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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • ChatGPT can be super useful, but I’m kind of worried about people learning to use it exclusively.

    I tried helping a PhD student assemble a set up for measuring transistors. He used ChatGPT to do all the code for the software control (python), which is fine, even if he relied on it to fix every single part of his code when a quick trip to the reference manuals of the equipments would solve the problem instantly.

    At a certain point I realized I maybe had misunderstood his set up design and asked him “wait, which device do you want to connect to your gate? Which terminal even is the gate?”

    And I kid you not, the dude asked ChatGPT which terminal in his device was the gate

    (he also reeked of weed so there’s that)

















  • In my first year of university, we had a fun project to make us get used to physics. One of the projects required filming someone throwing a ball upwards, and then using the footage to get the maximum height the ball reached, and doing some simple calculations to get the initial velocity of the ball (if I recall correctly).

    One of the groups that chose that project was having a discussion on a problem they were facing: the ball was clearly moving upwards on one frame, but on the very next frame it was already moving downwards. You couldn’t get the exact apex from any specific frame.

    So one of the guys, bless his heart, gave a suggestion: “what if we played the (already filmed) video in slow motion… And then we filmed the video… And we put that one in slow motion as well? Maybe do that a couple of times?”

    A friend of mine was in that group and he still makes fun of that moment, to this day, over 10 years later. We were studying applied physics.