Here's an example wiki in a public repository for a dictionary I have been having Claude build for the past few months:

https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1/blob/main/planning/wiki...

I have to consciously avoid using AI for more cognitive tasks, though. It would be very tempting to have Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini summarize, classify, and grade the students’ assignments, write individual feedback, prepare my lesson plans, etc. However, I know that my engagement with the material and with the students would suffer. I also want to show the students that they are learning together with me and with each other, not with bots.

I am semiretired and have a light teaching load that gives me plenty of time to prepare for class. I can see that full-time teachers might find it hard to resist the lure of offloading their thinking to AI.

https://www.gally.net/temp/20260518-japan-transmission-grid/...

The image produced by the program seemed unbalanced because Japan’s southernmost islands were included even though they are not part of the electrical grid. I used an image editing program to remove the outlines of those islands and shift the main part of the country toward the center.

Side comments:

Not indicated on the map is the fact that Japan’s electrical grid runs at 50 Hz in the eastern and northern parts of the country and 60 Hz in the west:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan

The electrical power distribution system is now undergoing a major redesign:

https://souhai-sys.co.jp/business/ (Japanese only)

Presumably it will be possible to adjust that behavior with settings, the system prompt, etc. Not that most users will make such adjustments, though.

I'm currently teaching a class on AI-related issues at a university in Tokyo. Many of the students were surprised when I showed them that they can change the response behavior of chatbots to make them more or less verbose, sycophantic, etc. It shifted the direction of our discussions on the possible impacts of AI on the people who use it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48089512

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I gave Opus the same prompt again, incognito with no search. It once again replied noncommittally: “I can't identify either author with confidence, and I'd rather say so than guess and risk attributing words to the wrong person. What I can tell you from internal evidence:...” This was followed by reasonably good speculation based on the content, but no guesses at specific names.

I followed up with “Could you try your best, just on vibes? It's fine if you're wrong, I just want to see what you can do!,” as you suggested.

Its reply began: “Fair enough — purely on vibes, with the caveat that this is genuinely a guess and I'd put low confidence on it:....” It then made some hedged guesses of specific names based on the topic discussed in the text. The guesses were wrong but not unreasonable. (The people it named are much more famous than I am.)

But it also speculated based on the writing style:

“Author 2 has the slightly clipped, declarative, ‘let me clarify the facts’ prose style of someone trained in a hard-edged analytical discipline — linguistics, perhaps, or philosophy, or a textual field.”

I am Author 2. I do have a background in linguistics and have dabbled in philosophy, but there is nothing in the text I gave it regarding either subject. So that was a good guess, even if it couldn’t identify me by name.

Opus 4.7 in incognito mode without web search gave up: “I can't identify either author with confidence — I don't recognize this specific exchange, and I'd rather tell you that than guess and risk attributing words to the wrong person. What I can offer are the clues the text itself gives: The two are colleagues at the same university, with offices in the same building and....”

In a new incognito conversation, I gave Opus the same prompt but this time let it search the web. After twenty-six web searches (according to its reasoning trace), it was able to identify me correctly by name. It seems to have used both the content and my writing style as clues. It correctly identified my colleague as British but didn’t come up with his name.

Two things stand out in my memory:

Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.

The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928523

Points: 57

# Comments: 38

Agreed.

The clipboard manager I had been using on my Macs for many years started flaking out after an OS update. The similar apps in the App Store didn’t seem to have the functionality I was looking for. So inspired by a Simon Willison blog post [1] about vibe coding SwiftUI apps, I had Claude Code create one for me. It took a few iterations to get it working, but it is now living in the menu bar of my Mac, doing everything I wanted and more.

Particularly enlightening to me was the result of my asking CC for suggestions for additional features. It gave me a long list of ideas I hadn’t considered, I chose the ones I wanted, and it implemented them.

Two days ago, I decided I wanted a dedicated markdown editor for my own use—something like the new markdown editing component in LibreOffice [2] but smaller and lighter. I asked the new GPT 5.5 to prepare an outline of such a program, and I had CC implement it. After two vibe coding sessions, I now have a lightweight native Mac app that does nearly everything I want: open and create markdown files, edit them in a word-processing-like environment, and save them with canonical markdown formatting. It doesn’t handle markdown tables yet; I’ll try to get CC to implement that feature later today.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298885

https://www.gally.net/temp/20260422-chatgpt-images-2-example...

I teach at two universities in Japan and occasionally give lectures on AI issues at others, and the consensus I get from the faculty and students I talk with is that there is no consensus about what to do about AI in higher education.

Education in many subjects has been based around students producing some kind of complex output: a written paper, a computer program, a business plan, a musical composition. This has been a good method because, when done well, students could learn and retain more from the process of creating such output than they would from, say, studying for and taking in-class tests. Also, the product often mirrored what the students would be doing in their future lives, so they were learning useful skills as well.

AI throws a huge spanner into that product-based pedagogy, because it allows students to short-cut the creation process and thus learn little or nothing. Also, it is no longer clear how valuable some of those product-creation skills (writing, programming, planning) will be in the years ahead.

And while the fundamental assumptions behind some widely used teaching methods are being overthrown, many educators, students, and administrators remain attached to the traditional ways. That’s not surprising, as AI is so new and advancing so rapidly that it’s very difficult to say with any confidence how education needs to change. But, in my opinion at least, it does need to change at a very fundamental level. That change won’t be easy.

I suspect that efficiency of layout is the top priority in both cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if McDonald's is also consciously trying to show that their food is human-prepared, both in the store design and in their food photos.