The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)
Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question:
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
Couldn't you make the argument that training the hands for more lifting and tiny movements has better long-term payoffs as that is also beneficial to many other tasks?
I've been trying to figure out how to avoid AI fraud in my classes, like many others. While not perfect, I've written down my thoughts and attempts in the hope it might help someone else:
Is it paywalled? I honestly didn't realize that. Sorry.
I'll edit the comment and change to an open URL and paste the two main ideas here:
FORCED SKILL-BUILDING GOALS
Where my original purpose of giving homework assignments was to help students build their skills through active engagement, I can no longer trust that all my students will have done it by hand. But I still want my students to feel the need to improve their skills. So, I start by considering which skills I think are most important for that class (writing, for example) and build a forced need for my students to improve that skill. For example, in my writing-focused classes, I now give students in-class hand-written exams. I let them know about the essay-based tests (mid-term and final) on the first day of class and encourage them to practice their writing each week, in-class and at home, thus giving them a very clear reason to practice — to get a good grade. Additionally, I take away the need to get a “good grade” on written homework by giving them full points if the homework is turned in on time, regardless of contents or mistakes. Thus, with the need to practice their writing skills for exams and no need to worry about making a good grade on homework assignments, students are encouraged to try the homework themselves — they cannot fail and they can only benefit by doing it themselves. In fact, using an LLM to complete an assignment will likely hurt them as other students who improved their skills will do better on the exams.
Homework once again can be used as a tool for them to improve their abilities through engagement, not just a pointless activity that an LLM can do to help them “get a good grade”.
FORCED LLM FRICTION
Another method I have found for encouraging students to complete assignments on their own is to purposely create friction to using an LLM. I try to plan assignments that it would be MORE work to use an LLM than to simply do it themselves. Humans being what we are, we often will choose the path of least resistance, especially if a grade is on the line!
For example, in one of my classes, I have students write a short story for homework (of about 250 words) about a picture I show them in class. Spelling and grammar mistakes are OK, they are guaranteed to get full marks if they turn it in on time, but the story has to be written BY HAND. To use an LLM, a student would first have to write a lengthy prompt describing the picture in detail and explain the type of output they need (a lot of work), and then they would still have to rewrite the entire story by hand (forcing them to focus on reading, spelling, and handwriting anyway). Thus, by introducing forced friction to using an LLM, especially where there is no danger (no friction) of getting a bad score because of mistakes, encourages students to take the easier path — just do it themselves.
The same idea also applies to shorter listening assignments. As long as the homework receives full marks for turning it in on time (low friction against the fear of poor ability) and the exams including a listening element (clear purpose for trying), the hassle of downloading the audio, sending it to an AI to transcribe it, then upload pictures of the homework questions just isn’t worth it. It’s just easier and more beneficial for students to do it themselves.
For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.
This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...
Worth pointing out - modern multimodal LLMs (properly called VLMs, etc.) can easily take pictures as input and describe them in text. In fact, the CLIP model - one of the predecessors of modern VLMs - is entirely designed around being able to caption images with text.
That said - requiring students to hand-write answers is reasonably effective. It's a lot more boring to hand-copy text out of an LLM answer than write it yourself, and it makes the "cheating" significantly more visceral.
I considered that... and in the "worst comes to worse" scenario where they decide to use an LLM and re-write everything by hand, I'm still hoping they'll learn SOMETHING during the copying process... kind of like the old time "copy books" that were once used.
I've become more and more curious about GA after bumping into it when learning a little 3D programming for fun. I'm looking to learn more, wondering if it would help my understanding of physics.
Do you have any resources (books, videos, etc.) you would recommend to someone wanting to learn?
Yes. I developed hay fever after living here in Japan for a couple years. Was fine the first few years, though it was amusing to watch "yellow clouds of pollen" being blown from the trees with random gusts of wind. Now it's not so amusing. My car windows are dusted with a new layer of "light yellow" every couple days now (in season).
It's super easy to be allergic to cedar pollen because it is such a fine pollen. I developed a cedar pollen allergy within a couple years of moving from somewhere with no cedar to a heavily forested area with cedar. No other allergies to anything, I don't think I'm particularly prone. I tried doing the allergy shots for it for a while but it didn't seem to do much. What works is staying inside with the house sealed up and air filters running, or just getting the hell out of town for a month+.
As the article shows, it is a bug in iTerm2. cat is just one program that could trigger it, the key thing is outputting attacker controlled text to the terminal when the attacker can control what files are present (ie unzipping a folder that includes a specific executable file at a well chosen location that gets triggered to run when the readme is output to the terminal)
Yes. It’s a Mac problem. That’s why Macs do the worst at pwn2own. It’s compounded by the fact that Mac users deny that there are problems in their beloved OS.
cat is a file concatenation utility. UNIX people know to view text files with more.
I remember back in 1995 or so being in a professor's office at Indiana University and he was talking about trying to figure out how to use Neural Networks to automatically track particle trails in bubble chamber results. He was part of a project at CERN at the time. So, yeah, they've been using NNs for quite awhile. :-)
Particle identification using NN classifiers was actually on the early success stories of NN. These are pretty standard algorithms in tracking and trigger software in HEP experiments now. There are even standard tools in the field to help you train your own.
What is more interesting currently is things like anomaly detection using ML/NN and foundational models..etc.
If you don't mind, I'd like to hear more about your setup. I have a bunch of bash scripts and python programs I've used to make working in the terminal easier (and more fun). Are you saving your dotfiles are a git project and then just syncing and pulling them down from there? I'm not an expert, just a tinkerer, but I like tinkering in the terminal. :)
Not the parent but a project (glorified Bash script) called vcsh[1] has served me well over the years for managing multiple Git repositories containing my dotfiles (separation of concerns).
Lately I have migrated some of that to Guix Home because the other half of the problem is having all the dependent programs necessary for the dotfiles installed automatically at the appropriate versions.
The latter one especially falls into the realm of tinkering. :)
Yeah my dotfiles, notes, and scripts are in a single repo. I think the most important thing to do is organize. I just match the system. So I put everything that a rc file in ~/ in one directory and everything in ~/.config in another. Then if you have your repo downloaded all you need is to run 2 find commands like this
It baffles me that people are so unorganized in their dotfiles. A little goes a long way to making your life easier. But then again people suck at bash so they're probably not thinking of using find this way. You could also use xargs to parallelize if you want but there'd be no practical speed difference for me
Another key component is to break out files. For example I have the directory ~/.dotfiles/rc_files/zsh. My zshrc file sources different files from that location. So I have a Linux file and OSX file there for anything that is specifically system dependent. If you want different configs on different machines you can check the hostname and use the same pattern!
Speaking of which, use functions! At first this is going to sound crazy but it's worth the effort and let's be honest, the effort is very low (though the initial rebase might not be depending on how messy you are)
function _exists() {
command -v "$1" &> /dev/null
}
alias_ls() {
alias_lsd() {
alias ls='lsd'
alias la='lsd -A' # A drops . and ..
alias ll='lsd -l' # h is automatic
}
alias_base_ls() {
alias ls='ls -v --color=auto -h' # numerical sort, color, human readable
alias la='ls -A' # ignore . and ..
alias ll='ls -lh'
}
if ( _exists lsd );
then
alias_lsd
else
alias_base_ls
fi
}
main() {
alias_ls || echo -e "\033[1;31mls aliasing fucked up!\033[0m"
}
main
Yeah, it is a bit more cumbersome but it's really not that bad and
1) debugging gets so much easier
2) you know where everything is and what everything does.
3) trying new aliases, command tools, scripts, etc also becomes a lot easier.
Following Unix philosophy has more advantages than disadvantages. I also strongly suggest adding comments because you'll forget why you did something. I'll often link to posts for this and for giving credit.
Fwiw, my main language is Python but for pretty much everything in the terminal I write in bash. You can often make oneliners that would traditionally be a lot of lines in Python. Not to mention it's usually faster. It's a good way to help you learn bash too! ^__^
Thanks for the detailed reply, examples, and links! Yeah, I definitely rely heavily on bash script functions, but had never thought about using git to share or sync my scripts and little programs. Thanks again, I really appreciate it!
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)