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minitechtoday at 1:44 AM0 repliesview on HN

This comment is confusing to me on so many levels. What’s with the tangent(?) about a math test your algebra teacher could have generated? Did you bring up an illiterate teacher (extreme outlier) as evidence that the general population has low comfort with written English, or…? (I’m going to resist getting into the rest of the tangent, but it’s really impressively densely perplexing.)

(edit: I’m not going to resist)

> If he could have written (in 2009) "give 20 question test for week 1 algebra II student with answer guide"

Is the “could” here just about AI not existing back then, or does “could not interact with the written language” imply that he could not have written this prompt? Why would he need the output, given that most of it is math? (If we assume he can speech-to-text the prompt, why can’t he do the same for other writing?) If the level of writing of “Write equation of a line in slope-intercept form with slope 3 and y-intercept −2” is the challenge, is he able to read it? What if the output is wrong – who’s going to verify it? Are you presenting this as a good thing? How did/would he grade handwritten written-answer questions?