It's also a biased, lopsided report. Guy I know who was an EV pioneer in California said it was so bad that, even though his career consisted of promoting EVs, he told people to avoid watching it because it presents such a skewed picture. Imagine it's been made by Michael Moore to put it into perspective. From what I can remember, and this was 20 years ago, his summary was that the EV1 was introduced purely to meet the ZEV mandate but in practice the vehicles were "saleproof" (his words). There wasn't any conspiracy to kill them.
I am waiting for AI Viva Voce (“AVV”). I am really surprised we aren’t hearing more about this idea?
Try it for yourself by making a prompt like this (adapt as needed):
Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me, to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 5 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction. Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?
I've tried stuff like this, but the problem is that you don't know if it's answers are correct, and more importantly, you don't know if its questions are on base or not. Plus its too easy to go off on tangents, especially when you ask it questions to clarify.
You can get some more success by writing down a framework beforehand, but openended dialog is still not a good way to learn with AI, from my experience.
Good points.
I’ve tried this a few times and I’ve been impressed by the dialogue. Given this was a very simple prompt, I am convinced a more precise version could be developed, including a rubric, a library of course content, starter questions and other guidance to the AI. I haven’t seen anything like this and schools / universities seem to be “struggling” with AI, which has me wondering why not embrace LLMs for learning and assessment, like this?
I mean, everyone I know has been using socratic dialogue for months to aid understanding, this seems like a variation of that. The issue is that if the answer is too easy to obtain it's hard to have the discipline not to cheat.
It is an expression from poker. A "tell" is a revealing signal that a player may give (inadvertently) that they have good or bad cards. "His tell is that he is holding his cards close to his chest."
It’s almost as impressive as the “GOS” written for Atari 8-bit running on 6502 at 1.79 MHz. Visually it’s almost identical but has a nicer font. The specs are somewhat similar with 16 task slots, calculator app and task manager, serial mouse support (ST mouse) and Atari’s hardware sprites helping with some of the graphics. The XOR window frame is the same idea. Amazingly, Atari GOS runs in 128K of RAM! One has to admire the work and inventiveness in these projects. See description and videos here:
"Author" of os8088 here. I love seeing what these early limited system could do! Someone shared a video of GOS with me after seeing what os8088 looked like.
I believe os8088 also boots now with just 128k of RAM, but it's very limited in the type of apps you can load. There's a os8088.com/hardware page where one of the contributors to the project that has been helping optimize the operating system tested it out on a bunch of different machines.
It would be interesting to install os8088 on a later series, like a Pentium III 500mhz or a modern Intel i7! Would it even run? I guess os8088 could not harness the CPU power to make it usable. Instead, could a modern CPU run multiple instances of os8088 like a server? That’s probably something Claude could code…? A multi-session server that provides 1024 instances of os8088 by remote connection?
One workable approach is for AI to conduct a viva voce exam with each student: after the student answers a question on a topic, the session prompts with another question which digs deeper. This goes on for say 8-12 questions, getting deeper each time.
I checked this idea by asking ChatGPT to examine my understand of 1970’s CPU history, assuming I was a CompSci student. After it asked me a series of 8 questions on Intel’s devices from the 4004 onwards, ChatGPT assessed me as a 2nd year student and graded me with a Credit. The experience was quite convincing and at the end it summarised the gaps in my knowledge, which I agreed with. It was also able to say what criteria it was using to assess me.
So why can’t AI-viva voce be a method to help students and professors with teaching and learning?
Try it out, in a subject or language you know well. Adapt this prompt:
Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 8 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction? Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?
One thing I’m wondering is whether we need an open source set of technical patterns and libraries for dealing with this changing traffic mix.
Millions of small sites and creators don’t have the ability to design their own protections against large scale automated access. If useful content now attracts aggressive crawler traffic, many sites will be too expensive or unreliable to run.
Is part of the answer a community response? Perhaps a community-maintained toolkit, based on traffic data, that host sites can apply? It could include standard agent identification, rate limiting, traffic classification, access policies, caching, challenge mechanisms, logging, attribution and usage control etc etc.
In effect, we need much stronger road rules for today’s automated traffic, available as open technical patterns and libraries rather than every site owner having to invent this alone (they won’t).
The community response was respecting robots.txt, but since that was more of a gentleman's agreement than a legal requirement, hungry AI scrapers disregarded it.
Which brings us to the old fashioned flood control mechanisms. That is, the toolkit you propose already exists and has been used for decades in various iterations to protect against various forms of attack (slashdotting, DDOS attacks, overzealous search engines, and now AI scrapers).
Have you looked into those before? Companies like Cloudflare have been at the forefront of this field for a long time now.
Yes, a community effort against the botnets would be great.
The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem. It is the "bad bots" which pretend to be real users and hide behind residential proxies, and so are almost impossible to block at the moment, which are the problem.
Given that there are big companies openly (i.e. on the clearweb, not even darkweb) selling access to these residential proxy botnets of compromised smart TVs[0] and mobile phones and other devices, can we not simply get a database of the these IPs and block access from them? I would venture that almost every single one of those residential users are unaware that they have devices in their homes which have been compromised and are being abused in this way, so if they were to start seeing messages from more and more sites along the lines of "Access to this site has been blocked because unusual traffic has been detected from your computer network. Please check all devices on your network and remove any malware which may be routing this traffic." then maybe we could start addressing the problem at the source.
> The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem.
And then they get blocked, which is a problem. In particular, the modern agentic AI tools interacting with web services to fulfill user queries - they are acting as user agents, and they should not be discriminated against.
So I'd say the first pattern that needs to be broadly adopted is non-discrimination of user agents.
But of course we've tried that in the past, the whole problem is that non-browser user agents == end-user automation, which is anathema to pretty much every on-line business out there, as money made online is primarily conditioned on users wasting their own lives on interacting with services directly.
I don't think there is a technocratic solution to this problem. Very rich people are using their money to DDoS the internet, for no good reason. We just need to identify these people and fine or imprison them until they stop doing it. Residential proxy providers would be a good start.
It’s true that “zen of” is bolted onto many topics… it’s a tired cliche to suggest “simplicity” when things are complex. Does it help or is it faux spirituality?
I’ve enjoyed reading the comments here and I think there’s truth in how the technical problem is divided and teams are arranged. The idea of frequency of features (or builds) being a reflection of our division of the problem, is interesting. It made me think about our teams trying to ship releases and the problems arising, but zen and parallelism don’t give any hints. It’s just about effort to organise better, like it always was
(Speaking as a lapsed participant in a zen community. Opinions are my own, so others may disagree.)
The challenge for these “Zen and my job” types of work is that much of Zen practice is (deliberately) a bit of an inkblot test. If there’s any real Big Truth to it, it’s that it’s all one big muddle that everyone has to muddle through for themself. Unlike in many Western religious traditions, there is no presumption of univocality - even within the canonical literature, every opinion is understood to be the author’s alone and represents their own personal attempts at muddling things through. It’s just that some people and works are regarded as being particularly worth a read.
But that’s never explicitly stated. Which can be particularly confusing to people who grew up in religious traditions that do presume univocality and a greater degree of spiritual authority. Hence these works by people who see one particular bit that clicks for them and conclude, “Ah, this is what Zen is really about, I must go tell others!” without realizing that perhaps they just stumbled across an inkblot that they found to be particularly evocative.
As for em-dashes, there were 7.
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