I have loved national parks since I was a little girl.

My parents didn’t have much money or time off for vacations. When they did, our family trips meant packing up the car with a cooler, snacks, and a duffel bag of clothes and going to a national park. There were the home state options: Joshua Tree, Sequoia, Yosemite, Redwood. Beyond California, Zion in Utah and the Grand Canyon in Arizona were reachable in a day. On our most ambitious trip, we covered nearly 5,000 miles, visiting Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Mt. Rainier in the summer of ’79.

My dad spent weeks before each trip studying and highlighting maps, the ones that you had to spread out on a big table and press flat to even out the creases. Then he folded them up again carefully (for those who haven’t tried it, it’s harder than it sounds) and took them with us on every trip.

My sister and I often fell asleep in the back seat on these long road trips. But once we arrived, we were in awe of the towering rock formations and multi-colored mountain ranges; of the sounds of rushing water and explosion of unexpected geysers; of things I didn’t know had names: hoodoos, buttes, narrows, even cairns; of park rangers and staff, so friendly and knowledgeable, who clearly loved their jobs, loved the parks, and wanted us to love them too.

The Trump administration’s assault on our public lands and on our dedicated National Park Service staff is truly appalling. I say this not just as a worker advocate disgusted with the Trump administration as abusive employer, but as an American with childhood memories in the wide open spaces now under threat and with deep gratitude for the people who care for those spaces, many of whom have been forced out of their jobs.

The other thing that struck me on our family road trips is how many immigrants had the same idea as my parents. At every park, the sounds of many languages flowed freely, as did the mix-of-English-and-an-immigrant’s-native-language so common in immigrant families, including my own.

Together, we soaked in the spectacular beauty of our nation’s public spaces. National parks were places where people came to appreciate – and to reflect – America’s beauty and its diversity.

I’ve been thinking about this as the President of the United States attacks, lies about, rounds up, imprisons, and terrorizes immigrants and immigrant communities. There are the horrifying well-known cases: Kilmar, Jaime, Tien. There are the ones someone managed to record, exposing the violent arrests of human beings on the way to work, on the job, or dropping their children off at school. There are the long-time business owners and the high school honor roll students, so integral to their communities, now forcibly expelled and no longer welcome. There are those sitting in detention or summarily sent to places they don’t know who were swept up so suddenly and without accountability that there is no public record, just family members left behind to pick up the pieces.

These are not isolated incidents. A federal judge recently had to order the Trump administration to stop indiscriminately rounding up individuals without reasonable suspicion, and then denying them access to lawyers. The judge found a “mountain of evidence” that the administration was doing this.

One of the many repulsive things about the Trump administration is the relentless emphasis on who doesn’t belong, the obsession with narrowing who is, and what makes one, really American. Those of us who push back often emphasize the contributions immigrants have made: the essential work they do, their service in our armed forces and as public servants, those responsible for medical breakthroughs and innovative companies. We cite to statistics, and say things like, “without immigrants, whole industries would collapse.”

But even that plays into the idea that immigrants have to do something to earn their place, that they’re not worthy otherwise. Immigrants also meet their friends for dinner and to play mah-jong, take their kids to baseball and basketball tournaments and to tinikling practice, sing in the local choir and organize quincenearas, attend school assemblies and arangetram performances, and go to church, temple, mosque, gurdwara, and synagogue. They volunteer. They vote. They vacation at national parks. They find joy in family, friends, and community, even while they never stop missing those they left.

In other words, immigrants express and expand what it means to be American and to love America, often quietly, without fanfare, in everyday decisions.

There’s a thing I love about hiking national parks which is the many unwritten rules of belonging and sharing space, the way you move aside without being asked when you hear footsteps behind you, the scooting over to make room under the shade so more people can catch their breath, the words of encouragement (“you’re almost there,” “it’s worth it”) from those coming down the trail to those trudging their way up. In so many ways, these parallel the ways belonging gets built across America in communities every day.

There is a connection between this administration’s attacks on immigrants, attacks on public servants who work in the federal government, and attacks on our nation’s public lands. First, the attacks all start with a lie—debasing the targets to justify destroying them. Second, the attacks all come from a desire to control and privatize; anyone or anything only has value if it can be controlled and used for profit. And third, the targets of the attacks all stand for a vision of America that Donald Trump abhors: openness, inclusion, service and community, embrace of difference and the idea that the world is and should be about something larger than oneself.

Last month, my 22-year-old daughter and I took a national parks road trip. (Yes, my dad got us a foldable map.) We visited Utah’s Mighty 5: Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce, and Zion. On our first night, we got to Moab and hiked to Delicate Arch despite a 9-hour drive, eager to stretch our legs and catch the sunset. Over the next few days, we chatted on long hikes (averaging 22,000 steps a day), marveled at the power of water and wind to carve odd shapes out of massive slabs of rock, and lay on the roof of our car to see shooting stars at midnight.

I consider her love of national parks a legacy of my parents. I saw it growing up: how immigrants pass on their love of America not through big showy acts or formal ceremonies, but quiet appreciation, struggle, and making a life. And yes, on hiking trails, at picnic tables, while crossing streams, and watching sunsets.

The new school year is about to begin, and I'm planning for the first days of school. One thing I think a lot about in the opening days is how to maximize student motivation in math class. I want to do a deep dive into how I think about motivation in one specific context.

I often hear teachers talk about motivation as if it’s a static property of students. A given student is either motivated, or they’re not. I disagree. Motivation is slow to change, but it can change, and the beginning of the school year is the best time to help students become more motivated. That’s what this post is about.

Every day my class starts with a Do Now. You can read in detail about my routine here. Short version is, students pick up a half-sheet of paper with five blanks, there are five questions on the board, and students answer them.

At my current school, getting students to complete a Do Now isn't simple. I've worked at other schools where almost every student does similar tasks without thinking twice because that's part of the school culture. That's not the case where I work now. No use crying over spilt milk; many teachers reading this will recognize what I'm describing. If you don't use a Do Now or you have trouble motivating students in other parts of class, the same principles apply.

There's no one trick to motivate students to do something. There are a bunch of different strategies, and the more strategies I use, the more success I will have. The ideas in this post are drawn from "self-determination theory," which is a psychological theory about motivation. If you'd like to learn more about it, the Wikipedia page is a good place to start.

Self-determination theory posits a bunch of different factors that influence motivation. Here is how I use these ideas:

Competence

Humans like to do things we feel good at, and we don't like to do things we feel bad at. Humans also like to get better at things, and to see tangible evidence of that progress. This isn't easy. I have to teach my students 7th grade math, and they are coming in with a wide range of skills. When I write my Do Nows I start with simple questions. I reteach some foundational skills early in the year, then put those skills on Do Nows. I aim for 4 questions that the vast majority of students get right, and one tougher question. If a lot of students get a question wrong, I do a quick reteach and include a similar question the next day. If necessary I do this multiple times. The goal is for students to get questions right, and for students to see themselves learning new things and growing day by day. Competence is always important, but it can pay extra dividends at the beginning of each class to create momentum and motivate students to try harder tasks as class goes on.

Relatedness

Humans like to do things with other humans. Relatedness is the core of why learning in classrooms, despite the myriad differences of any group of students, makes sense: we are working together toward a common goal, and that togetherness helps to motivate students. The most important insight about relatedness is that one powerful factor in whether a student is motivated to do something is whether everyone else is doing it. If I can start the year strong with clear expectations and high participation, that participation becomes self-reinforcing. Many students, in the opening days of school, will often look around the room to see what everyone else is doing, and if they see a large majority putting in effort they likely will as well. This means I start my Do Now routine from day one, when students are able to build new habits and want to make a positive first impression. The second important element of relatedness is to never emphasize when a student or group of students isn't putting in effort. If I put the spotlight on students who aren't doing what I ask them to do, that broadcasts their behavior and undermines the collective feeling I want students to have. Of course there will be students who are recalcitrant at times. That's normal. But I can choose to handle those cases with care, and without drawing undue attention.

Autonomy

Humans like to have a feeling of freedom, to feel like they have choice in what they are doing. This is tricky in classrooms. There are lots of ways schools give students fake autonomy. "You can choose this problem, or that problem." Those types of choices don't generally make students feel like they have real autonomy. Letting students choose where they sit can lead to poor choices and negative peer effects. I am really cautious about autonomy in my room. But the flip side is that I don't ever want to use coercion. I avoid giving fake autonomy, and I'm probably not maximizing the motivational effects of autonomy — that's a reality of mass compulsory education. But there's a mistake teachers can make where a few students aren't doing something, and the teacher stands over them and tries to strongarm the student into doing the task. This is a bad idea. Even if it works in the short term, a power struggle eliminates any sense of autonomy for the student and is likely to undermine motivation in the long term.

Extrinsic motivators to avoid

Rewards and consequences are common tools in education. Maybe it's giving students candy, or holding a student for a few minutes of lunch, or promising students a party if they all meet a certain standard. The core insight about rewards and consequences like these is that they can undermine motivation in the long term, especially if they are overused or if they are used too much and then discontinued. I really try to avoid things like this. First, it's tons of work for me. Do I want students to do my Do Now? Yes. But it's just one of many elements of my class. I can't bribe or punish students for everything. I want students to do the Do Now because they build a habit of coming into class each day and answering a few questions, not so they will get a reward.

The trickiest form of extrinsic motivation is grades. I don't want to emphasize that students should do the Do Now for a grade. I don't have time to grade it every day, and that motivation will fade over time. But I also can't ignore grading entirely. I work in a school where students often internalize the message that if it's graded it's important, and if it's ungraded it's unimportant. I grade a Do Now about once a week for the first few weeks, and gradually scale back to about once a month as the year goes on. My goal is to send a message that this is important, but I also don't make a huge deal of the grades. Hopefully that extrinsic motivation helps students to build good habits early in the year, then fades into the background. Peps Mccrea calls this "motivational handover" and has this nice visual:

The goal isn’t to avoid rewards and punishments entirely. The goal is to use them judiciously early on, and let them fade into the background as the year progresses.

Useful extrinsic motivators

There are two kinds of rewards that can be really helpful, and don't incur some of the risks of other types of extrinsic motivators. The first is praise. Everyone loves to be praised. I try not to go too crazy with this, but I also want to give positive verbal feedback on a regular basis. I pay particular attention to students who are doing great work day in day out, and students who have improved — in particular students who were struggling with a certain type of question, and then get it right on a Do Now. The second is now-that rewards. Here's the idea. If-then rewards, where I tell students "if you do x, you will receive y reward," are a risky type of extrinsic motivation. They can lead to students focusing only on the reward, they lose power over time, and if I stop giving the reward they will cause a decrease in motivation. Now-that rewards are rewards given after a student does something well, recognizing great work without dangling incentives in front of students to get them to do something. Now-that rewards are great to give as shoutouts or recognitions at community meetings or other gatherings, and while they can seem small they are a much more powerful long-term motivator than many other little carrots and sticks. I learned about if-then vs now-that rewards from this blog post by Adam Boxer.

Types of extrinsic motivation

The final insight from self-determination theory is that there are different types of extrinsic motivation. The most shallow and fragile is doing something to get a reward or avoid a punishment. That might work in the short term, but isn't likely to last. On the other side of the spectrum is doing something because you value the goal and see the effort as an important part of reaching the goal, or because you see that type of effort as part of who you are. These are still extrinsic motivation — students might not answer math problems because they are inherently enjoyable — but this is a much more durable and long-lasting form of extrinsic motivation. I use this language in how I frame for students why the Do Now is important, why practice matters, and why math is worth learning. I want students to say to themselves, "ok let's get to work, I want to learn math and this is what I need to do to learn."

Relationships and student interests

The two most common motivation strategies I see teachers talk about are building relationships with students and framing learning around student interests. I'm not opposed to these. I work hard to build relationships with students, and when possible I do my best to incorporate student interests into math class. But they aren't my first motivation strategies. I have too many students, and if I only use relationships and student interests many students will fall through the cracks, and won't build positive habits early in the year. I think of these as my backup strategies. If I do a good job with everything I listed above, I can get most of my class motivated to work hard on a regular basis. They won't work for everyone. Those whole-group strategies then leave me time to focus on the few students who I haven't been successful with. Then, I might focus on building relationships, learning about their interests, or finding other strategies tailored to the individual students. But the important part is that I focus on whole-group motivation strategies that work for the majority first.

Closing

I used the Do Now as an example in this post, but all of these strategies can apply to any other part of class. I focus first on everyday routines because that’s where students develop habits they repeat each day. The same strategies apply to all of math class, or any other class.

The toughest part about these strategies is they can be slow to work. They won’t transform students overnight. But gradually, over time, they make an enduring difference. It might be tempting to bribe students with candy to get some short-term wins, but they’re unlikely to last. A deep understanding of motivation is what makes a gradual but lasting difference.

A friend found this Sangaku, which if you don’t know (from Wikipedia) are Japanese geometrical problems or theorems on wooden tablets which were placed as offerings at Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples during the Edo period by members of all social classes.

So here’s what she sent me (from here)

The question that I’m attempting to figure out is: what is the radius of the small circle in relation to the length of the side of the square? And you’ll see from the text she sent me, there is the answer.

We found the puzzle curious and we thought the figure was lovely, so we decided to make a piece of stained glass math-art for it. (We’re trying to teach ourselves how to make math-based stained glass art. As you can see from the picture below, we’re still very much novices!)

I spent over an hour on the problem this morning. I played on Geogebra to get the contours of the problem itself to help me understand the constraints. And then since I didn’t have a better approach, I started brute forcing it. I came up with equations when I put everything on the coordinate plane (using calculus to find slopes!), found some tangent lines, and looked for intersection points of these lines. I knew it wasn’t efficient, but I thought it would at least help me see how things would shake out I was hoping lots of terms would drop away…

Alas! The algebra got messy, and then I thought I’d have a system of equations that could be solved.

To be frank, I’m pretty sure in the mess of algebra, these equations are probably not correct. And I couldn’t really solve them anyway. (If you’re wondering what a, b, and c are, they stand in for slopes of the three lines (pink, light blue, green).

I’m officially annoyed and ready to give up. At least for now, or for a few days, or maybe forever. BUT the reason I’m posting this is that I’d really love a solution. Why is the radius of the circle 4/33s (where s is the side length of the square)? What is the approach to figuring this out?

So if you like geometry puzzles, like these Sangaku, or the puzzles of Catroina Agg (https://bsky.app/profile/catrionaagg.bsky.social), help me out!

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Gisnep, the daily puzzle I made initially just because I liked the name. So I thought I’d reflect on how it’s been doing, what’s happened with it over the past year, and what I plan for the future of Gisnep.

A Quick Recap

Gisnep is a daily game in the style known as “dropquote” or “quotefall” puzzles. Solving the puzzle each day reveals a quote – sometimes profound, or funny, or odd. I added a little twist to the traditional format, making the source of the quote something that is revealed as you solve the puzzle and can provide additional clues if you figure out the source early on.

Before I even thought of making a game, I had registered the domain name on a whim without knowing what I would do with it, and then gradually developed the game over a couple months. I discarded an earlier version that I decided was a bit too tedious to play. I am not much of a programmer, so I vibe coded the game before “vibe coding” was a term. You can read the whole story of how I built it in last year’s launch announcement.

Added Features

Initially, once it was out in the world, I had a lot of bug reports that I was squashing quickly. But I also began to get a lot of feature requests. I added a “settings” widget for some of the popular requests, like hiding the timer since some people found it stressful. I also added a toggle to highlight the current word you’re at, to help people understand how words wrap to the next line.

I also decided that when you solve the puzzle, it would be nice to learn something about the source of the quote. So after a puzzle is solved you now get a “Who is that?” link to learn more about the quote source. I hear from people that they love this, and that they learn about interesting people from those links.

The link is automatically generated to go to the top Wikipedia entry for that person’s name. It’s a bit of a gamble that it will be the right person, and sometimes it fails hilariously. Like, the link for the poet Mary Richards went instead to the entry for the fictional character Mary Richards, played by Mary Tyler Moore. I finally updated the backend to allow me to override the default link so I could fix issues like that.

I also added some little features that I don’t explicitly mention anywhere. Like, if you switch to another tab, the timer on Gisnep pauses until you come back to it. That’s one way to pause the game if you need to get up for anything. Maybe I should actually mention that somewhere.

But the number one feature request people kept asking for was the ability to play old games. That was great to hear! People really enjoyed the game and wanted more of it. Someone on reddit even dug through the source code to figure out how to hack the game and let him play future puzzles, and shared a convoluted method that other players could use, too. So I prioritized adding an archive that would keep track of which games you still hadn’t played.

Last month, a new bug surfaced that only affected people who had solved every single puzzle so far. I was pleased to hear from so many people reporting the bug. That meant that a lot of people have played every single puzzle.

I Added An Easter Egg

When I added the archive, each puzzle needed a unique URL. I settled on giving each puzzle a unique number (as opposed to using the date), and formatted the links like this example: https://gisnep.com/?game=338.

But then I thought of that guy on reddit who figured out how to play future puzzles. Surely, this would make it even easier for people to do that. They’d just keep increasing the number to play all the upcoming games. I needed to defend against that. I could just have a 404 page saying that no such page exists when people try to play future games, but I thought it would be more fun to have a surprise for someone who tries to play a game that hasn’t been released yet.

So I made a special game that only appears if you attempt to play an unreleased puzzle. I don’t keep a log of whether or not that game has been played, so I only know of one person for sure who has found it.

And now I guess you can find it, too. I know, it’s a bit of a spoiler to tell you about it, but it’s actually not the only Gisnep easter egg so I haven’t ruined every surprise. Shhhh.

I Tried Ads But Hated Them

When I added the archive, I planned to put ads on the game. I figured that the current day’s game would always be ad-free, but games from the archive would have ads. That seemed like a fair way to monetize.

I implemented it for private testing, and I hated it. Ads are just so ugly. I couldn’t stand to have them on the site, even if just in the archives, and even if just at the bottom of the page.

I imagine that in order to make really good money on ads, you need to have significantly more visitors than I have, and probably more obnoxiously placed ads, and it didn’t seem worthwhile to ruin the experience for everyone in order to make a couple bucks. So I never rolled that out.

I have always had a tiny link on the bottom of each page that says “Leave a tip” and a surprising number of people actually do. I could imagine that if people saw me monetizing already with ads, they would be less inclined to make a donation. Since I don’t think I would have made that much money with ads, not having them has probably been the more lucrative choice anyway – and a much better user experience.

Some Numbers

So how many people actually play Gisnep? Not as many as I’d like.

On the busiest day, 3,544 people played Gisnep. That was just a few weeks after launch, when Tom Scott mentioned Gisnep in his newsletter. I’ve had a couple similar peaks, but more typically I have 1,300 to 1,500 daily visitors.

But that’s nothing to turn up my nose at. About 1,400 people return to Gisnep every day to play. And that number of regular players has remained fairly steady with just a little bit of gradual drop-off as you can see in the chart above. Overall, I think it’s pretty good.

And on average, 50% of visitors play 2 games per visit, so the archive is definitely getting used. That’s just an average, of course. I can see from my logs that some people are playing a lot of games per visit and spending a lot of time on the site, and some people just play today’s game and leave.

But is this enough to call Gisnep a success? I mean, if it didn’t require any upkeep and was completely set-and-forget, I’d be happy with even one visitor per day. But for the (admittedly small) amount of work it requires to maintain, I wish more people were playing it.

Some people post their daily scores on social media, and for a while there was someone playing every day on TikTok. But those people don’t have large audiences themselves, so they haven’t translated into very many new players. Growth hasn’t been viral, but people who play it seem to enjoy it enough that I have a lot of regulars. I’m running out of ideas for how to spread the word further without spending money on advertising. I’m open to suggestions.

The Mobile Issue

One thing I know would likely increase players is if it was easier to play on mobile, like other popular daily games. Right now, it’s functional on mobile, and people play it that way, but it’s not the best experience. Still, mobile users make up about 40% of the daily visits – and that percentage is a bit higher during the weekend – so I wish it were better for them.

The problem is that when I designed the game, I decided that 20 boxes across is the optimum number for gameplay. But that means they’re small little squares on mobile, hard to read or target with your finger on a phone.

I could do fewer squares across on mobile so that they can be bigger, but then the quote has to be really short so it doesn’t wrap on too many lines. And at that point, it’s a bit too easy to solve.

I considered making a “Gisnep Mini” version just for mobile. But it seemed like it would be too easy and it wouldn’t be fun – plus then I’d need to come up with twice as many puzzles each day. And when someone completes the Mini version on mobile, they still might want to play the harder version on mobile as a follow-up anyway. So I’ve resigned myself to this just being a game that’s better on desktop but still playable on mobile. For now, anyway.

The Upkeep Challenge

I mentioned above that Gisnep still requires a little upkeep. That’s mainly in two areas:

First, the game has a different tagline every day. I thought this would give the game a bit of personality, but wow is it hard coming up with original taglines for every day that aren’t extremely lame. I use ChatGPT to help, but discard most of its suggestions.

The taglines are mostly selected randomly but I do sometimes peg specific taglines to specific days. Sometimes the connection is obvious (a joke about a movie coming out that week, or a holiday, or other notable event), but sometimes it’s more obscure and written just to amuse myself.

Every few months, I come up with a new batch of taglines for the next few months, manually edit the json, and upload to the server via FTP. It’s not the worst thing in the world as far as upkeep goes, but it’s a bit of mental overhead to even remember to do it.

If I ever run out of taglines, it’s currently programmed to just reuse them from the beginning. Would anyone even notice? Each time I add more, I wonder if it’s worth it or if I should just have one persistent tagline, or no tagline at all.

Or maybe I should lean into it even more, and make taglines connected to current events more often.

Actually, hang on a second... [vibe-coding]. Okay, I just built a web interface for myself to manage the taglines. It’s hopefully going to be less friction than manually editing a json and uploading it via FTP, and encourage me to write more timely taglines more often. We’ll see.

The other bit of upkeep is the puzzles themselves. I can’t just pull random quotes from a quote database. They have to meet certain criteria for Gisnep: not too short; not too long; no more than once sentence; and they have to make sense without punctuation.

I’ve got some scripts that go through various free databases and pull quotes that meet those qualifications. Then I have to go through and remove the ones that are problematic (a surprising number of quotes in public databases are homophobic statements from politicians). And then I have to check for spelling issues, etc.

I do this in much larger batches than the taglines, so I actually don’t need to touch the quote database for another year or so, although I do add new ones occasionally when I think of them, or when people send me good quote suggestions.

And just like the taglines, I have the ability to schedule certain quotes for certain days, which I sometimes do, although I don’t know if people notice.

Amusingly, I sometimes get accused of scheduling certain quotes to reflect current events that were actually just coincidentally relevant.

The Future of Gisnep

As long as I still have a huge batch of upcoming quotes in the database, I see no reason not to keep Gisnep going. It would work fine without touching it for the next six months, but I have a couple more years’ worth of quotes ready to add to the database. If I gave up on anything, it would be taglines. I’d probably just turn taglines off completely if I didn’t want to maintain them anymore.

There’s also the question of the moose at the top of the game. His name is Mickey Moose. I never meant there to be a permanent moose. I have no idea if people like or hate the moose. I suspect most people are indifferent. I’ll probably keep him around for now.

The worst thing that could happen is if a new bug pops up that breaks functionality. Since launching Gisnep, I’ve started a new full time gig (I’ll tell you more about that some other time) so my available time to troubleshoot or add new features is less than it used to be.

What I really need is for some big famous celebrity like Sydney Sweeney Ryan Reynolds to post all over social media how much they love playing Gisnep. Then maybe I can reach the critical mass of players required to sell Gisnep to the New York Times for a bajillion dollars.

So if you’ve enjoyed playing Gisnep this year, the best gift you could give is to tell a friend. Or Ryan Reynolds. Or your friend Ryan Reynolds.

And that brings us to the end of another newsletter! It was a bit more naval-gazing than usual, but hopefully you found it interesting. If you didn’t, and somehow made it this far, then I’m surprised but also thankful.

Oh, one other small thing about Gisnep. I’ve seen occasional conversations where people wonder how it’s pronounced. Hard G or Soft G? I can’t believe I’ve accidentally made a product with a GIF-like debate. One thing I know from the GIF discussion is that it doesn’t matter what the creator intends, people will do whatever they want and swear it’s correct. But for the record, I say Gisnep with a hard G. And GIF with a soft G like the creator intended.

Thanks as always for reading. See you next time!

David

I teach HS Science in the south. I can only speak for my district, but a few teacher work days in the wave of enthusiasm I'm seeing for AI tools is overwhelming. We're getting district approved ads for AI tools by email, Admin and ICs are pushing it on us, and at least half of the teaching staff seems all in at this point.

I was just in a meeting with my team and one of the older teachers brought out a powerpoint for our first lesson and almost everyone agreed to use it after a quick scan - but it was missing important tested material, repetitive, and just totally airy and meaningless. Just slide after slide of the same handful of sentences rephrased with random loosely related stock photos. When I asked him if it was AI generated, he said 'of course', like it was a strange question. [...]

We don't have a leg to stand on to teach them anything about originality, academic integrity/intellectual honesty, or the importance of doing things for themselves when they catch us indulging in it just to save time at work.

— greyduet on r/teachers, Unpopular Opinion: Teacher AI use is already out of control and it's not ok

Tags: ai-ethics, slop, generative-ai, education, ai, llms

A Friendly Introduction to SVG

This SVG tutorial by Josh Comeau is fantastic. It's filled with newt interactive illustrations - with a pleasing subtly "click" audio effect as you adjust their sliders - and provides a useful introduction to a bunch of well chosen SVG fundamentals.

I finally understand what all four numbers in the viewport="..." attribute are for!

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: svg, explorables, josh-comeau