My gender is Homosexula

And they’re all Vlad

meirl

I’d like to add dickey collars for consideration.

I can picture him having an entire drawer devoted to an assortment of these, right next to his drawer full of ascots.

May I present this image from Legend of the Vampire?

what is the FUCKING truth

He has multiple outfits that all look identical while having completely different construction

why was this whole post obliterated

STAFF DOESN’T WANT US TO KNOW THE TRUTH

A classic

Sea turtle launches attacks on a scuba diver cleaning his tank only to be foiled time and time again.

Rats vs egg!

Success!

We will not stand for these accusations when the true culprit was degu teeth!

dating someone who knocks the fuck out as soon as they hit the sheets but you have had chronic insomnia since you were 7 but you both get sad if you guys dont hug to sleep is

…

and SCENE! that was my impersonation of what i think tumblr would be like in the late 1960’s. just to clarify this is a joke. this isn’t real. there is no beatles erotica here. it’s a bit. it’s a joke

this post is a failure because I was completely willing to accept both John/Paul fanblog and people demanding political positions on the Vietnam War in 2020 without question

- The English

Seen today on walk peace and love on planet earth

Many cats figure out pretty quickly that humans don't like dead mice as gifts, and then go through an extended process of trial and error trying to figure out what humans do like. Here we see Attempt# 47: Moss.

My boy used to bring me dead snakes (no venomous snakes in our area, don't worry) which made me rather upset because I love snakes and they were very good for our garden.

So whenever he brought me dead snakes, I would scold him.

And then he started bringing me *live snakes*

you ever have a good time laughing with your friends and think this is it. this is actually the point of it all

He did say he could, and so he did!

Leverage S03E02/S03E16.

tfw your vacation is thwarted by the lovecraftian whale you encountered when you were 14

Interested to know other lecturers' thoughts here. The university has just released the latest templates for our assignment briefs, and they now include this table:

I have to select which areas I will allow generative AI to be used for in every assignment brief I write (with the obvious caveat that this is showing them how to use it as a tool, not giving them the green light to generate a whole essay and submit that.)

My immediate thought is that the 'research' section is dangerous, and the 'creative' one is immoral.

Are they going to be paying for enough assessors to check sources exist and/or say what they're reported to be saying? Because if students are being given a green light to have ai come up with a list of sources, someone will have to check that...

I've said a flat out no on the research section. I genuinely cannot quite believe it's even included. We do check all sources as part of marking anyway, but generative AI is literally incapable of producing a real citation, because it's not a search engine. I'm staggered by that one.

The 'writing' section astonished me, but apparently it means students who use text-to-speech software; which is great, but it doesn't actually say that. So if I tick yes, they're all going to think they can just generate the whole thing with a single prompt and call it a day.

I am very frustrated by this. The structure point is actually one I'm happy with - it is a good tool for that, so fine. But even the proofreading unnerves me, because we all know it makes for a shit spellchecker ("querched", anyone?) Ugh.

text-to-speech software is generative AI since when? it is not a synonym for computer-automated, honest it's not

(also did they mean speech-to-text? though I have the same question about that.)

Text to speech is not AI but Speech to text very much is and always has been, we just used to call it an Algorithm instead of an AI

Sorry, yes, I meant speech-to-text. That's my bad

As a lecturer who's made a similar-ish cover sheet for my students' assignments but flipped (my students check the boxes to disclose to me how they used GenAI in their assignments, and we've given them guidance and insights on what we feel they should and shouldn't be using it for and how, earlier in the term), my main thought is that this is going to be really discipline-specific, and then down to the assessment aims.

For my subject's major assignment, I actually have an activity a few weeks before it's due basically showing students a similar case and how they could (in theory) prompt AI to simply write major parts of their assignment. And then we tear into what it outputs, highlight its weaknesses, pull up its hallucinated citations and read them for the literally fake filth they are, and discuss why that is. So they can write their assignments in AI, but they know it's not likely to go well for them if they do.

(To be honest, the cover sheet I've created also tentatively tells them they can't just get AI to write their whole assignment for them and call it a day, but we don't strictly disallow that, and instead err on the side of showing them why it's a bad idea. This will depend entirely on what type of subject you teach though.)

For some of these other ones -- do I like students using GenAI for creative in my class? No. Frankly, I hate GenAI for creative, on a personal level. On a professional level, I know it's being used in my industry (marketing) for creative brainstorming as a first stop, and that banning its use outright won't necessarily do my students any favours. I direct them to unsplash and pexels for free stock images, and don't grade on how pretty their art itself looks. But I am asking them to make a mock-up advertisement, and given that this is not a graphic design or art subject, I allow AI usage for that if they want to use it.

To be honest, most students don't. They're typically starting with an image from the company website and adding text (etc) to it in Canva. Canva itself has embedded AI tools to make design easier. I haven't even tried to figure out where using those options fall on the spectrum of using AI for creative or not. But the main thing is -- we're teaching them tools like Canva and showing them alternate resources earlier in the term so they don't feel a need to resort to AI. But we don't forbid it.

Spellchecking and grammar? I don't use it for that myself and generally find it tends to miss the errors I make anyway. But I have a former PhD student who swears by its ability to help him craft better sentences, and honestly his writing was good to start but is very smooth now. I've also got a post-doc I've been working with for close to two years who uses it as a sort of co-pilot for drafting and it annoys the shit out of me. His work has fewer technical errors but is also more vague and harder to edit than it was before he started using it.

I could go on for each of the items on this list. For every learning situation where allowing AI use is a nightmare, there's another one where it doesn't make much difference, or can be cleverly added to an assessment to build off of.

All of which is to say -- GenAI isn't one-size-fits all, and its usage (or non-usage) in your class won't be either, and will vary an incredible amount from discipline to discipline. But having a standard template handed to you that you have to pick from? Now that would actually piss me off as an educator haha.

one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.

what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.

star trek heritage post (June 9th, 2017)

Fierrochase but it's that one meme