@olivia
And, I'm really glad they got out of that situation okay, rather than having the teacher react to being challenged with aggression
She wasn't challenged directly. The kids didn't say anything, they just quietly corrected the mistakes in the given homework. I think that part helped a lot to deescalate the situation.
(But our teacher is otherwise a great person, and we're lucky to have her. Without her use of ChatGPT, she's nearly perfect, so yep, lots of luck involved. Could've gone waaay worse.)
It's more that LLMs will have wrecked the thing they need. For me, I did not do well with the school system at all, and lucked out very much that I was able to latch onto teaching myself computers (something that it turns out you can get paid for!), so now I'm not homeless.
Oh, yeah. A lot of things will definitely get wrecked. BUT! While a lot of things crumble, the current generation is building smaller pockets of well curated resources. We can guide the new generation there. We can teach them about the Fediverse, about the Smol Web, Webrings, and show them how to find the information they seek.
The ability to find information about queerness and talk to other queer people on the internet was so important for having any idea what was going on with myself.
I know the feeling1! On the other hand, I am hopeful that the current generation is less hostile towards queer and neurodivergent people. That we can help the next generation better than our parents did.
From personal experience, the path was never easy. It's 100% pure chance I ended up stumbling over a community where I felt comfortable, and that required Windows 95 to destroy my filesystem so I'd switch to Linux and find #debian-devel on IRC, along with Hungarian Linux channels. If Win95 didn't destroy my filesystem, I don't think I would have ever found "my people", and my life would be miserable.
Surprisingly, I think I'd have much better luck today, than in the late 1990s. The internet is here! It's generally pretty bad, but... there are pockets of greatness. I didn't have that in my teens. I didn't have internet, I didn't have access to BBSes either. I could go to the library, or church, or... or not much else. As an introverted kid, none of that were an option. Talking to friends, other kids? No way.
The internet was my path, and even with the slop infestion, that's still a better resource than nothing.
And we have a generation growing up who can navigate through the slop. Not all of us, the slopwranglers are fucked, but... many of us.
Also, despite everything, despite governments cracking down on non-conforming people...: at least I hear about that! In our family, in the communities I grew up in, this was taboo. Noone talked about it. It wasn't on the news. I didn't know other people like me existed!
Nowadays? I do. I see them get opressed and hurt, I see governments trying to erase them. That sucks. But: I know they're there. I know I can find them. Visibility matters, and trying to supress a group of people in today's terminally online world gives visibility.
With that said, I am worried, yes. But... it's a different shape of worry, and it is (usually) not existential dread.
We've been using crawl-pit. I can't actually remember exactly why we ended up picking this over iocaine initially, I do remember looking at iocaine.
Hm, there's some interesting stuff there! Thanks for sharing! I suppose one reason for using it might have been that it can serve slowly, while iocaine goes brrrr, and you can't tell it to slow the fuck down.
If you're okay talking about it, I'm curious what that system is.
...that'll be a second toot, because I'm running out of chars. Fuck. Sorry.
Somewhat. I'm cishet, but I'm a tiiiiiny bit neurodivergent. The community I found way back when that accepted me as I was turned out to be largely composed of queer folk. ↩︎
