PC Gaming

As someone who went through university before AI, this is nothing new.

Software engineering is a 4 year title. In 3rd year, there were still people that couldn't pass basic programming, which as you may guess is a 1st year subject.

People that have been studying software engineering for 3 years could not pass a subject where the most complicated assignment was filtering over an iterator. And I don't mean implementing it, I mean literally doing my_list.get_iterator().filter(is_odd);. Where get_iterator and filter is already implemented.

honestly, i think it's an overarching issue with the education system. ai is not the cause, it's the symptom, people had a million ways of dodging tasks before it too. it's just easier now than it's ever been.

if you know anything about indie game design, you know that learning is fun. as in, not that learning is a fun activity, but that learning is literally what fun is. you just need an environment that's actually conducive to that, and it will be extremely gripping, because you will have created a flow state generator.

but it turns out that doing that, while also ensuring what you're learning is at all useful (as opposed to, y'know, how to pop heads in counter-strike or something) is difficult enough that most teachers just gave up and decided that learning must suck. which is a problem for many reasons, but i think the biggest one is that if it's not fun, you're not actually learning: if it's boring, it's because you already know how to do it, and doing it more doesn't make you do it better, and if it's frustrating, it's because you keep failing and all that failing doesn't teach any skills. practice is important, sure, but good practice lies halfway between these ends, and it's fun. but a lot of people don't get there, and they're told it doesn't matter if you get there, what matters is if you get through.

i think that's why all these courses are getting skipped by ai. because a staggering amount of people in education programs, in any kind pretty much, aren't there to really learn, they are there to get through, by any means. because the whole social contract is that this is a thing that sucks, but if you get through it, you get a piece of paper and that paper will give you a nice life. it's a nice thought, it's understandable, human brains are wired to understand tradeoffs intuitively. but it skips the bloody point of why we do all this in the first place.

and yeah, i get why you're frustrated that uni students don't know this. but honestly, how would they? no one told them the world they were raised in since the age of 6 is a lie.

I mean, a computer gaming course isn’t any of that in the beginning. It’s basics, and basics is what LLMs excel at. Need 800 lines that are a monotonus number of checks boiled down to some sort of mapped system to clean up the code? It can do that in a fraction of a second.

The problem is that when you skip those basics you never learn the more advanced stuff either, because you don’t have the basics to build upon.

disqualification of the whole team.

Oh fuck no. I've been stuck on teams with deadweights before. Teachers refused to do anything about them contributing nothing at all. Still pissed that asshole graduated.

"What did you learn at school today?"

"Nothing."

Oh, you'd be surprised.

I used to teach english for non native speakers, and after chatgpt's debut in 2023, almost every single essay, homework, and presentation was entirely done with LLMs. We had to demand handwritten essays, and presentations had to be done in the classroom (we gave the theme, they worked out a presentation, and then presented it the same day without leaving the class).

And even then, some students would ask to go to the bathroom, use their phones, memorize a whole ass paragraph from chatgpt and then come inside class to write it down.

As all the others say, they want the cert and the status that comes with the cert.

It's part of the reason everyone needs three years experience for an entry level job, a good student fresh out of education is worth little but then worth a lot if they learn fast. A bad student fresh out of education won't learn at all and will be an active detriment, if only because they're taking a seat someone better could take.

People who use AI for everything aren't guaranteed to be bad students, but bad students probably will use AI for everything. The trick will be figuring out the difference.

Increasingly higher ed in america is being treated as a degree mill, where students are "customers" and the degree is a "product."

It's disgusting, but it's a natural consequence of a commodified education system in which colleges and universities are treated as businesses.

I personally think we need to cut out the parasitic administrators and let the department faculty run the schools like co-ops, and possibly hire out the few administrative tasks that are actually necessary.

That would be far cheaper than paying these enormous administrative salaries, so it could lower tuition while increasing faculty pay.

But has anyone considered those poor shareholders?

Wools that just want the cert

The mentally bankrupt

Just for the cert or whatever at the end.

You're right, I should read Accelerando again.