just know i’ve loved you all along

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

Sometimes I remind myself that both Dan and Phil will get more mature and leave YouTube. They won’t be attending SiTC or Playlist Live anymore. Their jobs are as radio show hosts. They’ll find a girl who they think is best for them and get married, move into separate houses, have a family and be happy. I just hope they’ll think of YouTube and who they were, AmazingPhil and danisnotonfire before they take their last breath.

You just had to be there I guess.

hey, I was just at "things got better" island and everyone there is talking about how excited they are to meet you

lol i litereally stopped reading right before one of his most important quotes. including it with a lot of added context because i always see that quote on its own without the rest of the conversation which is really fascinating.

I’ve been listening to the people in the apartment below me have arguments for two years now and I still can’t figure out what language they’re speaking. The best I can narrow it down is like if Portuguese and Hebrew had a baby. Is that a common pidgin combination

I just listened to a clip of this and jesus christ you fucking got it. there are like 3500 people in the whole united states who speak this and two of them are in a very fraught marriage four feet below me

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

well if this is the only thing

okay okay i can close some tabs i don't need this google image search of "pear trees"....well you never know actually

you will live to witness manmade horrors that are completely within your comprehension if you've paid any attention to a single piece of human history but are nevertheless still huge bummers

were I to create an original piece of media I would create bait so queer in order to create a fanfic environment I like. I find you guys do your best work under duress.

I’d say “jeez can two people not be friends anymore?” and then I’d give one of them amnesia in which they only recognize the other above anyone else

How many people do you think have lezzed out in Antarctica

not enough

millions of penguins probably have

This is so true and such a good point

This is so stupid because a year is how we measure time on earth. Imagine if an ant said ‘Hello we have lived in your driveway for 737 queebals 😌’ and ur like ‘what’s a queebal’ and they’re like ‘oh it’s how long it takes for the sun to travel all across the driveway 😌’ and ur like, that measurement of time only applies to beings who live in my driveway. And the ant would be like ‘😌’

This is something only a 4050 queebal-old would complain about 🙄

death penalty should never exist. the governing authority should never have the power to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die

i hate discussions about the death penalty in leftist spheres cuz theres always the eventual 'death penalty is bad except for when the government kills pedos/rapists/etc'. which is absolutely ignorant and applying personal morals and feelings to the government's actions when the government CAN NOT operate according to moral boundaries.

saying that the death penalty is justified for certain criminals is also allowing the government to determine who those criminals are. the government putting people to death, even those who are perceived to 'deserve' it, is not a moral act. its the govt maintaining the status quo that keeps the government in power.

the death penalty is never a justified murder. its not an act of self defense or street justice. the government has and will continue to falsely put people to death or modify the legal definitions of criminal acts to kill those deemed unacceptable. the people who want drag and transgender existence to be considered sexual harassment and child sexual abuse are the same ones who want the death penalty for this very reason.