Often debates about education are framed as non-tech versus AI approaches, but too often, AI ed tech just magnifies the same failures of traditional school.
Vibe coding is the creation of large quantities of highly complex AI-generated code, often with the intention that the code will not be read by humans. It has cast quite a spell on the tech industry. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much of their code must be AI-generated or risk poor performance reviews. Software developers worry that everyone around them is a “10x developer” and that they’ve fallen behind. College stude
Close reading is a technique for careful analysis of a piece of writing, paying close attention to the exact language, structure, and content of the text. As Eric Ries described it ,“ close reading is one of our civilization’s oldest and most powerful technologies for trying to communicate the gestalt of a thing, the overall holistic understanding of it more than just what can be communicated in language because language is so limited. ” It was (and in some cases still is) practiced by many anci
Chronic boredom is harmful to adults, causing stress, disengagement, and poor well-being. Academic researchers have shown that boredom in the workplace can be just as damaging as burnout. But search for information about childhood boredom and you’ll find the opposite message: articles describing boredom for kids as “fantastic”, “important”, and full of benefits.
Large language models make it remarkably easy to generate code. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to build an application, and you’ll receive hundreds of lines of working code in seconds. But this creates a problem: you get code you don’t understand, and when you need to modify it, fix a bug, or add a feature, you’re stuck.
Note from Jeremy: We’re teaching a course starting Nov 3rd on how to build towards software mastery and craftsmanship whilst leveraging AI effectively. Have a look at solve.it.com if you’re interested.
18 months ago, Andrej Karpathy set a challenge : “Can you take my 2h13m tokenizer video and translate the video into the format of a book chapter”. We’ve done it, and the chapter is below, including key pieces of code inlined, and images from the video at key points (hyperlinked to the video timestamp). It’s a great video for learning this key piece of how LLMs work, and this new text version is great too.
tl/dr: This is a copy of a one-off email I sent to all fast.ai forum users, with a long-overdue update. I had planned to send this email a year ago to let you know you could sign up for our new fast.ai course, “How to Solve it With Code”, but by the time I woke up the day after launching it, it was full. :O The good news is that we’ve spent the last year making it much better, and a brand new version is ready to go now. You can jump straight to it here: solve.it.com . It’s designed mainly for ex