I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this.
Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fact companies allow employees to have it, despite obvious security issues of sending everything one types to a saas, is even more wild.
People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office settings. Some of those would install anything that would help them through text-based communications.
[1]: "How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers" https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
[2]: "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong" https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
[3]: "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level" https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rqulik/til_t...
I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels.
Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.
US is at the bottom of the OECD PISA rankings (as it is with life expectency too), though on a global basis you're right (better than Morocco or Indonesia on both criteria).
Shockingly Australia has fallen quite a bit from the initial PISA study where it was ranked #4, now almost as bad as USA.
https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country
Honestly what surprised me the most from your very informative link was that France is lower than the US! I'm probably biased but I've always considered the French education system to be quite rigorous and well rounded, with a few different education paths to fit different student profiles from a pretty early stage. Especially compared to canada, which in my experience has a rather weak and rigid curriculum.
(Though I dislike the way french and European higher education in general works. You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. The choices you make in high school basically define what you can even study in, and thus what you can do for the rest of your life. I think that's one thing the US does super well, even more so considering that degrees are less important there in the first place.)
This was true 50 years ago but hasn't been true since the 90's or so. France may well be the exception in this, but then again, France is an exception in many ways.
Isn't it still true in Germany? With the different high school tiers that can even make it impossible to enroll for a university degree? Though you are right that I shouldn't say that Europe as a whole is like Germany or France even if it's sometime easy to assume so haha.
There are different tiers of highschools and different tiers of higher education.
The first tiers are more targetted towards craftsmanship (e.g. arithmetic and trigonometry you can quickly do in your head, you start working earlier in life, as early as 16) while the latter tiers are more universal and abstract (e.g. math concepts that have better use for computer science, you start working much later, around 25 years old).
You can switch between tiers or fetch later.
Thanks for the details! If you wanted to switch from craftsmanship to say, a more abstract field. Would you have to do the entire 10 years (ish?) of "missed" education?
I know that here in Quebec, you can enroll in university no matter what as long as you are 21 years old and finished high school. Does that happen in Germany? Or is it rare to actually be able to switch between "paths"?
Germany tends to be more focused on paperwork, there isn't a German that is even moderately active in business that I know that doesn't have a 'steuerberater', it's overly complicated and the paper tends to be in the lead. Germany has fewer free professions than other EU countries as far as I know, lots of things are regulated and it can definitely be harder to switch. But it isn't impossible and I know more than one German who successfully switched careers, even between regulated industries and academic / business careers.
In France, from what I know there is a fairly strong culture of secondary education that creates an 'in-group', not unlike what you see in the UK or the USA with their top-tier universities, and you are either 'on the plan' or you won't be able to get in unless you are of exceptional abilities and that rarely happens later in life, so I think that alone is sufficient to explain the discrepancy.
In NL you can enroll in higher education basically whenever you want, quota permitting and with the intense competition for such spots from abroad by very qualified young people this too can be tricky, depending on the field. But in NL a university degree isn't a pre-requisite for many jobs outside of academia (and teaching) itself.
Anything to do with technology tends to be more merit based, and achievement there tends to trump formal education, and by the time you are 40+ that formal education tends to be weighted far less than when you are say 25 and just out of school.
Other countries would add more to the pattern of variability, there is a huge difference between say Poland or Romania or the Nordics or the Baltics, further reflected in the weight that which a diploma or degree from such institution would carry, especially abroad. For instance, right now in the Baltics there is something of a brain drain happening with the younger generation moving West in droves and so as an older person it is stupidly easy to enroll in a university program. But that degree isn't going to help you much unless you remain in the local economy and the degrees from a decade or more ago are given more weight than the ones that you get there right now because they are fairly desperate for students just to keep the departments up and running.
That’s definitely outdated. Literacy rate of my “third world” country is %16 higher than US atm.
What's the functional literacy rate though?
Be careful trying to compare countries or even historical numbers when standards vary. The US has a 99% literacy rate based on some metrics, but as often happens when metrics become useless the people tracking them raise the bar.
Thus the US’s “Level 1” literacy rate, which represents being able to follow basic written instructions, was 92% in 2014. But in 2020 the standard changed yet again to: “54% of adults in the United States have English prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.” Noticeably being literate in a non English language suddenly doesn’t count, the prose at 6th grade level is also higher than it’s been in the past.
Or as Wikipedia puts it: In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
It's odd to read the story of an adult who believes they're a poor reader, still to this day apparently, because of what happened to them 30 years ago. Odder still that the article leaves itself the only conclusion of going all the way back to grade school and trying an entirely different strategy and hoping that just "works out" in the end.
The lack of "continuing education" in the era of the internet is baffling to me.
I think about this a lot, too. My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I? I think there are two reasons: a lack of focused effort, and the steadily increasing demands of adulthood.
I do reasonably okay at self-guided education when I want to, but there's definitely a difference vs. a structured secondary education environment, where there is accountability and other people to guide each other through the process. And, that's coming in to those subjects with already a better-than-average literacy and numeracy; I have to expect that for people who struggle with grade school reading comprehension or math, trying to bootstrap those abilities alone would be daunting.
Also, there's just less room for pursuing those now. Lots of people are getting squeezed by concerns that aren't part of most childrens' awareness -- housing costs, bureaucracy, the treadmill of maintaining all the machines that get us through daily life. Those add enormous pressure to dedicate more time towards professional development and "getting ahead", or at least not falling further behind, and that has been eroding all of the unstructured time that I would spend working my way through a textbook (or online class). People with poor literacy are probably more likely to have lower-paying positions, so all of those demands are even more severe.
Not that it's impossible. Lots of people do manage to self-educate their way out of poorer circumstances, and certainly the internet has made that far more accessible than it was before the turn of the century. But, let's not underestimate how challenging it is, either.
My suspected culprits:
1) The massively increased complexity of ordinary living is overconsumining our personal resources. and
2) For post-GenX and later, the erasure of childhood (free-roaming & peer-only hours) sabotages[1] the reward systems (joy) that supercharge early learning.
The less joy there is to facilitate learning, the more effort is required (from otherwise overly depleted resources).
[1] similar to what abuse and neglect do
Isn't the opposite true with regards to complexity of ordinary living? We've specialised so far that most people aren't required to or even capable of sewing their own clothes, hunting/growing/foraging their own food, building their own shelter and furniture. Something our great grandparents would find unbelievable.
Modern living is so monotonously boring and devoid of any challenge that people are find more and more creative ways to try and get an ounce of that physical and mental stimulation back in their lives (hobbies, exercise, gaming, etc).
To reinforce your point: I have dyslexic friends and family that have learnt to write over time. Very difficult, but they have learnt because they had to for high paying jobs.
One friend literally couldn't read. He took himself through adult reading courses. He ain't no Shakespeare, but I can now txt him and get a written reply.
Tech is helping, but the underlying reason for the change is their own initiative.
I would judge that none of the friends or family illiteracy was actually caused by our schooling system in New Zealand. Some people just struggle and our pedagogy will always be imperfect. Certainly I can see some failures in my own schooling that still exist and I would like to see fixed (mostly get rid of 99% of the deep crap).
It's all about incentives. That is companies are incentivised to give continuing entertainment for ad clicks, rather than building a world of the educated that may have a better all outcome for society (but probably not the ad companies at all).
she had known thant she has disease, so she can't read well when childhood. but the main point is why her normal daughter was taught same strategy by school.
I didn’t see a direct mention of it in the links, but is the junk method referred to called Reading Recovery? First I’ve ever heard of it, at least by name. Found it by googling the name Marie Clay that I did see mentioned in one of these links. (Annoying how hard they work to bury the lede.)
If I remember right (it has been a while since I dived into this topic), Reading Recovery was one of the programs mentioned. It was supposed to be a supporting approach to teaching reading to kids who were struggling otherwise.
The mainstream approach that really made a hash of things though was "Whole Language" learning, largely commercialized by Fountas and Pinnell, which eventually provided the program and associated materials to classrooms around the world. This program relied, in part, on guessing: if a child got stuck on a word, they would be asked to guess what word might fit in the sentence. Sometimes they were given context clues, like a picture on the page. Any efforts to associate individual letters or letter combinations with sounds was abandoned.
Wikipedia has something of a watered-down overview of this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language, but I really recommend listening to the podcast in the second link in my parent comment (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/), APM Reports put together a compelling examination of what happened, and it's explained well. (I do wish it was also available in a more typical article format.)
Between the whole language approach to literacy and undiagnosed ADHD, I was very slow at learning how to read. Fortunately, my parents were able to force my grade school to put me into special ed for a couple of years and I rapidly acquired the skill. I have no idea how the teaching methods differed though, beyond classes being half the size and the special ed teacher being accompanied by an aide
There are a lot of people whose professional outcomes are meaningfully constrained by their ability produce clear business English.
I know a guy who used to get inexplicable feedback about his communication that boiled down to “write better.” This limited his ability to get promoted. He runs all his comms through ChatGPT and asks it to “make this more professional” and doesn’t get that feedback anymore.
I get that people don't care or understand this, but that's also saying he cc's OpenAI, and therefore probably Microsoft, and therefore almost definitely the NSA, on all his business communications. What a world.
Man, I don't know where most of the people here work, but the shit most people write about in their jobs is inconsequential and not super secret. It's performance reviews and meeting notes. 99.99% of the workforce isn't writing about the company's secret sauce... Ever. Maybe director level and up. Also, most companies make physical things, not software, so there's no secret sauce to share through email anyway.
The conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Sure it does. There's no secret to making boxes, or installing glass windows, or making frozen pizzas, or ordering gravel, or installing breakers, or paving sidewalks. Very very few companies make something that actually sets them apart via a trade secret. And sure, there might be some tricks in those examples but it's not putting anyone out of business via being accidentally found a year from now in accidentally leaked partial training data.
My last job was Director of IT and I'm absolutely sick and tired of security fear mongering. Turn on MFA for everything. Boom. You are now secured from 99.9999% of attacks. Chat GPT is absolutely the least of my concerns.
About 0.1% (0.001%??) of business communication might have adverse consequences for you/your company if forwarded to Microsoft or OpenAI or the NSA. The rest is absolutely fine. And you’re probably already using Gmail or Android or Chrome or Exchange365 or iOS or *something* that could theoretically forward your comms to a tech company (and the security state).
Compared to the alternative of having your colleagues think you’re a bit stupid just because you were raised speaking a language other than English, or your parents weren’t middle class… using Grammarly or ChatGPT is a no brainer. I’d support anyone using whatever tools they can to overcome discrimination and thrive.
The alternatives are:
1. Educate everyone in the company to stop discriminating against people based on language ability (impossible??)
2. Provide a local self-hosted version of the tools (although as a worker at RandomCorp, I would probably prefer to forward all my comms to Microsoft than to management!)
3. Tell people facing discrimination to just shut up and deal with it.
Given the context of an engineer with such poor writing skills that they can't be promoted I'd say the odds anything they write mattering to Microsoft or the NSA are quite a lot closer to 0%. In the only circumstances that it did matter, I'd guess you're not unlikely to be better off with them in the loop anyway since we're talking deep cover industrial espionage.
People won't care until something major happens and after that they'll implement some draconian half-measure that doesn't fix anything like snooping on office WiFi.
How's that even supposed to work, given that the average corporate ecosystem is so vastly cloud-based now that the majority of services use desktop and mobile apps that pin HTTPS certificates?
As good as the average corporate IT security is that I've witnessed via my work, passing said data to NSA/OpenAI is the least of their issues. Far less scrupulous hackers are running amok as it is.
I’m not sure how to explain this but Microsoft doesn’t need OpenAI to get access to business emails.
I've seen people do this on the same week as mandatory trainings featuring this exact scenario. At multiple companies
Where it will go through teams, outlook/exchange, or O365.
Not leaking data is no longer as easy as it used to be. Just some forms are more accepted than others.
I suspect it all started with two Ukrainian who got tired of checking how much of "a" and "the" they forgot to sprinkle into their texts.
I read comments online, and in my experience the most difficult writing to parse isn't from foreign speakers who drop articles or mis-conjugate things - it's from people whose writing is just, for the lack of a better term, bad. This is very common on places like Nextdoor or Facebook.
It's things like:
- total stream-of-consciousness gibberish that could probably be assembled into a coherent statement if the writer would re-read what they wrote and edit it
- A complete lack of punctuation, or even understanding of sentence and paragraph structure; at a glance, it looks like what I described above, but it's different because there's definitely a topic and a point they're looking to make, but they can't put the words together correctly.
- spelling so bad, that even with context, it's unclear what word they're intending to use.
- A wild misunderstanding of how to start and stop conversations online. (One recent example is me asking someone on Facebook if I could stop by to check out a garage sale, and a clarifying question about a term they used, only to get the response "ok." Note that in their post, they didn't specify an address beyond the name of the town they live in.)
You can definitely point out flaws in the way I grew up - somewhat solitary, spending a lot of time alone in my room on a computer connected to the internet - but I think that it at least taught me how to make myself understood in written form.
This drives me nuts. Did anyone see this [1] on HN the other day? People in comments were springing up to defend this atrocious writing style.
Make a paragraph. Make a point.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275905
I think that writing style has a point in _realtime_ text chat, where you are racing to get your comment in and turn in the conversation. It’s like a way of streaming your thoughts, not unlike voice conversation - many of the defenses seemed to be talking about that. Not defending it in non-realtime scenarios though.
Oh yeah, I didn't even think about context switching for different communication mediums - maybe my complaints are mostly about people who are used to texting people a series of text messages, in a more conversational way, that doesn't really translate to something like an email or a Facebook/forum post?
I'm not a huge fan of that, but it looks like poetry, and what's more, it looks intentional. The author was going for something, and is probably aware that some folks won't like it.
That's a whole different beast from an email I'll get from a coworker/neighbor where I cannot parse what's even being asked of me, and where the writing is so confusing I don't even know how to ask them to clarify their statement other than to tell them to start over, possibly all the way from kindergarten.
I have far more understanding and patience for non-native English speakers making those sorts of mistakes than I do for native speakers.
You write like a native speaker, so I'm not surprised. But imagine having a few years of school-German, and then taking a German language job. I'd bet there would be times you'd want a writing assistant, too.
There are also plenty of native English speakers who for whatever reason got a crappy education, and didn't get a lot of writing feedback.
As far as corporate security goes, you are correct, and we ban it. But I get why people want it.
Learning a language at school, you will soon be better than natives at grammar. It's the vocabulary, idioms and implicatures that will be tripping you up. Does grammarly really help with those?
hah better than a German at German grammar? don't think so
That is what stuck out to me: Installing rando applications on your corporate computer that has access to internal stuff... Whoooaaaa Baby! That's just a security disaster waiting to happen. It's stuff like this that eventually leads to draconian and crappy "Nobody gets admin access to their machines" corporate policies coming down.
Most TechCorp places I worked, if someone installed something like that on their corporate device, they'd get at least a stern talking-to and probably sent back to security training.
that.
especially what is puzzling me is:
so we do not want to have stack traces or whatever else this includes for security reasons, but installing basically keylogger that does spell check is ok
there are companies that forbid using chatgpt for even html development because this could leak company secrets, but grammarly on confluence/jira is just fine
The vast majority of companies don't write any code ever. Not everyone is developing "apps".
If you're going to generalize "everyone" you need to understand your business type is a tiny tiny minority of what most people do.
I really like Grammarly as a product, but I exclusively use their web editor. I wonder what their web vs desktop usage is.
Grammarly is perfectly reasonable product, the major issue is that no adults seems to be in charge at Grammarly This is clearly a product that should never ever be sold a service. This needs to exist solely as a local installation, there is no way to justify the current implementation and someone in charge at Grammarly should have pull the emergency break and demanded a re-implementation.
I understand why Grammarly sells their product as a service, but it's irresponsible and they are just waiting for their Okta moment.
I worked with someone who really needed it, but we had the usual "keep sales users as far from the actual product as possible" organizational isolation so it worked out in practice. (For engineering, it was on the "don't install this in particular" list.)
I have to wonder whether Grammarly's "Enterprise" tier and its underspecified "advanced security features" involve installing it on-site and offering am "all of your company's words don't get sent across the Internet to another company" feature.