EVE Online rolling in a chatbot to answer rookie questions with data gleaned from rookie channel chat history feels wrong in a fundamental way that looks superficially like gatekeeping, but really cuts into why Silicon Valley tech in education has been a complete disaster.
Some things are just inescapably difficult, and that's fine. Some things take time to learn, and that's fine. It's not some failure of democratization for things to have steep learning curves. For all of its difficulty, EVE Online did not lack in documentation.
How bad do I want a thing? One of my math profs in uni confessed she was no prodigy. Truthfully, she was on the verge of flunking out, and after a discussion with her own prof, had to accept that she had to study twice as long to internalize the concepts.
How bad did *she* want to learn math?
I'm preaching to the choir on hating generative models and LLMs, but this push-button-get-answer shit robs people of any chance of internalization. "Learning" is reduced to the equivalent of copy-pasting code from stack overflow or something, which can deliver metrics but does not reflect learning.
I've spent my life sitting in front of a horrifying yet sad parade that started out promising, with lots of interesting ideas: what if we got kids to engage with education by making everything a game? What if we did the same for adults? What if you had a personal sometimes-wrong tutor 24/7/365?
Now most every major web site has a corner chatbot. Sometimes the info is right there; increasingly, it's not. The online world is becoming opaque. Conveniently, only massive corporations can afford the bill and the data centres providing those bots. Crawlers bulldoze small sites with traffic.
Techbros hate humanity to such a degree that they're willing to burn it all down to be seen as paper geniuses. Ed tech is anti-learning and human hostile. The strongest association reinforced by these techniques is there being a parental software figure doling out the treats. That's not independence. That's not innovation. That's not creativity. That's being a rat in a box with a lever that dispenses food pellets.
Please Read The Fucking Manual, even if it takes you two, three, or four times as long.
#tootfleet
Chris Huelsbeck
Engadget Bot
Andre Nantel
A Hot Cocoa Sergal ❄️☕
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