@barbarabeeton No. In that respect, they've certainly improved. But the constant creation of new accounts is irritating. Aside from SE's rules, I mean. Especially annoying they never even acknowledge any previous answers, so unless you keep track, you don't know, half the time, what they're about.
@cfr -- Ugh. I guess that's just one of the joys of unfettered AI. (I've been buried in TUGboat editing, so have been a bit distracted and not paying attention. That'll teach me ...
If you see anything that matches the typical style of the current sock, then flag it and ignore it. What I've found matching in style for this sock is the following: 1. Questions asked in posts are typically done with a space before the question mark (eg. " ?"). 2. Have used `ExplSyntax` with optional argument `O{orange}` as of late. 3. Some macros use a `\wv...` prefix. 4. Questions often have unsubstantiated claims, asking about general statement or code improvements.
@cfr -- AI is only as bright as what it's been trained on. At least I haven't seen so many questions with misused \\ over the past few days. (That horror was the inspiration for my TUG talk this year.)
@Davislor If you follow the link, there's a numbered series of suggestions from various people. A dozen or so. But the style keeps changing somewhat. 2 and 3 above are less common now.
@barbarabeeton Indeed, but why do you think the socks are AI? I could completely believe Veak might be using an automated approach to create the accounts, but I guess that doesn't need AI. (On the other hand, I know very little about AI beyond the fact it will spit out an answer which would probably pass given an essay question. Not a good pass, but enough for a low 40s.)
@cfr -- I wasn't thinking that AI was being used to create accounts, but to write questions. On the other hand, I haven't tried it myself, and am not likely to. (Gee, I wish that I'd been in one of your classes. When I was in school, 60% was the cutoff. Except for some engineering classes, where grading was sometimes on a curve. But when in an electricity & magnetism final, I started writing doggerel in my blue book, I knew I wasn't going to pass.)
@cfr -- The videos of the talks will be online soon. But the slides are already there, linked from the program list. (I don't think I captured quite the level of horror that I could have.) And it's written up somewhat more tidily in the proceedings.
@barbarabeeton It's just a different grading system, I'm afraid. UK vs. US. 70% is a first. 60% upper second. 50% lower second. 40% covers thirds and (non-honours) passes. That's the standard UK scale. My undergrad university used a non-standard system involving a complex system of Greek letters, pluses, parentheses and minuses. My postgrad university (US) used a non-standard system involving H, P, L and F. Only for postgrads. They used the standard(ish) scale for undergrads.
Very roughly 70% here is 90% in the US and 40% is probably 60% in the US. (A pass really is a pass, whereas Ds in the US always struck me as akin to our 'A' level 'N' grades ('N' is for 'near miss'). People couldn't actually use them to count for anything.)
@cfr -- The Baltimore school system, where I attended (US) public school before college used the system E(xcellent), G(ood), F(air), P(oor), D(eficient), with possible plus or minus. It took me a bit to get used to A/B/C/... I'm not at all sure how Baltimore schools operate now, except that the high school I attended (the oldest all-girls' high school in the US) is still a public school, but now an exam school. Its sister school (that my mother and sister attended) no longer exists.
@cfr -- I don't think the presentation is all that horrifying, actually. I tried really hard to make it instructive. Well, maybe a few of the examples might cause a good typographer to shudder.
Jumped in a bit late tonight... I see that the sock is still active. As of late, I've been scoping out the new user section to suspend them before they can ask their "first" question. What an annoyance... thanks for being patient folks!
@barbarabeeton What's an 'exam school'? Exam Schools I'm familiar with (a building). Unlike universities, schools here don't get to make it up. Public exams are all done by exam boards, although governments determine the framework. (Education is devolved, so England, N Ireland and Wales have different systems. Scotland always had a different system.) My nephew got results this summer, but they're all numbers because he's in England .... England keeps changing their system ....
@cfr -- An "exam school" is a school that requires a student to pass an exam to gain entry. They seem to be becoming more popular on this side of the Atlantic. When I attended, the school was largely college prep, and had one "homeroom" that followed an accelerated program. That's the class I was in. Nobody could enter after the first year, and after the third year it was possible to enter college, which one girl did. There were only ten of us who graduated after four years.
@barbarabeeton Ah, interesting. I went to a bog-standard comprehensive. Not quite so bog-standard, actually. My parents hired a lawyer to get me into a feeder school after they initially allowed only my brother to move. The council accused my parents of trying to get us into the secondary school. This was, of course, perfectly true, but not something they had any evidence for and the council lost the appeal. The school I was destined for ... parents did whatever they good to get their kids into ...
2
... somewhere else. Anywhere else. So my original primary, children went to 13 or 14 different secondary schools. The primary I was moved to, we went to 2. The Muslim girls were sent to a Catholic secondary. Everyone else went to the same mixed comprehensive. The physics department was useless, though. One of our teachers wouldn't go through the answers because she'd forgotten her calculator. When someone offered his, she refused. We all knew she didn't know how to solve the problems herself.
The maths department was, however, excellent. They even sort-of supported double maths. (We got 5 taught and 1 untaught slots rather than 8 for the double bit, so the teacher had to voluntarily agree to teach us and threatened not to in the first week.)
@cfr -- At the time, Baltimore had four rather specialized secondary schools (two all girls, two all boys) and about a half dozen others. Of the two all male schools, one was classical liberal arts, and the other what is now called STEM. Both of those are now coed, and I think also exam schools. Progress to college is, I think, still pretty close to 100%. My teachers were all quite good; this was before calculators, so all calculations were done on paper. And mostly handwritten;
,,, I didn't type anything until my junior year term papers. (I attended summer school before junior year to learn to type, and purposely chose a keyboard with blank keys. The summer before senior year, I attended evening school to learn solid geometry. I was the only female in the class; the rest were boys who needed the credit for engineering college. The teacher was amused.) During the day, I took swimming lessons, but wasn't old enough to be a lifeguard. That's all so long ago!
@barbarabeeton I was the only girl in double maths. There was another, but she quickly dropped to single. However, our teacher was female. Our maths department was almost entirely female. Physics was 2/3 male teachers, but the men were off sick and so we had the incompetent 1/3, who happened to be female. We never actually covered all the syllabus, there were no funds for the recommended textbook and the roof came off the sixth form block during the first term (so no senior science labs).
People either got As or Es and lower in physics. To pass, you told your parents which book the school couldn't buy and they got it for you. Then you got a copy of the syllabus from the exam board. Prior to the exam, you sat down to figure out what hadn't been covered at all and decided what you could teach yourself in time. I scotched one topic, I know, and taught myself at least one more. The teachers pretty much cheated for the practical exam by setting up a practise run ...
... based on the equipment list. And then you hoped for the best. One girl got a B, but only because she turned two pages and missed the graph question. Everyone else got either A or E and lower. When one of the boys was asked to take his lab book to an interview, he spent a weekend writing a fake one. We didn't have lab books. We didn't do experiments.
We didn't type calculations. We used calculators, but that was it. (I suppose this is still the same - I can't imagine they have kids sit exams on computers.) I more-or-less taught myself to type. I had a self-teaching course thing, but I got too bored, so I only really used the basic instructions. I just tried not to look at the keyboard until I got it. Unfortunately, I've developed a preference for US keyboards, which are not so easy to get.
@yo' Congratulations! Enjoy her. And don't believe people that scare you about the future transformation in monsters, we are still waiting for Sara's transformation, and she's 18 already... (Time flies...)
@DavidCarlisle The other day we found that the sizes of the variants of the vertical bar (and double vertical bar) in Latin Modern Math do not follow the sizes of the parentheses and other delimiters. Where possible, the vertical size of variant n of the bar equals the vertical size of variant n+1 of the parentheses.
@DavidCarlisle I mainly want to run test not only locally so that I don't introduce features which relies on some developement code. I just tried to add github actions and it seems to do something so let's looks what breaks (I have not idea if I have all needed packages in the list).
@samcarter -- 6 = 4 teen-age nephews + my sister + me. The husbands got the rest of the bird. In our childhood, my sister and I were conned to believe that dark meat was special. We never changed our opinions, so it's still drumsticks (and maybe wings) for me. (And the surgery to create the multi-limbed turkey was great fun.)
@yo' -- Congrats and all good wishes. I know she'll grow up enjoying good music.
@campa well, the office computer of my sister in law runs TL 2016, and she asked me to take a look at a few things that don't work for her... So I had to time travel.
@AlanMunn You might find this interesting (you're a linguist, right?): The wrong (though grammatically correct) sentence "My computer runs on TeX Live " was quite likely a slip originating from my internal Italian-To-German-To-English language processor...
