by Maureen Holland

Web feeds are incredible! And a bit confusing! Why are the feed links often called “RSS”? And why is this “RSS” feed in an atom.xml file… hang on, what is feed.json for? What are they even feeding into anyway?

To start, web feeds are often referred to as “RSS” because RSS is the oldest format. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is an XML-based specification for web content syndication (including podcasts).

Syndication is the sale or licensing of material for publication or broadcasting by others. In broadcast syndication, networks sell reruns of their original shows to other platforms, where those shows might reach a larger audience. In web content syndication, feeds package web content into a format that can “rerun” on a feed reader application. A key difference is that feeds are not sold to feed readers. The “audience” for web feeds has a much more active role to play. They are subscribers, choosing what content they want to follow and what reader they want to follow it on.

Other web content syndication specifications include Atom (also XML-based) and JSON. If you’re interested, CSS Tricks has a breakdown of the technical distinctions between these formats. A web feed (even one that says it’s an “RSS” feed) could be any of these formats under the hood.

A very basic web feed looks like this: https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/feed.xml

Simplified example below:

<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<atom:link href="https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
		<title>Magpie</title>
		<link>https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/</link>
		<description>
		Blog of writer and web developer Maureen Holland. Untidy nest of shiny things.
		</description>
		<language>en-ca</language>
		<item>
			<title>A Vanilla Personal Site</title>
			<link>
			https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/a-vanilla-personal-site
			</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">
			https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/a-vanilla-personal-site
			</guid>
			<pubDate>Tue, 18 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
			<description>
			I rebuild my personal site every few years. This time, I decided I wanted to go as minimal as possible. It's been the most enjoyable iteration.
			</description>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

This XML file includes general info about the feed (channel) and lists one item which contains a title, link, description, publication date (pubDate), and globally unique identifier (guid).

A feed reader, like Feedbin, NetNewsWire, or NewsBlur, is able to parse that information and serve it in a human-readable format that will look something like this:

It uses the unique identifier to determine if an item in the feed is new. It can do this for any number of feeds, constantly updating a reading list of your favourite web content.

Importantly, feed readers have no proprietary control over your feed list. If you are dissatisfied with your reader, you can export your feeds to an OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file and import them to a new reader later.

The Joy of Autodiscovery

Remember all that stuff about RSS and Atom and XML and JSON? Forget it!

A subscriber shouldn’t have to know any of that technical detail. This is where RSS Autodiscovery comes in.

You can implement autodiscovery with a single line of HTML in the head of your website (and if you’re using a blog platform, chances are it’s already there by default):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Magpie" href="https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/feed.xml">

Now, no one has to hunt for your site’s subscribe link (or “RSS” link or whatever). They can copy/paste the website address into their feed reader and let the application do the work of finding the feeds.

If you want, you can also include separate links for different categories. WordPress, for example, automatically generates feeds for entries and comments. Ghost includes a main post index, author archive, and tag archive.

This is not required but can be helpful if your site has a lot of frequently updated content or a wide range of topics. Subscribers may prefer a subset of content (i.e. long form articles or short “Today I Learned” posts).

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Everything" href="https://example.com/feed.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Articles" href="https://example.com/articles.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="TIL" href="https://example.com/til.xml">

Wrapping Up

I started subscribing to web feeds after reading Tim Kadlec’s Investing in RSS. When I’m online, at some point, I will be checking my feed reader for a bit of inspiration. It’s a form of self-care to step out of the daily grind and step into someone else’s brain for a while. As much as I’ve learned from the articles I’ve read, it’s the feeling I’ve had reading them that I remember most, that spark of connection or revelation. If I’ve been offline for a while, the unread notifications can pile up, so I also consider it a form of self-care to select “Mark all as read.”

If you’re already a fan of web feeds, check you’ve made it easy for others to find your feed with autodiscovery. If you’re new to web feeds, pick a reader and try it out for a month. Then switch to a different one, just because you can.

This post owes a lot to Matt Webb’s great work on https://aboutfeeds.com/.

1. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Red Grading Pen

You may recall my last post-semester dispatch about teaching first-year composition in the age of the AI homework machine. This post got more traffic than anything else I’ve published on here, thanks to a timely share on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. I wrote about the banalities of trying to police AI writing and the struggles to get students to look up from their screens, resolving to ban device use from my classrooms and retvrn to using pen and paper.

So, how did it go? For the most part, well. In the final week of each semester, I always ask students for feedback on my course design. This time nearly all of them said they appreciated the break from their heavily tech-mediated lives and course loads. Even the student who had been most ornery and resistant to the device policy early in the semester had come around, said it helped him focus. Many reported that they found handwriting a better way to gather their thoughts and take memorable notes and voted to keep the handwritten assignments. They enjoyed how I used the whiteboard more and had them stare at boring slides less. All were appreciative of being given readings as printed handouts instead of webpages or pdfs.

I (and my comment section) had worried that working with pen and paper would be totally foreign to today’s freshmen, that I wouldn’t be able to parse their handwriting. Both fears were unfounded. Most of them had still been doing some pen and paper work in high school, and (perhaps because of the death of cursive) mostly their handwriting was very readable. Frankly my pen and paper skills were rustier than theirs, having spent the last twenty years doing all my writing via laptop. I was the one who at first found it a strange change to prep my lessons in a notebook rather than on slides, whose handwriting got sloppy when marking up their papers. But I acclimated, and soon I found grading a stack of papers a much swifter and less annoying task than churning through speedgrader on Canvas — situated as the latter activity is within the distraction-filled medium of the browser or the iPad.

There were some difficulties to my analog approach. Students mostly kept laptops away, but phone use was devilishly hard to suppress. I had a few students who sometimes openly scrolled Reels during class, and calling them out on it made me feel like I was teaching middle school, not college. AirPods sometimes stayed in if I didn’t bug them about it, and I could never tell if students had just forgotten they were in their ears or if they were surreptitiously listening to music or podcasts during class. I didn’t want to be a cop, but I occasionally had to play that role, in part because a lone device user was visibly distracting to my other students and in part because they were distracting to me as I tried to teach.

When students are allowed to have their laptops out, however, we can all maintain the fiction that they are at least partly taking notes or examining the reading or checking Canvas, as opposed to texting, shopping, doing homework for their other classes, or watching (e)sports. (Not that I have always been clean of such sins even as a grad student. I have a vivid memory from undergrad of a journalism prof scolding me and my friends for our incessant mid-class typing to each other on gchat.) Without the screen between us, it was way easier to tell when a student was disengaged, bored, spacing out. Some would yawn, fidget, stretch, check the clock, stare vacantly, even doze off. Students in the back whispered to each other; apparently one pen-and-paper skill that hasn’t endured is that of passing paper notes. That was all a new challenge for me, and occasionally made teaching demoralizing and enervating.

Such behavior varied a lot between my sections. My 1:30pm class was by default pretty alert and engaged, and being packed into a relatively small classroom made it harder for students to get away with breaching our collective social contract. By the time we got to my 4:30pm class, with its more sprawling classroom, both students and I were tired and ready to go home, and they had the room to use their phones under the tables without bumping each other’s elbows. These differences were more palpable without devices in the mix, but I was also able to attune to their moods and needs better, adapting my teaching strategies between sections, getting the evening students up and moving more often to put comments down on the whiteboard.

So: a lot of pedagogical exploration and growth. I still caught a bunch of students using AI on typewritten assignments, and there were others that I didn’t catch, merely suspected. But on the whole a good teaching experience, for all of us.

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2. The Kids Are Not Okay (with Tech)

Probably the most striking part of this semester, however, was the theme of tech critique that ended up suffusing so many of our class conversations and so much of what my students wrote.

A solid chunk of my classes are devoted to discussion and analysis of various pieces of contemporary writing. For the first half of the course, I provide them with weekly “tabs” (a frame I borrowed from the excellent Today In Tabs newsletter, which admittedly makes less sense now that I’m usually printing these readings out). These include op-eds, longreads, book reviews, blog posts, podcasts, keynote videos, etc. Usually recent and topical, though for everyone’s sanity I try to avoid material that’s overtly partisan. I use these to give them examples of the kinds of writing they are being asked to do in class, to point out interesting and well-crafted sentences, and to expose them to the discourse that shapes contemporary culture.

In the second half of the course, these discussions continue, but I ask the students, in small groups, to provide the tabs, present on them, and lead the conversation. This semester nearly every article they chose was about the troubles and travails of our digitally mediated modern life.

There was the NYT podcast on AI’s impacts on education and the MIT study on ChatGPT-induced cognitive atrophy. There was this high schooler’s essay about struggling to get off her phone to pursue the hobbies she loved and this excellent New Yorker piece about the attention crisis. They talked about youth disengagement and screens in schools and maintaining friendships over text message and treating big tech like big tobacco. They debated if audiobooks count as reading and whether culture has come to a standstill. We spent most of one class period on our feet milling around after listening to a podcast about the dangers of “binge sitting.” That’s eleven out of twelve tabs we discussed across two sections. The single piece that didn’t clearly fit the theme was a Zadie Smith essay on essay writing, and I was pretty much the only one who really dug that.

Again, these were the articles they found and picked themselves to discuss with each other. The tabs I picked for them earlier in the semester occasionally touched on such topics but were just as often personal essays about friendship or telemarketing, gonzo journalism about dog shows, or chapters from this year’s ASU common read, Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein. I do think I primed the pump for them a bit with my own obvious interest in tech lash, but I don’t think their selections were all about pleasing teacher. This was what they wanted to talk about: social media and screentime and AI overuse. Several times I nudged the next group up to explore another topic, but usually they just found a different angle to address the same set of concerns. When it came time to pick one of the readings to write a response to for their final project, a huge portion of them chose to keep talking about tech.

These issues have come up before in previous semesters, but never with such overwhelming frequency and focus. I felt like they were constructing a syllabus for each other and me - Zoomer Tech Dilemmas 101. So it was fascinating to sit back and listen to them hash these questions out. These kids were mostly born the year the first iPhone dropped. They’ve never known a world without social media or smartphones. And yet they speak often about living through the sudden advent of “Technology” - by which they always mean digital devices and platforms; that an airplane or a nuclear power plant or an MRI machine might also be considered “technology” rarely crosses their mind. They aren’t always very articulate or clear-eyed about these circumstances they’ve grown up in, but they always have stuff to say about it.

That stuff is usually a mixture of frustration and defensiveness, along with anxiety about where Technology is going, a yearning for moderation, and a slight longing for the long-gone offline world. They’re scared about what this grand experiment we’ve run on them will mean for their adult prospects, but they also get annoyed by tech critics who don’t give due credit to the kinds of digital literacy they view themselves as having mastered. They see enshittification unfolding, but also they never really experienced the web before every inch was clogged with ads and paywalls and laced with dark patterns; as a result they can’t decide whether they should expect better. They agonize about doomscrolling on TikTok, but they also like that the endless flood of content means everyone has a chance to express themselves. They often say AI has a lot of valid uses, but don’t want students to be able to access chatbots until high school, maybe middle school at the earliest. They also unanimously claim they don’t think AI should be used to cheat, though I’ve found that a student expressing this opinion is no guarantee that they themselves won’t turn to AI cheating when they get stressed. They like the utility of social media, but wish it didn’t dominate their social lives. I’ve had a few students who apparently hoped that college would give them a chance to experience the kinds of friendships they’ve seen in, well, Friends, and then been disappointed to find that rushing a sorority or going to a frat party was still always mediated, still all about doing stuff on one’s phone.

There was a harsh undercurrent of recrimination in their discussions. Both of self and of others. What’s on your For You page, for instance, was the result of your choices most of all, not some mysterious algo, so don’t complain about the content you’re being fed. They have not yet learned how to be angry at big systems, so that energy curdles into guilt and shame. Sure, products like Instagram and ChatGPT are designed to be addictive by some of the smartest and best-funded people on the planet, but often students would say it’s still on the individual to not let themselves get sucked in. The Tyler,The Creator school of online governance is alive and well in Gen Z.

Probably the most moving sentiment I heard from them and read in their work was an acute concern for those generations even younger than themselves, Gen Alpha and so on. Zoomers see themselves as having gotten some unmediated childhood play, with core memories of just going outside and running around, climbing trees, etc. But they don’t see their younger siblings getting that same experience. They’re very concerned about iPad babies. Even a student who once bragged about regularly hitting twelve hours of screentime per day fretted about seeing his three-year-old cousin play Call of Duty on an unattended phone.

Of course when I hear this, I think, “Hey, that’s my line! Millennials are supposed to talk that way about you!” So perhaps every generation thinks of themselves as the last ones to have a foothold in the good, old, swept-away physical world. And like everything trends come in and out like the tide, the pendulum swings the other way, social manias are slowly moderated. Parents I know with babies and toddlers today are very keen not to let their kids be iPad babies. Many of my students reported that their schools had, in their senior year, implemented strict no-phone policies, including making students lock their phones in sealed pouches. (Enterprising teenagers bought magnetic keys online and unsealed their peers’ pouches for $5 a pop.) Data is piling up about how counterproductive school laptops and tablets are, and districts are starting to act accordingly. There’s every reason to think that we can and maybe even will mitigate and roll back some of the bad effects tech has had on young people over the last fifteen years.

But in the meantime it’s hard to shake the feeling that something has gone very amiss with this cohort now entering college, and that the students themselves are desperate to understand and articulate what that something is.

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3. Teaching in the Great Literacy Crisis

Part of that something is: many of them can’t write. My first semester teaching comp a few years ago, I had a student who simply couldn’t put together grammatically coherent sentences and clear thoughts. I fretted a great deal about whether or not I should pass him. Now I’ve become numb to this common occurrence. Ever since, I’ve had more and more students whose writing is not just weak but close to non-functional, and this semester was the worst yet.

Rules of grammar that were so drilled into me as to become second nature by high school either were never taught to many of these students or somehow didn’t take. Many have a solid vocabulary, but don’t piece it together right. Often they know this, and are frustrated by it. I carved out part of one period toward the end of the semester to ask them what they wish we’d covered and blitz through answers, and most of the questions they had were about sentence structure and proper use of punctuation. When I did my course design feedback, several students said they wished we’d spent more time learning grammar.

This is not normal for first-year composition, even at a big access-focused university like ASU. Comp textbooks are all about understanding genres and rhetorical situations and types of argument, using and citing sources, being a part of academic discourse. In the rhetoric textbook I used this year, writing clear and correct sentences is covered in two slim chapters way at the back, more as a reference, an afterthought. If I could do it all over again, I would have begun this semester covering those chapters in detail, hoping to catch up some of the students who are writing at remedial levels.

Even some students who are gung-ho for school, who are engaged in the class, who are maybe even in the honors college, are struggling with basic writing in a way that they weren’t just a couple years ago.

Many other educators have been sounding the alarm about recent and sudden drops in student literacy, particularly reading comprehension and stamina. I’ve been seeing that too, though I got into this game too recently to know a world in which college students could fully absorb and understand 30+ pages of reading. Part of the reason why I do the tab discussions is to model for them the practice of reading an article, understanding its points, appreciating its strengths, and critiquing its weaknesses. This is not a skill they find easy when it comes to text. They struggle to hold in their mind the various movements of argument within, say a New Yorker essay. I can’t imagine what it’s like to try to get them to read full books.

AI makes recognizing and dealing with the writing/reading crisis infinitely worse. Some students compensate for their poor writing skills by turning to LLMs, which masks the true extent of the problem. In a confusing twist, this also makes teachers like me suspicious of any writing that is too clean and correct, and I think some students who do their own work know this and are introducing a few glaring errors to “humanize” their writing, just like their peers do to sneak AI-generated essays past graders. It’s a counterproductive and miserable spiral all around.

These LLM products are arriving at the perfect time to both paper over and exacerbate a growing literacy crisis. I don’t know how many of my students were never taught phonics and instead were told to learn to read using the long-debunked “three cueing” method — basically teaching as literacy the strategies that illiterate people use to cope and pretend understanding — but I know it’s not zero. I keep thinking about the student Clay Shirky wrote about in the Chronicle of Higher Ed who used AI to graduate high school with a 3.4 GPA while being completely unable to read, turning himself into a walking Chinese room thought experiment. The bigger the gap between what students are capable of and the demands of college or, for that matter, the professional world, the more they will want to and need to turn to AI to compensate. Such ever increasing dependence on fundamentally grotesque and untrustworthy systems is a recipe for precipitous social decline, not to mention the destruction of higher education and generational confusion, disappointment, and anger when the hallucinatory bubble pops.

In order to disincentivize AI use, I switched to “grading process over product.” I broke projects into more steps that students earned completion points for without being judged on quality. Final revisions were worth fewer points, and I tweaked my rubrics so fewer of those points came from categories like “clarity” or “polish.” In general I think this was a good practice, but it also gave me fewer opportunities to signal to individual students that they needed to up their grammar game, maybe seek help from the writing center or my office hours. Assuming those remedies are enough when one has gotten this far without some fundamentals in place.

And most of those students whose writing I don’t consider college level passed my class, just as they passed through high school. I don’t know if that’s good or bad for the students themselves in the long run; hopefully they improved and will keep improving, even if they are behind. But it doesn’t seem like it bodes well for society, and it’s unpleasant for me, personally, to feel like being an educator means being part of an assembly line of buck-passers without a clear buck-stopping mechanism.

Not that I’m passing everyone. This semester I’m failing more students than ever I have before, even though my class, in my opinion, has only gotten easier. Most of them just didn’t attend enough and, against my advice, didn’t withdraw before the deadline. Some didn’t turn in a bunch of assignments, despite many check-ins by email and face-to-face urging them to get something in. Sometimes these latter students were still coming to class regularly, participating and staying engaged. Sometimes they were totally fine writers. They just didn’t show up or didn’t do the work. There’s always been one or two, but this semester it’s a half dozen — a startling jump from the last couple years.

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4. Welcome to the Wackpot...

The last few months, along with the articles my students found, my tabs were filling up with observations and takes about the decline of literacy, the struggles even elite institutions are having teaching the recent crops of college kids, and theories of the New American Dumbness. It’s grim out there!

So why is this happening now? Is it the phones? The brain rot content? The AI slop? The spoons-worth of microplastics in our brains? Is it the lingering impacts of the stultifying covid years and zoom school, or the multiple covid infections taking a hammer to our collective prefrontal cortex? Or, as I argued a few months ago, is it that the ever understood but rarely faced reality of unaddressed climate catastrophe has made millions give up, turn away, lose the plot? Is the cognitive decline trickling down from our insane, sundowning leaders, or trickling up from the content-entranced masses? Is it The Fascism?

In William Gibson’s time-communication novel The Peripheral, the high-tech hillbillies of the near future are separated from the higher-tech posh kleptocrats (and their servants) of the farther-future by a cataclysm called “The Jackpot.” We spend much of the book wondering what this disaster was that wiped out some 80% of the human population. A virus? An asteroid? A solar flare? A rogue AI? Nanotech gone mad?

The most memorable moment in the book is when Wilf explains to Flynne that, no, it wasn’t one single thing: it was a confluence. It was the climate getting worse and resistant disease spreading and tech acceleration and tremendous violence, all swirling together into an emergent, slow-moving global giga-disaster without clear beginning or end. On the other side, the decimated world is controlled by rich survivors, for whom the whole affair was both a bullet dodged and a dark Malthusian blessing. Probably we are already in The Jackpot now, Gibson suggests. Maybe we have been for 500 years.

That’s my theory about what’s happening to young people right now, too. It’s not one thing — it’s everything. It’s the covid years plus phones and social media plus ed grifters selling bunk curriculum plus No Child Left Behind plus the stupefying politics they’ve come of age around plus the AI slop now being shoved in their faces plus all the rest. Call it “The Wackpot”: an emergent generational crisis that may now coming to a head. Wack because most of the forces driving it are just so frustratingly dumb.

As worrisome as The Wackpot is, I had many students who were thoughtful and curious. They know something is wrong, and they’re intensely interested in figuring out a better way forward, even if they don’t yet have the frameworks to understand the systems that failed them.

And all these problems are solvable. We can return to working literacy pedagogy and get screens out of schools. We can pop the AI bubble and regulate social media as a public health concern. We can de-alienate and de-atomize. We can do right by the generations coming up, and offer educational remediation for the worst impacted.

I’ve been fiddling with a story that features an attention-span bootcamp. You sit and read War and Peace, and a drill instructor screams in your face if you check your phone. Maybe that’s dramatic, but I do think there will be demand for this kinda thing in the coming years. The changes I made to my teaching and classroom policies this semester feel like where everyone is headed, and more importantly seemed to be having a positive effect.

There’s an assumption that the young are rebellious and the old are complacent, but I don’t think that’s always true. When we are young, its very easy to accept the world, because we are powerless to change it and we don’t know how else it could be. When we come into adulthood, gain some measure of influence and mastery, and experience social change and change within our own lives, we have the opportunity to stop accepting, to develop analyses and push reforms. If enough other people come to similar conclusions, society can change quite rapidly and radically.

When I was eighteen, I don’t think I had a social critique as deeply felt as the one my students explored this semester. My politics were all over the place and didn’t start to coalesce until I sought to enter the workforce amid the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. These kids are coming into their grievances and frustrations much earlier. I, for one, am interested to see what they make of the world, when soon they get the chance.

Book Updates and Blurbs

If you liked that long essay about finding hope amid decline, may I interest you in a long cosmic mystery novel about the same?

This week we are officially sending Absence to press! It was so wild to hold the ARC in my hands at last — an object in the world, rather than a document I’ve been fiddling with for year on my computer. It’s beautiful inside and out, and I’m so stoked to see the hardcover edition that drops in May.

Due to the holidays and a backup at the printer, we had a somewhat abbreviated ARC reading period. Nonetheless some fantastic authors took the time to read and blurb it, for which I am eternally grateful. Here’s what a few folks had to say:

“A wild, inventive, and extraordinarily prescient novel, Andrew Dana Hudson’s Absence unspools a moody detective yarn that quickly vaults sky-high, weighing humankind’s slow numbing against daily horrors and faith’s struggle against the impossible. And yet most impressively, within its nightmare of spontaneous gradual depopulation, much is made clear of our species’ capacity for hope. There simply aren’t enough books like it.”
—Jinwoo Chong, author of I Leave It Up to You and Flux

“A moving, enthralling story, set in a fully realized, beautifully examined world. Don’t let this one get away.”
—Sara Gran, author of the Claire DeWitt novels and The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“Absence is fascinating, shiningly clever, and thought-provoking. A thriller wrapped in dystopian almost-horror wrapped in a perfect enigma, anchored by a grounded and methodic agent named Harvey Ellis. Brilliant!”
—Manda Scott, Edgar-nominated bestselling author of No Good Deed

“In this engaging, closely observed and intensely humanistic story that reads like Mulder and Scully collecting the immanent evidence of the end of the world, Andrew Dana Hudson helps us see how the real path to a better tomorrow is through rediscovery of the connection and community we have lost.”
—Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas and A Natural History of Empty Lots

Absence comes out May 5, 2026. Preorder now!

Art Tour: Sleepers

Up top is a picture of Sarah Sze’s unique video installation Sleepers (2024), which I saw recently at the Denver Art Museum. We’d gone to Denver basically to see art, and this was a real highlight. One of the most entrancing projection works I’ve seen in years. It immediately made me think of the fractured attentions and thought processes that I see my students wrestling with, trying moment to coalesce into something clear and meaningful and whole. You can watch a short clip of it here.

I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.

Why did Grok misattribute the quote? Well, because nearly all consumer-facing “AI” are essentially “fancy autocomplete,” designed to find the next likely word rather than offer factual accuracy. “AI” is not actually either intelligent or conscious, and doesn’t know when it’s offering bad information, it just runs its processes and gives a statistically likely answer, which is very likely to be factually wrong. “Statistically likely” does not equal “correct.”

Still, I was curious who other “AI” would tell me I had dedicated The Consuming Fire to. So I asked. Here’s the answer Google gave me in its search page “AI Overview”:

I do have a daughter, but she would be very surprised to learn that after nearly 27 years of being called “Athena,” that her name was “Corbin.” I mean, Krissy and I enjoy The Fifth Element, but not that much. Also I did not dedicated the book to my daughter, under any name.

Here’s Copilot, Microsoft’s “AI”:

I have indeed dedicated (or co-dedicated) several books to Krissy, and I’m glad that Copilot did not believe that my spouse’s name was “Leloo.” But in fact I did not dedicate The Consuming Fire to Krissy.

How did ChatGPT fare? Poorly:

I know at least a couple of people named Corey, and a couple named Cory, but I didn’t dedicate The Consuming Fire to any of them. Also, note that ChatGPT not only misattributed to whom I dedicated the book, it also entirely fabricated the dedication itself. I didn’t ask for the text of the dedication, so ChatGPT voluntarily went out of its way to add extra erroneous information to the mix. Which is… a choice!

I also asked Claude, the “AI” of Anthropic, and to its (and/or Anthropic’s) credit, it was the only “AI” of the batch which did not confidently squirt out an incorrect answer. It admitted it did not have reliable search information on the answer and undertook a few web searches to try to find the information, and eventually told me it could not find it, offering advice instead on how I could find the information myself (for the record, you can find the information online; I did by going to Amazon and searching the excerpt there). So good on Claude for knowing what it doesn’t know and admitting it.

Interestingly, when I went to Grok directly and asked to whom the book was dedicated, it also said it couldn’t find that information. When I asked it why a different instance of itself incorrectly attributed a different dedication to the book, it more or less shrugged and said what I found to be the equivalent of “dude, it happens.” I also checked Gemini directly (which as I understand it powers Google’s Search “AI” Overview) to see if it would also say “I can’t find that information.” Nope:

I’m sure this comes as a surprise to both Ms. Rusch and Mr. Smith, who are (at least on my side) collegial acquaintances but not people I would dedicate a book to. And indeed I did not. When I informed Gemini it had gotten it wrong, it apologized, misattributed The Consuming Fire to another author (C. Robert Cargill, who writes great stuff, just not this), and suggested that he dedicated the book to his wife (he did not) and that her name was “Carly” (it is not).

(I also informed Copilot that it had gotten the dedication wrong, and it also tried again, asserting I dedicated it to Athena. I’m glad Copilot got the name of my kid right, but as previously stated, The Consuming Fire is not dedicated to her.)

So: Five different “AI” and two iterations of two of them, and only Claude would not, at any point, offer up incorrect information about the dedication in The Consuming Fire. Which I will note does not get Claude off the hook for hallucinating information. It has done so before when I’ve queried it about things relating to me, and I’m pretty confident I can get it to do it again. But in this one instance, it did not.

None of them, not even Claude, got the information correct (which is different from “offered up incorrect information”). Two of them, when informed they were incorrect, “corrected” by offering even more incorrect information.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: I ask “AI” things about me all the time, because I know what the actual answer is, and “AI” will consistently and confidently get those things wrong. If I can’t trust it to get right the things I know, I cannot trust it to get right the things I do not know.

Just to make sure this confident misstating of dedication facts was not personal, I picked a random book not by me off my shelf and asked Gemini (which was still open in my browser) to name to whom the book was dedicated.

It certainly feels like Richard Kadrey might dedicate a book in the Sandman Slim series to the lead singer of The Cramps, but in fact Aloha From Hell is not dedicated to him.

Let’s try another:

Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse may be dedicated to his wife, but if it is, her name is not “Kellie,” as that is not the name in the dedication.

Let’s see if the third time’s the charm:

It’s more accurate to say this was a third strike for Gemini, as G. Willow Wilson did not dedicate Alif the Unseen to a Hasan, choosing instead her daughter, whose name that is not.

So it’s not just me, “AI” gets other book dedications wrong, and (at least here) consistently so. These book dedications are actual known facts anyone can ascertain — you can literally just crack open a book to see to whom a book is dedicated — and these facts are being gotten wrong, consistently and repeatedly, by “AI.” Again, think about all the things “AI” could be getting wrong that you won’t have such wherewithal to check.

What do we learn from this?

One: Don’t use “AI” as a search engine. You’ll get bad information and you might not even know.

Two: Don’t trust “AI” to offer you facts. When it doesn’t know something, it will frequently offer you confidently-stated incorrect information, because it’s a statistical engine, not a fact-checker.

Three: Inasmuch as you are going to have to double-check every “fact” that “AI”” provides to you, why not eliminate the middleman and just not use “AI”? It’s not decreasing your workload here, it’s adding to it.

Does “AI” have uses? Possibly, just not this. I don’t blame “AI” for any of this, it’s not those programs’ fault that the people who own and market them and know they are statistical matching engines willfully and, bluntly, deceitfully position them to be other things. You don’t blame an electric bread maker when some fool declares that it’s an excellent air filter. But you shouldn’t use it as an air filter, no matter how many billions of dollars are being spent to convince you of its air-filtering acumen. Use an actual air filter, damn it.

I dedicate this essay to everyone out there who will take these lessons to heart and not trust “AI” to tell you things. You are the real ones. And that’s a fact.

— JS

(if you haven't seen it, count yourself lucky.)

The people who build these products aren't bad or evil. Most of us got into tech with an earnest desire to leave the world better than we found it.

background: the resonant computing manifesto counts among its drafters at least three xooglers with at least a decade of tenure each¹; three venture capitalists, one of whom is a general partner at a firm on Sand Hill Road; two employees of github's "let's replace programmers with an LLM" skunkworks; a guy who sold two AI startups and worked for the first Trump administration's Defense Department drafting its AI policy; an employee at one of the Revolutionary AI Art Startups that lost the race for mindshare a couple years ago; and the CEO of techdirt-cum-board member of Bluesky PBLLC, the "decentralized" social media startup funded by Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and crypto VCs².

many of them are independently wealthy from building past iterations of the Torment Nexus, don't have to work another day in their life, and are waving off their former (and current) colleagues before they do something that shoulders them with an irrevocable burden of cognitive dissonance about whether their comfortable house was purchased with blood money.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise. It could just as easily pour gasoline on existing problems. If we continue to sleepwalk down the path of hyper-scale and centralization, future generations are sure to inherit a world far more dystopian than our own. [...] This is where AI provides a missing puzzle piece. Software can now respond fluidly to the context and particularity of each human—at scale.

it is, despite everything, still possible to do your own user -- sorry, "the word user carries heavy connotations of addiction"³ -- person research and manually build a piece of software that provides the person with clean, responsive, well-marked buttons to do a cross-section of tasks that are important to them, instead of using a 42U rack full of graphics cards and a petabyte-scale archive of the collected written works of all of humanity to determine whether the person wants to put an appointment on their calendar with 70% accuracy.

there's just no money in it, and that's why the demand is for a decentralized AI future, one which will be monetized through decentralized AI apps, which will definitely not be built by the engineers who drafted this manifesto, underwritten by the venture capitalists who drafted this manifesto (who are not in the business of giving away money for free), and eventually "exit" into a form that funnels money upward to the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley in a decentralized fashion.

this manifesto demands little, will deliver even less, and I hope the people who contributed are proud of it. the signatories include such luminaries of Conscious Computing™ as -- choosing three at random -- the virulently transphobic CEO of Automattic and Tumblr who has spent the past six months bolstering his reputation as the inventor of Wordpress by trying to destroy one of his largest customers; the "head of community" at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most flagrantly destructive entities ever to exist in the history of the world, which provided startup funding for Facebook, OpenAI, xAI, and a hundred other AI companies which are fighting over their place in the landscape of enclosing and monetizing the sum total of human creativity; and The Guy Who Invented NFTs But You Gotta Believe Me They Were Cool When I Invented Them, who is just kind of tacky.

if you'll excuse me I have to get some sleep; I have to work tomorrow, my manifesto barely paid my rent for five years and cost me nine months of job searching without unemployment insurance.

1. one of them now runs the Center for Humane Technology, which was founded by another high-ranking xoogler between 2013 and 2018 amid the first wave of Skinner boxification of technology, and now gets dripfed about $4 million a year by a bunch of civil society organizations and family foundations to be influencers. their "Impact" section on Wikipedia implies that their impact is mostly that Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook according to their teachings since 2018 (until he got way into Rome, I guess), they have a podcast, they appeared on a Netflix documentary once, and they gave a SXSW talk.↩

2. which, I am obligated to remind everyone at every opportunity, started out being a sad, irrelevant by-invitation-only platform developed by a bunch of Jack Dorsey's cryptocurrency engineers for an audience of cryptocurrency dorks until one of them screwed up the invite system and let the punks in; the punks overran a dead mall and made it look countercultural; and VC money, the site staff, and the center-left political class desperate to find a new place where they can reclaim the vibes of Hamilton Twitter since they realized Elon was a fascist (mid-2024) have been trying to kick the punks back off of this “decentralized” platform ever since.↩

3. the drafters, in a poorly-considered attempt to (I'm sure they would tell themselves) avoid stigmatizing people with substance abuse disorders, decided to edit the word "user" out of the descriptions of the AI systems they wanted to build, ignoring the fact that their manifesto describes a world they want to build -- and thus, the fundamental goal they achieved by doing this was to avoid an unflattering association of their ideal world with the stigma of substance abuse, which still rings clear as a bell in their heads.↩

Wrong answer.

What happened?

Your kid forgot how to do something, and so they made a mistake.

“What, it’s wrong? Arghh. I failed again. I’m a failure.”

Sadness and tears (used to, or maybe still do) ensue.

Perhaps even anger at themselves / math in general.

This is a real danger if your kid loves math and they forget something. It feels like getting an answer wrong because they forgot how to do something is a reflection of who they are and a value judgment of who they are as a person.

Some parents help instill in their kids the feeling that “if I am good at math, I am valued.”

Some kids instill that feeling in themselves (Hello, perfectionism!).

In either case, it’s not mentally healthy and misses the bigger picture.

Some kids go through it early, while others carry on this burden for part/most of their lives.

Today’s post is about “What to do when they forget something they *knew*”.

I. Start With the Reassurance: Forgetting Is Normal

While not helpful in the moment, it’s crucial to help kids understand that forgetting how to do this is normal and a part of the human experience.

It can also be helpful for you, as an adult, to remind yourself that forgetting something isn’t a sign of laziness or disrespect.

Overall, it’s not a character flaw in the child, it’s just something that happens.

Forgetting is how memory works and not a sign that something has gone wrong.

We’ll talk about it in the next section, but your brain and the kids’ brains are built to forget things they don’t use, so if it’s been a while since they used that math technique, the brain will eventually forget it.

So if a kid forgets something, it’s not that they’re bad at math, a failure, or should quit math.

It’s that they’re human, and their brain decided it didn’t need that bit of information.

The key message for your kid is that forgetting will happen.

Not if, but when and how often.

And that’s it perfectly normal.

And as adults, it’s up to us to model positive behavior, and how we respond, so the kid learns it’s not a value judgment and that it’s natural.

It means we have to work on helping our brain understand that we want to remember it.

You may even share when you forget something to show them that it happens frequently, in many different circumstances, and that it’s not the end of the world.

II. The Science: How Memory Works

In our household, it helped us learn a bit of the science behind how memory actually works.

Roughly speaking, there is a short-term memory system and a long-term memory system. (This is a simplification, but a useful one for our purposes.)

Short-Term Memory

Short-term memory can hold about seven items (plus or minus two) (Note that some modern studies say that the number is closer to 4 +/- 1).

So at any one time, you can remember 5 to 9 things.

Sure, you can chunk things to squeeze a bit more out of it (think about phone numbers: remembering “123” instead of “1” and “2” and “#”), but the roughly seven-item limit remains the same.

This is why cramming works (for a short while): you can cram things into your brain in chunks and then regurgitate them soon after.

Two reasons not to rely on short-term memory are that a) as new information enters, your brain throws out old information, and more importantly for math, short-term memory cannot support multi-step reasoning (which is basically what math involves).

Long-Term Memory

Long-term memory can hold an unlimited amount of information for long periods.

However, there are a few limitations (ignoring the biological one of the brain being a fixed, non-infinite size):

• Difficulty in memory retrieval: Not all long-term memories are equally strong, and some may be harder to access than others

• Memory cues: Retrieving information is often easier with prompts or “memory cues” that help activate the memory trace, much like searching for a file on a computer

• Memory degradation: The accuracy of recalling information can decrease over time, not necessarily because of a limited duration, but potentially due to factors like age or interference from new information.

Which is where the forgetting happens if it’s a math technique that hasn’t been used in a while (which again, is perfectly natural).

Memory degradation follows a curve-like pattern rather than being linear.

The “forgetting curve” means it takes a while to forget something, but then it drops off sharply.

Short-Term to Long-Term

The name of the game, then, is to move things from short-term to long-term memory and to strengthen the retrieval patterns and memory cues.

There are many tools to help you move things into long-term memory, like our favorite, Anki.

The focus is on:

• repetition

• spaced exposure

• retrieval practice

• using knowledge in new contexts

Remembering Math

Whether it’s Math or what your 1st grade teacher’s last name was, the brain stores all of the information pretty much the same way.

When the kid works on math and sometimes forgets it, it’s not that the kid is “forgetting math”, it’s that the kid’s brain is forgetting *a thing that happened to be math*.

Thus, knowing the science behind memory and forgetting (even this basic introduction) means that the kid (and you as the adult) are well equipped to help the kid understand scientifically what happened, why it’s normal, and how to improve it (such as working on your spaced repetition, doing more practice problems, and using retrieval practice like quizzing yourself).

The tricky thing, however, is that math builds upon itself, so “I forgot how to do the problem” isn’t as straightforward as one might think.

III. Math Has Many Steps, and Kids Forget Steps Differently

Roughly speaking, doing math involves a long chain of small reasoning steps.

Later in college and beyond, it moves to making a statement and rigorously proving whether it is true or false, again using a chain of small reasoning steps.

In either case, math involves a (short, medium, long) chain of reasoning steps.

So when the kid says “I forgot how to do the problem”, it’s not an all-or-nothing statement, as in “I know it” versus “I don’t”.

Even trickier is that there is a ladder of fluency in math that makes the “forgotten technique” issue even fuzzier.

We can think of the ladder of fluency as follows:

1. Seen it once and can recognize the problem and technique to be used

2. Can setup the problem solving strategy and start it

3. Can do all the steps with help

4. Can do all the steps on their own but slowly

5. Can do the steps accurately but not automatically (think having to skip count by 8 to figure out the 7*8 multiplication, rather than remembering that 7*8 = 56)

6. Can do it easily, fast, accurately, every time

And since each kid will be on a different rung of the ladder for every single math technique, it’s harder to pinpoint exactly what was forgotten / where and how to help.

Which means we/you/the kid has to dig deeper to figure out precisely what was forgotten.

Which is why teachers in school tend to be super pedantic about a) neat writing, b) writing down your thinking process, and c) writing down each and every step.

IV. Why Writing Every Step Helps

Writing out all the steps lets you/the kids see exactly *where* things fell apart or how far they got before they couldn’t do anything else.

Note that if you do math with the kid by sitting next to them, it also lets you see what steps of the reasoning were fast vs slow, and what steps had to be redone as the kid remembered something they should have done earlier (especially in early math things like negative signs, parentheses, converting fractions, and so on).

Additionally, this process helps teach the kid how to self-coach when they work alone later by noticing what was easy for them and what was hard.

If it was easy, then I don’t need to work on that skill.

If it was hard, then I need to work on making that memory easier to retrieve.

If it was impossible, then I need to go back to figure out what I forgot.

Bringing back the science of memory: if each step in a solution is already in long-term memory, then the brain is freed up to focus on the *new* technique that’s being learned right now.

Let’s look at the impossible-to-figure-out-how-to-proceed step where they got stuck or got it wrong.

V. When They Forget: Diagnose the Right Problem

Kids rarely forget the technique itself, they just forget a prerequisite step.

For example:

• Trouble with multiplication → underlying trouble with repeated addition *or* with 2-digit mental addition.

• Trouble with negative signs → underlying trouble with inverse operations

• Trouble with fractions → underlying trouble with factoring or Lowest Common Multiple

This is why “I forgot how to do this problem” often really means “I forgot one small piece that everything else depends on.”

Which means that to help them remember it, you and they need to go backwards to figure out the last point they fully remember.

It’s best to go backward, one unit/concept at a time, to make sure you aren’t covering material they already remember.

Then, when you do find it, you want to move forward slowly until you hit the *exact* gap in their knowledge.

Once you find that, you cement that knowledge through various means (the next section covers this) to improve the accuracy of the kids’ thinking.

This builds confidence and helps them learn how to recover from “forgotten” math knowledge.

VI. The Review Strategy Works That For Us

Three things we want to focus on when go back to figure out how to fix the issue.

*We want to make it very clear to the kid that there is no shame and nothing wrong with them for forgetting.*

We want them to stop spiraling if their emotions are getting too big for them to handle.

We also want to make sure we focus only on the missing piece and nothing else, because that’s what was forgotten, so we/they won’t waste time reteaching/relearning everything.

The review pattern is roughly as follows:

1. Go back 2–3 chapters before the “forgotten” skill.

2. Do a few examples from earlier material to warm up.

3. Move forward gradually until we hit the forgotten step.

4. Celebrate rediscovery (“oh right, that’s the part I forgot!”).

5. Re-teach or re-practice just the missing piece.

6. Do a handful of new problems to refresh long-term memory.

Sometimes this will be quick, and sometimes (we’ve been there!) it’ll take a few weeks to internalize the technique again.

Whether the forgetting is resolved in the short or long term, both are normal and highly dependent on the child.

Again, there is nothing wrong with the kid when they forget something, and if it takes them time to re-learn the skill.

They’re a math-loving kid, so it should always be shaped as a fun (re-)exploration of the topic.

Sometimes you might have to do this two or three (or more) times with the same topic, and that’s okay.

Two things you may run into if it’s a highly-specific technique or if the resource you’re using (worksheets, book, website) are that a) you can’t find enough new problems to work on the technique, or b) you/the kid need another way to explain the technique.

Luckily, we live in the age of LLMs and AI.

VII. Use AI as a Gentle Diagnostic and Problem Creation Tool (Not a Crutch)

We don’t want to train the kid to use AI to find answers to math problems because doing math problems is the whole point of learning math.

What we do want to help train the kid on is how to use the LLMs/AIs effectively to help the learning process.

Especially knowing that today’s algorithms can provide wrong answers, hallucinate things that aren’t real, and may be built on shaky moral/legal grounds.

To that end, use the AI to ask for only the next step, not the whole solution.

*Remember that you are diagnosing what was forgotten, not having it show you how to do the problem.*

Once you know where the memory gap was, you can use the AI to generate basic to intermediate problems explicitly focused on that exact step.

This helps focus the learning time and ensures the right thing is practiced to help it move from short-term memory to long-term memory.

As a bonus, if it’s not shown in the book, you can ask the AI to help show how a specific math technique/fact can be derived.

VIII. Re-Derive, Don’t Just Re-Memorize

When you/the kid work through re-deriving the example, it’ll help connect to more things within their existing memory structure which will make it easier to remember in the future.

Three examples that fit here are:

• Arithmetic: Multiplication as repeated addition

• High School Algebra I: Quadratic formula

• High School Geometry: Area of an equilateral triangle

In each case, the kid can memorize the fact/formula, but they’ll be much better served if they go through the derivations a few times, especially if they forgot them.

The re-derivation helps train them in mathematical reasoning, strengthens connections to other topics they’ve seen before, and reduces the fear of forgetting, since they can always re-derive it if need be.

This can also help you with kids who really want to know why something works.

Obviously, you may not have time to rederive everything from scratch/first principles every time, but if a topic is often forgotten, it’s well worth spending the time there.

Over time, this will become one of the strongest “maturity builders.”

Speaking of building maturity, when a kid forgets something and gets upset, or when they share work with you and you notice where they forgot, emotions will run high.

IX. Emotional Work: No Shock, No Anger, No Value Judgment

Emotions will run high for both parent AND child.

I’ve been there and incredulously asked, “How could you even forget that?!”

I may have even demanded an answer to, “Why did you forget that?!”

I’ve definitely let my frustration run away with me.

I, too, am human, and it’s hard to remember in the moment that the kids already feel rotten about having forgotten something.

My/your inquisition will not help them.

It usually just adds shame on top of confusion.

This makes their emotions run even higher/hotter and makes it less likely that they’ll be able to reason through it.

Instead, we (and hopefully they in the long run) need to remember that forgetting is expected, that it lets us review topics we enjoyed learning in the past, and that it has no merit on who we are as a person or student of math.

And if your frustration gets the better of you, apologize right away.

I always apologized and explained my surprise.

While I may not longer get mad/sad/frustrated, I still do get surprised.

But now I have a plan (the above), and we will work through it.

While it may seem like a small thing, being able to recover is a great “life practice” that will help the kids with homework, tests, college, and life down the road.

Forgetting will happen again in the future.

X. Build the Habit of Leaving Notes for Their Future Self

To help guide them in their reasoning and to help them understand, it can be helpful to ask them to leave notes for their future self in case they forget again.

The explanation should be in their own words, relating what they forget and how to remember it.

Be sure to encourage them by creating examples that helped them understand.

This way, if they forget again, they have a friend waiting for them on the page: their past self.

This works wonderfully because it teaches self-coaching, autonomy, and long-term resilience.

It also means they use language that makes sense to them so if/when they look at it again later, they will probably have an easier time understanding the examples.

And like the other skills above, they can continue to use this technique in a myriad of subjects and in life.

XI. Conclusion: Forgetting happens, so have a plan

Forgetting is part of learning, and the sooner you and your kid accept it and have a plan for handling it, the better the emotional outcomes you and they will achieve.

The goal isn’t to never forget (though Anki can really help here), it’s to know what to do when the kid forgets something.

Lead with kindness (self-love) and remind the brain that it actually did need that piece of information.

Everyone, from kindergarteners to professional mathematicians, forgets from time to time, and that’s just life in mathematics.

XII. Closing

That’s all for today :) For more Kids Who Love Math treats, check out our archives.

Stay Mathy!

Talk soon,
Sebastian

PS What’s something you or your child “forgot” that surprised you? Hit reply or comment.

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