Daily Tech News 16 June 2025

• Why Johnny (class of '27) can't read. (Substack)
  
  Only 5% of college English majors were able to understand the first seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House.
  
  Now it's understandable that someone might not fully grasp the specifics of social roles in 19th century England - at least not if they haven't read Dickens or Austen or other great authors of the period before - but it is worse than that.
  
  Much worse.
  
  Paragraph from Bleak House:

  As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

  And here's the response. Note that this is from a college English major:

  [Pause.] [Laughs.] So it's like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything's been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he's says they're waddling, um, all up the hill

  And this is when the students had access to freely look up anything with which they were unfamiliar.
  
  Kowalski, analysis:

  Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech.

  Full depressing article here.

• By why male models? (arXiv)
  
  Using AI for writing essays fries your brain.
  
  But the above study is a year old and the students had all been in college for two years or more at the time, so that's probably not the full answer.
  
  Edit: Turns out the above study (the first article, not this one) was originally conducted in 2015. So no, AI is not the answer. Their brains were already fried.
  
  
  
• Don't buy an RTX 4090; it's probably fake. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And expensive. Not a good combination.
  
  
  
• Could this city (Vienna) be the model for how to tackle the housing crisis and climate change? No. (NPR)
  
  Apart from anything else - Vienna has a pretty mild climate most of the time, rarely getting very cold and never getting extremely hot - there's something more important hidden away in a footnote:

  About half of Vienna's 2 million residents live in social housing. Here, at Biotope City, the social housing has solar panels. Vienna is using social housing to cut greenhouse gases and help adapt to climate change.

  It's a nice pod, but it's still a pod.
  
  
  
• Facebook's Llama 31 can recall 42% of the text of the Harry Potter novels if you prompt it with the text of the Harry Potter novels. (Understanding AI)
  
  Yeah. How about that.
  
  I think the author has been using too much AI and has progress from the second article to the first.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:44 AM

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