Week 1-2
Syllabus AMA - Warm-Up
Chat with the people around you!
- What struck you as interesting or unusual about the Syllabus?
- What questions do you have for me about it?
But first: Wtf is a Syllabus?
Ask me anything!
Concerning Course Outcomes Alphabet 101
Course Outcomes
Students will be able to write all the letters of the alphabet.
20
÷ 26 Letters
------------
77% C+
Please help, my grandmother is on fire!
Course Outcomes
Students will be able to write all the letters of the alphabet.
Let's brainstorm about AI.
The mind that does the work is the mind that learns.
As a student I think AI can be helpful for the use of grammar checks and for the expansion of one's vocabulary.
I do not think AI is entirely a good thing, for example, it takes away a student's critical thinking, or how to write in essays.
The LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants' questions compared to the Search Engine. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or "opinions”
participants who were in the Brain-only group reported higher satisfaction and demonstrated higher brain connectivity, compared to other groups. Essays written with the help of LLM carried a lesser significance or value to the participants (impaired ownership, Figure 8), as they spent less time on writing (Figure 33), and mostly failed to provide a quote from their essays.
It’s unfair to the students to “ban” AI, as if we’re honest with each other, we all know that everything the students will do in their future will involve AI.
It is a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it?
Jeff Bezos
If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen. [...] As big a deal as the PC.
Steve Jobs
[It] will sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking.
Tech journalist Steve Kemper
"Maybe bigger than the Internet."
Investor John Doerr
I said this about Beanie Babies in 99 and I was right
— hotcyder (@hotcyder.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 1:30 AM
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what students should do instead is use it to get ideas from AI. This can be articles, stories, magazines, & etc. That AI provides to the student based on what they are trying to write about.
Research conducted by OpenAI found that its latest and most powerful reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinated 33% and 48% of the time, respectively, when tested by OpenAI's PersonQA benchmark.
Moore-Colyer, 21 June 2025
On one test, the hallucination rates of newer A.I. systems were as high as 79 percent.
Metz and Weise, 6 May 2025
[W]e further conclude that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in the real world LLMs. [...] We emphasize that since hallucination is inevitable, rigorous study of the safety of LLMs is critical and urgent.
Xu et al., 13 Feb. 2025
Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs.
Hicks et al., "ChatGPT is bullshit," 8 June 2024
