Overall seems like a pretty balanced board. Al Shafei and Bezuidenhout have backgrounds aligned with the type of Mastodon I want to see. The lawyer guy dabbles in crypto law, but also did tons of pro bono work for Mastodon. Seems to me like he’s just passionate about emerging tech. Biz Stone is also an interesting inclusion. He’s obviously well connected to the VC space but has been pretty critical of Elon Twitter.

Hang in there! I’m a teacher and we just had our last day yesterday. Summer break is right around the corner!

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are more than a few Chinese EV companies with flimsy finances or finances that are propped up by the state. The growth of the Chinese auto industry just stinks of artificial growth through government patronage to me.

Trump and the people in Trump’s immediate orbit were in direct or very close indirect contact with all of these groups. They knew exactly what was going to happen. In addition to the normal nutty Trump crowds they reached out to these psycho fascist militias and told them to be there to “fight like hell”. People like the Proud Boys know exactly what an invitation and rhetoric like that mean. This was not a rally that got out of hand. This was all planned out and coordinated with other schemes like the false elector scheme and the Georgia phone call. This was deliberate and planned. Trump is an idiot but he knew what he was doing. This has all been documented in the impeachment hearings, the Congressional Jan 6 investigations, and the recent indictments.

I had this thought as well. Read the books up until 6 or 7 a few years ago, enough to vaguely remember overarching plot but not specifics. I can tell they’re changing things but I’m not invested enough in the plot specifics to really care. It’s a nice spot to be in as a casual WoT fan.

If the shoe were on the other foot you know exactly what the GOP would do.

Gorgeous!

Awesome! Gondolin is an underappreciated piece of Tolkien lore.

Relatively small shifts on the margins can have huge consequences in the electoral college.

Just started Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. Excited to work my way through his kickstarter books.

Our governor is generally sane, I’d be surprised if he supports this. Our state legislature on the other hand is exactly this stupid.

It’s one of the fascinating paradoxes of education that the more you teach to standardized tests, the worse test results tend to be. Improved test scores are a byproduct of strong teaching - they shouldn’t be the only focus.

Teaching is every bit as much an art as it is a science and straight-jacketing teachers with canned curricula only results in worse test scores and a deteriorated school experience for students. I don’t understand how there are admins out there that still operate like this. The failures of No Child Left Behind mean we’ve known this for at least a decade.

I use ChatGPT to create banks of questions that are aligned to the essential topics that I need students to learn. Then I randomly assign the same number of questions to each student from each essential topic. I give the students the list of topics to focus their studying on.

I also have other “categories” that form their final grade, things like participation and homework assignments. So any marginal unfairness that might result from randomized test questions is more that made up for over the course of everything I grade them on.

I would never accept a student’s use of Wikipedia as a source. However, it’s a great place to go initially to get to grips with a topic quickly. Then you can start to dig into different primary and secondary sources.

Chat GPT is the same. I would never use the content it makes without verifying that content first.

This is why I read through everything I use to make sure it’s accurate.

Babel didn’t grip me as a book, but the magic system using word pairs was so novel and cool.

This should be the standard response to the “free speech” screechers. Free speech to say what, motherfuckers?

And don’t let them dodge the question. If they don’t answer with specifics then you know exactly what they want “free speech” for.

I should also add that I fully inform students and administrators that I’m using AI. Whenever I use an assessment that is created with AI I indicate with a little “Created with ChatGPT” tag. As a history teacher I’m a big believer in citing sources :)

High school history teacher here. It’s changed how I do assessments. I’ve used it to rewrite all of the multiple choice/short answer assessments that I do. Being able to quickly create different versions of an assessment has helped me limit instances of cheating, but also to quickly create modified versions for students who require that (due to IEPs or whatever).

The cool thing that I’ve been using it for is to create different types of assessments that I simply didn’t have the time or resources to create myself. For instance, I’ll have it generate a writing passage making a historical argument, but I’ll have AI make the argument inaccurate or incorrectly use evidence, etc. The students have to refute, support, or modify the passage.

Due to the risk of inaccuracies and hallucination I always 100% verify any AI generated piece that I use in class. But it’s been a game changer for me in education.

Yes. These are growing pains. That’s a good thing.