In the age of "Twitter"? Why Twitter specifically, not the internet or social media? I honestly feel like Twitter is losing relevance. I learned about it from TikTok for what its worth, and then read more about it here on HN. I've never understood why people put Twitter on a pedestal that I feel it doesn't deserve. Though aside from that your point stands and I totally agree with you. In reality people's/companies' constitutional rights can be infringed easily and the courts take months or even years to stop said infringement.
It feels weird and unfair to focus solely on Kahn here when he’s competing with some random teacher or professor’s droning, confusing, non-interactive lecture that’s less engaging and just as lacking in interactivity or application.
I also don’t think he ever purports to be “all you need” to learn.
It reminds me of the people who criticize Duolingo because you can’t actually reach perfect fluency through their app--like wasn’t it always obvious that it was never meant to be the only education you need; wasn’t it always obvious that you need to actually _speak_ a language to learn it? And yet it’s still a great app that has helped millions of people learn languages.
I agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Khan here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.
I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.
Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.
Traditional methods are failing because of austerity and capitalism. Pedagogy is a science which has expert studying these things. And most teachers are well aware of the science and know what works. Stuff like instant feedback has been known to work better since behavioralism in the 1950s. Problem is that whenever these solutions are applied they are used to cut corners and make education cheaper, resulting in a net loss. This is a problem of austerity.
Note that I was explicitly not blaming this on Khan, I was merely stating that he is the face if this movement and as such will get a lot of the blame, regardless of how much he deserves it.
My personal feelings about him is that he is actually an excellent teacher, and has independently discovered what pedagogical scientists have known for decades. He however allowed his discoveries to be packaged as a neat capitalist solution, and then has watched as his “discoveries” were used to excuse austerity (and made a bunch of money doing so). At best he is naive, and at worst he is an active participant. Either way he deserves at least some of the blame (though personally, I would rather blame the system, and point to him as being a part of it)
As a native speaker, I have to ask it to rephrase 5-10 times a day. Sometimes I actually get mad and I tell it “I can’t answer that because I don’t know what the fuck load-bearing indirection means”. I’ve gotten so frustrated that I’ve ended a session and started over.
As a Polish speaker I communicate with Claude using my native language and it does the same things. Most annoying and slowing down things are:
- acronyms and shortcuts - it makes it's own and start using it without introduction
- exotic names of variables or functions - it uses them as examples or analogies, but when I ask what they mean and where are they from it gives me answer that it came from C language or some C library (I only work with typescript and python)
- convoluted descriptions of code behaviour - it's hard to rely on a outcome of prompt of type "explain code in..."
It sounds like you need to invert the abstraction, the communication of your model becomes the fulcrum for your learning, not merely the delivery of your product.
What? When I saw you couldn’t even make the effort to tell your AI to at least make the README _pretend_ to be written for humans to read, I immediately knew this was slop and stopped looking further. Using AI to create this is totally fine, but there’s a minimal level of effort that needs to be put in.
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah it was a bit rushed (I started this 3 days ago), the goal of this was to see how fast I can ship a product e2e. I will admit there was a lack of effort into making the readme readable. There's still some work I want to finish here over the next few days.
Not sure why people post content from these horrible media sites that require a subscription to read it. I have no interest in subscribing to the Guardian. Personally I wish HN would ban submissions from these predatory sites.
Because using AI or adding AI features can influence many aspects of the softwares (decisions, philosophy, UI, details, attitudes to users, privacy, security, etc.), and reflects the abilities and purposes of the developer or company.
To be fair I imagine it has very few users now; maybe a chicken and egg thing. Most people either get their news from a single news site or from social media these days. And no I'm not implying that no one verifies sources on these platforms, but either it's Reddit or Hacker News or TikTok or Twitter.
I’m curious—if it was unobtrusive would you feel the same way? For example if it were a game, and after you beat a level or finished a game, if the summary screen showing the stats and points from your session just had, down at the bottom, “Do you love this game? Consider leaving us a review in the App Store!”? I hate the bag popups too, especially when they get in the way of whatever I’m trying to do in the app and I’m forced to either dismiss the dialog or go do it. But is even _mentioning it to you_ you without the nag pop up too much? Deserving of a one star review?
Well, not covering content helps. Another thing that would help is sensitive to the emotional rhythms.
One problem is that before I have to close your modal dialog I have probably closed 20-30 other modal dialogs that I never wanted to have open just in the first few hours of the day. I have been using the web all day and people are always trying to steal a little bit of my attention with everybody trick in the book and the one thing that comes across as "luxury" to me is that when you don't do that in any way shape or form.
To be fair, a lot of the problem is applications jumping on you the moment you start them up. It might be that if you work for a company in Silicon Valley you think it just normal to get jumped on by five homeless people in a row as soon as you poke up your head. But sorry, it's not!
Specifically I have this problem with the Creative Cloud Applications that I only used when I am under distress. Like I use Adobe Illustrator for an unpleasant task that I have to do every three months (and have a checklist for now!) or I use Acrobat Pro because I am handling paperwork I am behind on. I want to fight off the demons in my head and get the job done, I do not want to evaluate anything about new features that have been added to the applications. If it had some sense that I'd completed a task and then had a good feeling about the app then yeah, maybe I'd like to hear about a new feature, or maybe put in a good word for your app.
> the summary screen showing the stats and points from your session just had, down at the bottom, “Do you love this game? Consider leaving us a review in the App Store!”?
Apple App Review rejected our app for having an unobtrusive message like that in the bottom of the release notes page in the menu of our app. "you're only allowed to solicit reviews through the apple dialog"
