sarpland

[sarpland]

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Part 24 in my weekly poster series of 2025

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[sarpland]

I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man I did not realize how dire the AI/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??

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yo what

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CROSS STITCH PATTERN - Windows 95 Glitch by ArtByRomShop

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People in the UK especially, please don't give your ID to Spotify

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SHUTDOWN: AOL will officially shut down its dial-up service on September 30th, 2025 after 34 years. Tell your grandparents!!

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From the OP: "If you sit at a desk or stare at your phone all day, this is for you. Here's how to undo the damage: - Banded Chin Tucks - Strengthen your neck flexors and fight forward head posture - Banded Pull-Aparts - Target your rotator cuff and improve shoulder stability - Banded Abduction - Activate the midline of your scapula for better posture - Lateral Deltoid Raises - Build shoulder stability and control - Banded Up-and-Overs – Boost scapular mobility and range of motion These simple banded drills will help you stand taller, move better, and feel stronger - even after hours at a desk."

Some of these are the same or similar to the exercises my physical therapist taught me.

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the worse version of "this meeting could have been an email", "this meeting was an email but you didn't fucking read it"

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I really think we should stop saying "kid-friendly" and start saying "ad-friendly". We shouldn't indulge these companies and their excuses anymore. I also think that continuing to pretend that this is about "protecting the children" pushes a lot of the blame onto kids and teens, who don't have the political power to push through any of this censorship legislature. Corporations and governments are to blame.

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I'll always talk up internet radio stations because I don't think the average person is aware that they're free, can run in your browser (or in any program that can connect to them), work on your phone, run better than a youtube tab, and give you a much better selection of music than you could get from a general algorithmic playlist

(also lots of them have live shows which you can tune into for free)

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This whole thing about scanning your face to prove tour age is making me remember, in 2018 while out in paris we got our wallet stolen during a particularly busy night at a lesbian bar. It was very late and with no money to buy metro tickets we were effectively stranded, but some people helped us and we ended up staying the night at a really sweet older man's place. His face was deeply scarred and he was missing an eye. We chatted on our way and he told me about his life, probably to help calm me down. He explained he had been stuck in a house fire 20 years ago and had had multiple rounds of facial reconstruction and a skin graft, but there's only so much surgery can do so he just learned to live with it. I remember he said he liked the queer bars because they're the only place people don't really stare at him.

At some point I took out my phone, and at the time I was using face unlock. This prompted him to tell me all the ways this technology doesn't work on him. How his phone selfie camera doesn't focus right because it's not detecting a face. How he had to update his ID the old fashioned way, because the website kept rejecting his photos. And how it was becoming more and more common, and how it was making his life way harder.

This was 7 years ago, and now whenever I see this sort of technology I think of how that guy can't use it. And how house fires are pretty common, and how anything from being born this way to a skin condition to heavy tattooing can probably cause the same issue. Can these people get age verified ? Will they just lose access to all social media, which are increasingly necessary in society, if this becomes the norm ? These are people who are already driven out of public spaces due to how they look, and they're getting pushed out online too all in the interest of companies wanting more money.

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You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

Disclaimer [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[A Cueball profile picture is shown next to five paragraphs of illegible text, which contains varied punctuation marks and two square-bracketed citations.] [The last paragraph in the essay is separated from the other paragraphs by a line with three dashes. Its single sentence is highlighted, and lines connect that illegible sentence to a box with an enlarged, legible version of the sentence.] Enlarged text: Not ChatGPT output—I’m just like this.

[Caption below the panel:] I’ve had to start adding this disclaimer to my messages.

[sarpland]

find it really funny that one of discord's loading quotes is "back in the day, discord used to be a browser app! can you imagine?" like. getting a little big for your britches aren't you, electron app