this year so far
================

This year got off to a hell of a
start. Been throwing myself into so much
and have no idea if I'm succeeding.

The first week of the year started off
with me getting chewed out by the CIO of
my community college for plans made for
this working group before I was ever
hired. Namely, the idea of using Linux
on machines that were meant for
experimenting with machine learning as
part of different departments'
curriculum.

My former boss seemed to have made a lot
of enemies before he was yeeted into the
stratosphere and I'm currently dealing
with the fallout from all of it, playing
nice, making peace.

I'm getting stymied at every turn,
though. I found out like two weeks ago,
just as I thought I was getting ahead of
this work, that actually we need to have
a working computer lab/experimental
space set up by spring for our local
congressman to tour.

I don't know why I wasn't ever told this
before but the college isn't even giving
us a room to use without a fight.

You'd think that this is something
they'd embrace in terms of PR and
getting future funding through a
congressional office, but no basically
because all of this was the joint dream
of my now fired boss and the as of a few
months ago retired college president,
everyone in management for the college
system is treating this 800k grant award
as an annoyance to be sabotaged

Can you tell I'm frustrated?

In a very fucked up way, OpenAI
releasing chatGPT gave this group a
lifeline because now I have all the
deans across the system going "wait,
students can do all our crappy tests and
assignments that were totally generic
with AI? what do we dooooooo?" and here
I am with a group of faculty I've
already been teaching everything they
need to know to understand the theory
and limitations of these tools across 8
different departments.

I feel like I'm playing very cynical
politics but I'm trying to parlay this
panic into a push for better changes to
how we teach, well, everything. Making
evaluation less ableist, less rote, less
*boring*.

Unfortunately a lot of the deans I've
talked to are like "what if the answer
to LLMs is to have students do in-person
oral exams again, like the good old
days?" and I'm just like this is
literally the goofiest possible solution
to the problem.

Also, personally, I've just been dealing
with a lot of stress, a lot of angst, a
lot of hard feelings. That's probably
something for a separate post as I think
it's good for me to get back to using
this phlog more often to just talk about
life and everything.