My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among […]
Paul Graham’s Legacy
Last week there was a press release you might easily have missed. A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs. Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class.
Big deal, it’s Y Combinator Junior, right?
Wrong. It’s Y Combinator on steroids.
This second-generation YC has […]
2021 Prediction #6: COVID-19, Clubhouse, and the Great High School Reset
To this point in my tech predictions for 2021 I have ignored COVID-19, which we all do at our peril. Now that we know the pandemic is real, that it won’t just disappear, and that half a million people are so far dead from it, what are predictable longer-term impacts? I see plenty changing in how we work, how we use social media, and how education has generally failed. Coming out the other side of this mess several aspects of life will be different, but school probably won’t be one of those.
I have an unusual perspective on these times since I am a parent of three sons (19, 16, and 14), I have […]
2020-21 is the asterisk academic year
A few weeks ago I wrote a column about helping our children cope with distance learning as we hide from COVID-19. Since then I’ve watched the progress of my own children — Cole (16) and Fallon (14) are still at home — and I’ve spoken to friends and teachers all over the world. It isn’t going well. In fact, the whole distance learning experience has been a disaster that will ultimately result in this academic year being forever assigned an asterisk to separate it from every other academic year, before or after.
I hope your experience is better, but I doubt that is the case. And the fact that people […]
Cringely’s Rules for Home Schooling in the Age of COVID-19
My first job out of college was teaching biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture at Triway High School in rural Wooster, Ohio. I lasted for six weeks. The school environment was such a downer, from the smoke-filled teachers’ lounge to my young co-workers who were teaching mainly, it seemed to me, to avoid service in Vietnam. So when a reporting job became available, I jumped on it, leaving Ohio forever. Years later I returned to teaching, this time at Stanford University, where I worked for six years. Now, 37 years after Stanford, I’m teaching my kids at home thanks to COVID-19. You may be teaching your kids, too. This […]
