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.... Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents.

Wow. This image of Anthropic employees ripping books apart to use them to train models is a powerful one, seems like an inflection point in the history of information.


I think the answer to "how will AI agent guidelines be enforced" is that they won't be because they can't be, at least not directly.

This doesn't mean that this approach doesn't have value though. I think it very much does.

One way to indirectly enforce use of the AI agent guidelines is via an oral examination where the instructor and student look over their work together and talk about it. Students who have genuinely tried to learn and used AI as a learning tool via the agent guidelines should do a lot better in an oral exam than students who have used AI as a solution generator.

I adopted the oral exam (without agent guidelines) for a course i teach in the academic year just gone, it worked pretty well. Next term I intend to include the agent guidelines to give them clearer guardrails. Still ultimately optional, but if students choose to ignore them it's gonna be pretty obvious during our conversation.


I wish you good luck! And add that I'd be interested to hear how you get on. I intend to adopt a similar approach with my classes in September. The . history folder is a great idea.

How do you intend to assess your students?


I told them up front this was new territory and we're all learning from it. If they're overusing it I assured them they won't be dealing with a student integrity issue, but I will be giving them feedback if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments.

I'm hoping they learn to use it as a tool instead of trying to offload all cognition to it.

This is a CS course targeted at non-majors, so thankfully the "fundamentals" aren't as critical as the overall themes and general skills.


"if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments."

Not sure if this is fair. Consider some ofher poor study tool. Would you dock their grade for using externally curated flash cards too much?


I had forgotten Northern Exposure existed for 30 years until remembering it recently, and discovering that i had very fond memories of watching it on Irish tv as a teenager. There was something different about it, definitely going to watch it again


they had me at the theme tune. very charming, my kids are gonna lap this up


never knew this was a thing. seems it's still available to buy! sounds like a more respectable version of Buckfast, the tonic wine made in an abbey in Devon that had/has a cult popularity with the youth of parts of Ireland and Scotland


Did you actually find a place where you can buy this beverage (the official version)? Asking for a friend of course.


it's listed here, though out of stock (and in Ireland) https://www.celticwhiskeyshop.com/Vin-Mariani-50cl

Seems an Irish company started remaking it https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/irish-drinks-firm-...


"Buckie" was supposed to be "auntie's pick me up". It is still a minor political issue in Scotland whenever some hack politician wants to make a name for themselves.


Also popular in rave culture


Sterck's article from The Conversation referenced in this article: https://theconversation.com/measuring-poverty-on-a-spectrum-...


I did most of this route by bus in the late 2000s, mostly semi-cama style where available. Was entirely manageable mostly, apart from feeling weird as the altitude kicked up heading to Cusco, and the horrendous surface of the la paz to uyuni road. For an interminable stretch in the middle of the night in felt like we were driving over an endless washboard.

The 2008 US presidential election was on, we hadn't heard the result, the park ranger in an unbelievably remote hut at uyuni informed us that "el Moreno" had won


Funny, I was in the same area a few months earlier. Had to have a wisdom tooth pulled in Cusco and then had a dry socket in Uyuni which was agony.


I had dental issues there too, but soldiered though after seeing the state of the dental clinic.

Used needles on the doorstep, signage spelt wrong etc.

I think the elevation exacerbates problems.


I had planned to move towards projects counting towards the majority of my CS class grades until chatgpt was released, now I've stuck with a 50/50 split. This year I said they were free to use AI all they liked (as if I can do anything about it anyway) , then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas.

Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely take a look at your AGENTS.md approach.

What's your student feedback on it been like?


> Then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas.

This is amazing and wish professors had done this back when I did CS in the late 1990s.


It's a completely innocent typo, but "the skull of communicating technical ideas" would be an amazing magical artifact.


And it would consist of half hopium, half copium...


i would absolutely love to do individual interviews, but I have three classes of 50-80 students each and, at 10 minutes per interview, that would be ~35 hours worth of interviewing and there just isn't time to do that given the schedules of the students, etc.

my feedback has been pretty good on the in-person quizzes, we just had our first set


> that would be ~35 hours worth of interviewing and there just isn't time to do that given the schedules of the students, etc.

Great example of AI decreasing labour efficiency (because you need to invest more in fraud prevention).


> then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc

Was there something fundamentally different from those who used "AI" a "lot" vs those who didn't?

Did they mention the issue of hallucination and how they addressed it?


Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours. As kids when we looked out to sea on the west coast we thought next stop was New York, but it's more like Newfoundland. If (when?) the gulf stream gets significantly disrupted it's gonna be a major shock


> Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours.

Here is research that argues to the contrary: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-euro...


Interesting. Is there other research on this? How well tested is the mode?

It is something i have wondered about because proximity to the heat in the sea is clearly an important factor too, so i am interested. Surely the Gulf Stream must have some impact?


The article doesn’t say that the ocean is irrelevant just that it’s not the oceanic currents that dominate. The main thing is just having an ocean at all coupled with prevailing winds being west to east. Hence Seattle, which is mild but does not benefit from Gulf Stream like currents


Yes, I get that. To clarify I meant proximity to heat in the sea "stored" from warmer times of the year without the effect of the Gulf Stream is clearly an important factor.


Fortunately, Ireland’s woefully inadequate climate policies may help give us a chance to study the phenomenon of AMOC collapse within our lifetimes!


Ireland's climate policies, whether adequate or inadequate, can have very little affect on the evolution of the AMOC, or any other large-scale climactic phenomenon. There are vastly more influential factors at play all around the world.


Inasmuch as it’s a country of five million people you are right in absolute terms, but considering the government’s shocked Pikachu face reaction to being held to the terms of an agreement Ireland signed up to it’s still a bit galling.

https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/15406...

Ireland “has the largest emissions per person in the EU for the sectors covered by the regulation.”


And we are not even building enough housing as it is, imagine if we were...


One of the best things Ireland could do is build lots of housing close to job centres so people don’t have to drive so far to work, or ideally can take public transport (or bike or walk)

It’s remarkable seeing people commute to Dublin from tullamore or even athlone.

Relying less on concrete would help too, wood construction seems to be getting more common at least.


For peat's sake!


It's not indeed more at risk than previously thought - https://www.politico.eu/article/gulf-stream-could-collapse-l...


TL;DR:

    "As far as current models suggest, we conclude that the risk of a northern AMOC shutdown is greater than previously thought,” Drijfhout and his colleagues wrote.


I had an accidental "not" in my comment (and edit window closed). Yep, that's indeed the message.


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