Tech

The content below this paragraph is entirely written by ChatGPT, which solved a problem I had about using vim. In one sense, it is magical that now you can solve this sort of niche tech problem with just a few prompts. On the other hand, it does take away the incentive for people to ask and answer tech questions—to ask for help and to help—on the internet. Many fear LLMs will doom the internet as a place where humans create content. I agree that is a possibility, and I will try to resist it by promising that I will not post anything generated by AI here anymore. (This paragraph is of course revised by an AI. 😁) ...

I just taught Linear Algebra, which means I need to give exams with a lot of questions about computations. I would like to have the numbers in this problems to be random, and I like to solve them with computers. (Sorry, students. Only you need to compute by hand. 😆) I have tried to use Mathematica to do so. The math parts works well. But the typesetting of Mathematica looks quite ugly. ...

In the past two months when I taught Linear Algebra, I used the Q&A website Ed (edstem.org) to answer questions from students. My main motivation for using Ed is to avoid answering the same questions repeatedly. If a student post a question on Ed and I reply, everyone else can see my answers. This goal is mostly achieved. However, I also want to train students to write about mathematics formally, and to foster a sense of a community among students. These goals turned out to be a bit more difficult. ...