Well that anecdote is referencing the Scruffies v. Neat war[1], within which the nativism debate was merely a somewhat-archaic undercurrent.
IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".
If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.
There's a parallel in linguistics. Chomsky showed that all human languages share deep recursive structure. True, and essentially irrelevant to the language modeling that actually learned to do something with language.
...this is so absurdly and blatantly wrong that it's hard to move past. Has the author ever heard of programming languages??
The "current one" is Department of Defense. They are illegally branding it otherwise without congressional approval, but that doesn't mean we should welcome it.
More fundamentally, it's hard to convey just how much better a government that wages wars but ostensibly says that they're bad is than a government that gleefully does so. I'll take a flawed democracy that partakes in immoral operations over an openly-imperialist autocracy any day of the week -- as should we all!
Yeah that's a terrible note to start on -- this is just someone hoping for a pat on the head from the fascists. Not even they would truly believe something so absurd!
That whole intro is whack, really;
There are many things that I or Anthropic or most of you would look at as mass domestic surveillance, that are legal, and it is DoW’s position that it’s their job and duty to do everything legal to protect our country, including those things.
"It's not their fault that they're evil, they're doing things that have yet to be explicitly forbidden by statute!" would be bad enough for a typical executive agency, but to say that about the US Department of Defense in March 2026 is just... brazen.
It warms my heart that there's basically a 0% chance that they ever approach this camp's viewpoint based on the Herculean effort it took to switch over to a slightly more modern frontend a few years back. I'm glad you don't think of yourself of a Luddite, but I think you're vastly overstating how open people are to a purely-static web.
Also, FWIW: Wikipedia is "specialsnowflake". If it isn't, that's merely because it was so specialsnowflake that there's now a healthy of ecosystem of sites that copied their features! It's far, far more capable than a simple blog, especially when you get into editing it.
Ok, fair point. I presumed that this crowd would be far more familiar with the capabilities of HTML5 and dynamic pages sans js than most. (Surely more familiar than I, who only dabble in code by comparison.)
No, I'm not suggesting we all go back to purely-static web pages, imagemap gifs and server side navigation. But you're going to have a hard time convincing me that I really truly need to execute code of unknown provenance in my this-app-does-everything-for-me process just to display a few pages of text and 5 jpegs.
And for the record, I've called myself a Technologist for almost 30 years now. If I were a closet Luddite I'd be one of the greatest hypocrites of human history. :-)
It would not have hurt to make a version of wikipedia, that will work without JS for the most part, including all that is important. However, that requires a mindset for supporting static pages, which is mostly what W should consist of, and would require a skill set, that is not so common among web developers these days. Such a static version would be much easier to test as well, since all the testing framework would need to do is simple requests, instead of awaiting client-side JS execution resulting in mutation of content on the page.
It is true that they have a particularly robust, distributed backup system that can/has come in handy, but FWIW the timing matters to them. English Wikipedia receives ~2 edits per second, or 172,800 per day. Many of them are surely minor and/or automated, but still: 1,036,800 lost edits is a lot!
In fact, as long as the malware is just doing deletes, you can just merge the two "timelines" by restoring the snapshot and then replaying all the edits but ignoring the deletes. Lost deletes really aren't much of a problem!
Filesystem & database snapshots are very cheap to make, you can make them every 15 minutes. You can expire old snapshots (or collapse the deltas between them) depending on the storage requirements.
That doesn't really matter though against an attack that takes some time to spread. If the attack was active for let's say, 6 hours, then 43,000 legitimate edits happened in between the last "clean" snapshot and the discovery of the attack. If you just revert to the last clean snapshot you lose those legitimate edits.
Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
Well they have an illegal monopoly over display ads that they defended with a moat of money when FB tried to butt in, so that's an example of them being not great to rely on.
You seem like a great professor(/“junior baby mini instructor who no one should respect”, knowing American academic titles…). Though as someone whose been on the other end of the podium a bit more recently, I will point out the maybe-obvious:
Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves
This is the right thing to say, but even the ones who want to listen can get into bad habits in response to intense schedules. When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night… well, I certainly would’ve caved far too much for my own good.
IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race…
For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)
Yes, I expect that pressure will be there, and project grades will be near 100% going forward, whether the student did the work or not.
This is why I'm going to in-person written quizzes to differentiate between the students who know the material and those who are just using AI to get through it.
I do seven quizzes during the semester so each one is on relatively recent material and they aren't weighted too heavily. I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz. I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad, so I'm trying to remove that for them.
The quizzes are still somewhat difficult (and fairly frequent) so you have to still get your stuff done (and more consistently than the cramming encouraged by a big midterm/final)
I do spaced repetition in lectures, my homeworks are typically programming problems and, as I said in OP, rely on the student committing to doing them w/o AI. So spaced repetition of the most important topics on quizzes seems reasonable. (It's an experiment this semester)
> When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night…
Millions of students prior to the last few years figured out how to manage conflicting class requirements.
> Millions of students prior to the last few years figured out how to manage conflicting class requirements.
Sure, and they also didn't have an omniscient entity capable of doing all of their work for them in a minute. The point of the GP comment, in my reading, is that the temptation is too great.
Ok well hopefully the new kids just grit their teeth and ignore the changing conditions, then? Surely once we inform them that they should be better people they'll snap out of having personal failings!
IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".
If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.
[1] Minsky, 1991: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...