problem is that the merging intent is not mathematically solveable in a satisfying manner.
E.g. let's say two people edit the body element depending on the content of the Edit the best solution¹ could be to take both contents (in which order?), to just take one, to take neither or to merge them semantically into a new third thing.
Meaning there are two obvious ways of going for a better merging solution:
1. Retain the ambiguity (if there is one) and present it to the users and let them decide
2. Use an LLM to guess the intent of both edits and task it to resolve the ambiguity if resolveable
¹: with best I mean the the solution real humans merging text from two pieces of paper would chose
Yep, the combined intent of two people cannot be established automatically when they cannot see each other's changes or understand each other's reasoning. Figuring out the collaborative intent for conflict resolution would require mind-reading.
The right UX for scenarios where accuracy is essential is to let users know when they are offline. The offline-enabled approach is not suitable for a lot of situations.
As someone I trusted in source control once pointed out: often the source of a conflict may be social or political or miscommunication. As much as we all want technical solutions for sociopolitical problems, the real answer is still often communication and that any {source control; collaborative editing; etc} tool is only as good as its merge conflict UX is at communication between involved parties.
I think we've gone far enough down the road of "we can solve all CRDT merge conflicts through technical wizardry" that the next steps are "what is the right merge conflict UX when people should be communicating?" not just "what can we solve technically and never show the user?"
Yes, but as an university level educator I have to stress that the vast majority of students suck at understanding what they will need to know to be good at the juicy bits that interested them in the first place. Our task isn't just to teach them what they are interested in. Our task (among others) is to prepare them for a life after university in their profession(s) while giving them the practical skill of learning new subjects themselves. For example: Nearly nobody wants to do the math stuff, but nearly everybody will profit from knowing it after the fact (at least in the field I am in). Education is more than knowledge, but if we talk about knowledge it is the systematic accumulation of interlinked ideas and concepts that after a few years turn someone who had no idea into someone who can excell in their field. Nobody who likes to work on cars likes doing taxes, but nearly everybody who lives off working on cars will need to know how to do them. So the question will be, can a society afford to teach people only the fun bits?
I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.
But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.
> I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside.
While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, 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. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?
> 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.
> but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal.
Absolutely. Which is why we've built a society where helping others close those gaps is natural and considered to be part of a life-long process. Again, it is great that you are playing your part, but you'd be doing the same if you were standing beside someone on an assembly line. It is not clear what the significance of university is, unless you are simply biased by it being central to much of your experience?
> it is more free than school education. [...] If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.
Which is why youth life doesn't end at school. In fact, school is supposed to be just a small part of that existence. We encourage them to do things like babysit young children, get jobs, etc. where hitting a wall and shattering is plain unacceptable and even catastrophic. This forces them to quickly get up to speed on how to learn and feeling like they can learn when things get real.
It is inevitable that someone will end up living a completely sheltered life and miss out on those fundamentals, but compelling them to first un-shelter themselves is what university entrance requirements are for. If you are regularly seeing students both sheltered and accepted into university, our fundamental assumptions about university have broken down and we need to step back. You working hard to offer a bandaid is noble, but not a good solution.
I guess in my case it has to do with the aspect that I am teaching Media Technology and Electronics in an Art university. The students studying here are the 5% that made it through the selection process, but math and physics aren't typically a big part of that.
Meaning it is kind of like teaching a language in a engineering school: sure it is needed, but you can't just go all hardline on your requirements if you teach that class, otherwise you're going to lose everybody, because someone who studied engineering may have done so precisely with the background that they were bad with languages during school.
Same here. Art students are generally not the abstract maths type (although there are exceptions). My goal is to teach them at least that maths can be a very good tool in their belt if they want to know how things will work out before put into reality.
I still try to demand a lot of the students and they will certainly leave better educated than they entered. I just have to do it more in a boil-the-frog-way, presenting math as a way that allows us to avoid having to do unnecessary work or spend unnecessary money. This works pretty well.
I could of course also do it like my predecessor and just do a lecture on the physics of light, writing down equations nobody will understand and then have 90% fail and curse at my existence. But I don't really see the point of why I would want to do that in terms of the outcome.
I am teaching for at the university level for 6 years now, with 5 courses per year.
The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.
The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.
When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.
So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.
Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.
Maybe ot is just me, but gmail users can go.. [fill the blank]. It is one thing to not value your own privacy, but not valuing that of other people is unacceptable.
Sure using the mysteriously free webmail client of that ad-company may be convenient, but the people who have to interact with you (or with whom you chose to interact) did maybe not make that choice. Forcing on them is not only rude, it should be illegal.
I am not saying you need to run your own mailserver (although I do, mailcow is great), but maybe paying for an email service that respects your another peoples privacy makes sense in a world where a single email is the key to your kingdom.
And I say that because AI that writes responses has to read your mails first. I am sure Google won't use that gathered information for any other purpose than suggesting a reply. /s
What an odd thing to fixate on . . . swap the pronouns around any way you prefer, and my statement remains correct. The captain is in charge of the aircraft and she is to be obeyed if you want to fly on her aircraft. She can refuse to accept any passenger for any reason. If it is a stupid reason, she may have a problem with her employer later, but nobody can overrule her in the moment.
Friendly reminder that not everyone's first language is English, and for a lot of people for whom it isn't, gender-neutral pronouns can be a pretty foreign concept and it's easy to forget about it. We just apply the natural gender that the word has in our language (such as a chair being feminine in both Portugese and French, so a lot of natives of those languages may mistakenly refer to a chair as "her" in English). I wouldn't go so far as assume the person you're replying to is sexist or whatever it is you're thinking just from the fact they referred to an imaginary captain as "he".
Yes. The captain has the authority, by law, to remove anyone (or everyone) for any reason. There is basically nothing the captain is legally barred from doing while the plane is en route.
> There is basically nothing the captain is legally barred from doing while the plane is en route.
This is pretty wide of the mark. They have a lot of authority, yes, as it's the flipside of the flight's safety being their responsibility. They still aren't allowed to assault a passenger, say, or commit tax fraud, or needlessly break the air laws.
Also, while the plane is en route? As in, the captain throwing someone out of the plane mid-flight?
Ah yes because I am definitely saying that the captain of an airliner is free to commit tax fraud. That's definitely something someone with a functioning brain could believe I meant, and not a complete straw-man bad faith interpretation.
And yes, the captain's authority is greater while the plane is en route compared to on the ground. En route the captain can divert pretty much anywhere if they think it's the right thing to do. They can dump fuel over the ocean or even over houses if they believe the alternative is worse. When the plane is on the ground realistically all they're going to do for anything is deplane everyone, either at the gate or via an evacuation.
>A few thousand pagers went off, quite a few in the hands of kids.
Citation needed for "quite a few in the hands of kids".
What kind of kids get to hold very specific communication devices that Hezbollah leadership uses?
I smell bullshit.
>Terrorism by definition.
Says the person who's never read the definition.
You can call the op that targets military leadership whatever you want, but the mere fact of military leadership being targeted makes it not terrorism BY DEFINITION.
Btw. as per EU law (GDPR) website owners are required to aquire informed consent for any kind of client side storage if it contains information that is personal. And it has been ruled that any information that can be used to identify returning users is such.
People think the GDPR is just about cookies, but it is agnostic of the technology used.
Maximum fines: €20 million, or 4% of the company's total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year — whichever is higher.
And informed consent means they need to know what data you collect/store for which purposes and there needs to be an equally easy to select No-Option.
This doesn't really address the issue here. The condition here is that a site might decide that it needs to store (say) a copy of the Red Hat server installation package on each user's local machine (20GB) to facilitate repeat visits.
The stored data is not related to the user at all. The problem is that the website gets to silently write 20GB to the user's disk.
Last week I read through 10 project proposals by students. Two of those ticked all boxes for LLM writing throughout their full text. Not that I checked for LLM-markers specifically, but if a text makes you go: wait a minute, am I reading the output of an LLM? only to then present you with more markers also content-wise, that will have an impact on the human reading the text.
And it should. If someone sends me an obvious copy-paste mass email it also has an impact on how serious I take that email to be meant as an actionable proposal targeted at me specifically.
If they half-ass their proposal which has to do with language I can reasonably infer they may also half-ass the real world implementation which in this case also had to do with language. If you're unable to describe your own idea on half a page of paper in your own words, maybe the students who are able to do so should be treated fair.
I don't care wheter or not they use LLMs, in fact do. But engage with the ideas and results and convince me you really care about them.
Exactly, without talking about automated checkers or publishing policies, if a text gives readers the impression is was LLM-generated it will affect how they judge it.
Recently a contractor presented a small internal tool they made for a very specific task. The UI text gave a direct impression to be entirely LLM-generated with no human edition. It makes the entire tool look vibe-coded, affecting how we judge it. Now I question whether they even reviewed the functionality correctness, which I wouldn't doubt if the UI didn't look generated.
The problem I see is that LLMs have the tendency to pull everything towards the mean of whatever you ask it to. But the really, really good stuff is often totally out there on the fringes.
You can get some good results with really precise instructions, but this requires someone who has already thought a lot about what they are after.
Coming up with precise instruction about what we are after isn't always possible. In many cases we only know what we are after once we see it. And if you can't express what you are after into tokens you can't outsource that choice to anyone else except your own direct experience of the process.
E.g. let's say two people edit the body element depending on the content of the Edit the best solution¹ could be to take both contents (in which order?), to just take one, to take neither or to merge them semantically into a new third thing.
Meaning there are two obvious ways of going for a better merging solution:
1. Retain the ambiguity (if there is one) and present it to the users and let them decide
2. Use an LLM to guess the intent of both edits and task it to resolve the ambiguity if resolveable
¹: with best I mean the the solution real humans merging text from two pieces of paper would chose
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