jlangemeier

The problem with Spreading in LD & Policy debate is it's actually trivial to counter; but since it's still primarily focused as the approach, people's usual response is to do it themselves. LD & Policy both 'require' a virtue and criterion being evaluated, and spreading has the unintentional effect of spreading an argument too thin and ignoring that base virtue/criterion, leaving it weak and unsupported.

The easiest way to not get burried in shit isn't to dig yourself out or fling it back, but to side step it...

But tactics like this are actually at the core as to why I don't believe the author of the article is actually talking about debate (instead about discussions, dialectics, etc); since debate - at least how we establish it in both school and what we'll generously describe as 'debates' at the legislative level - is solely about 'winning' the argument, even if there's no win to be had.

It's essentially speedpass built into the car, nothing exciting.

Just like the Amazon BNPL scheme is just Layaway or a store credit card gussied up in Tech speak.

The whole article is just asking a bunch of fintech venture capitalists where they want the market to go; and throwing in a quick blurb from a JP Morgan/Chase exec to make it feel well rounded. Most banks and credit unions aren't JP Morgan, BoA, and Wells Fargo.

I'm being a bit 'tongue in cheek' with this... you mean like... ABET or NCEES, which handles the FE, EIT, and PE 'tests'?

Also, ABET already accredits Software Engineering and IT programs; and NCEES has had a Software Engineering PE in the works for the last couple years (I haven't checked recently, but iirc it was slated for release in 2022(?)).

Toy problems seem to exist in pretty much any technical discipline, but it seems most acute in the software world; and I've come to suspect that it's accessibility to making those. Code is quick and human-centric technical item, where as something like a bridge rectifier, amps, fets, and PID controllers aren't necessarily items you can just 'pull out' in an interview; you can see if someone's comfortable with CAD programs, you can see if someone has the chops to understand when a BJT is more appropriate than a MOSFET; but you can't really do that quickly as a 'whiteboarding session' so other technical fields are required to be more selective since you can't just slap out a FET configuration for a D Class amp without spec sheets, requirement gathering, probably CAD design, and other design steps; but you can sure-as-shit slap out a MVP of a SPA customer portal without any of that.

Divorcing "coding" as the act of writing code, and "coding" as the mental process of building a well designed app/system would bring the software world into better alignment with a lot of the rest of the engineering world; and would make something like a SWE PE more viable in the first place. I also don't know if you've ever sat a PE, but they're also __OPEN_BOOK__, since we know that it's a lot of knowledge to have in your head, and it's a better test if you know where to look something up and how to use the right tools (kinda like a 'take-home' exam in software interviews, but not nearly as exploitable and scummy); bring your reference material, but so much ground is covered that if you don't know your stuff, you're failing the PE no matter how many reference books you bring along.

I had used Obsidian - when it was all local file - for a while and switched to Roam because I could use it across my devices; going to try out Obsidian again because of the Syncing that's now available (and I was too lazy to get it set up with some stupid/janky rsync attempt on a box/drive folder).

Definitely liked Obsidian's ecosystem a lot more than Roam's so I'm excited to give it another shot now that my one missing - but needed - feature is now available.

You're literally __NOT__ citing the study used and provided to the regents and which forms the basis for the article.

Again, as I noted to the GP, the study is not clear in all cases what n they are using when calculating their percentages, and the author of the article takes advantage of that.

Further, you're reading a lot into my comments; I am neither advocating for or against changes to given policy, but that the study leaves inconsistencies that the author readily takes advantage of for their own agenda.

UC reports international students separately. [sic]

The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and others are general enough that the lack of detail is concerning as the study leaves out the total population and only provides percentages.

Not in higher ed.

While the common/colloquial understanding through recent years shows that Asian students are more represented in higher ed; the general notion of what URM is codified as in higher ed contexts is less known; and wasn't clearly defined in the article. And I initially spoke too broadly, as the PI (pacific islander) portion of AAPI is included in URM, the Asian portion is not; and the PI portion is not mention anywhere in the article; and with AAPI discrimination being in the current cultural Zeitgeist, if that distinction goes unmentioned it's a leading statement.

There is a chance; but more than likely they're quietly mixing what they count in the denominator; especially since with the rest of the URM group and whites it seems they are very careful to call out that its comparisons between the high school pipeline and the in-state collegiate pipeline, but aren't as careful when discussing the AAPI pipeline.

Also, it looks like the study is following federal guidelines (IPEDS/NCES) on student groups; so Asian in this context for international students includes everyone from Korea, China, and Japan, down to the Malaysian Peninsula, through India, all the way west to the Arabian Peninsula (you know, like about 50% of the world population, no biggie there); so there may be some weird mixing of what's included in the denominator for AAPI students.

Higher Ed Number cruncher here (who also read the report, which apparently was a big deal to the author since they cited the page count - and many of their arguments hinge on you taking their word for it and not reading at least the exec summary yourself - which is only 8 pages):

So, fun thing about the actual study that the author references... the committee actually __DIDN'T__ tell UC regents to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it test optional due to variability in assessment requirements between institutions - and the exec summary doesn't include any recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing from their eval process.

Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the tested time period.

This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of paragraphs, covering "affirmative action" and over-representation of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn't usually an out for lower tuition like WUE/WGE (which coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in), interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.

For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not mentioning them until you reach the point you're calling out the discrepancy they end up begging the question around the "model minority" bs; when it really may be explained more concretely through international and out of state student draw.

I'm going to push back on the "less intrusive" than cigarette smoke; yes, vaping smoke doesn't stick to your clothes or on your breath, but that precludes the weird habit of vapers using the product where ever they darn well please because it isn't "smoking." The amount of times I've ran into a cloud of "banana margherita" is a bit ridiculous, and honestly I'd rather sit in a smoking section of a restaurant in podunk Wyoming than be randomly accosted by vape smoke, because at least with the smoker section I am willingly choosing to be there.

Also, as a smoker, I've never "hit it off" with somebody because we smoked. Hitting it off with someone in the smoker's pit outside a bar is just shooting the shit with someone that's in a common area; folks that vape and vegans are very similar in that it's a major point of conversation, as if they've assimilated it as part of their personality.

All that being said, vaping is fine, but the uptick in high schoolers smoking (because it's still smoking under a different name) is a bit alarming; and will be interesting to see how that consumer pipeline changes as regulation of them changes.

Do you have any actual data for that? Last I saw, most bands are still using live drummers and studio recordings for small to mid-sized bands are still actual drummers as well - unless it's a mostly studio band trying to save cost.

I think the analog to programming is a bit more direct in this sense; most companies aren't going to go with something like Copilot unless it's supplemental or they're on an entirely shoestring budget; it'll be the bigger companies wanting to squeeze out that extra 10% productivity that are betting hard on this - same with where larger bands would do this to have an extremely clean studio track for an album.

I'm still a bit befuddled as to why Docker is necessary in this case at all. Python has enough tools for package and dependancy management, if you're wanting to set up a remote machine for personal development, again Docker seems like overkill. I understand and fully accept that it's part of the development ecosystem, and it's good to get and be comfortable with it, but much like the suggestion for VS Code (which I use in my day to day, with many of the extensions mentioned) it seems like overkill for a beginner and overly specific for an intermediate++ developer, who should be more in a camp of "use whatever makes me most productive".

Ah yes, those mild mental health issues that still get people fired for regularly under the auspice of "attendance issues," "cultural fit," or any of the numerous reasons they can get fired for that are totally the result of their mild mental health issue but have to be re-phrased so that the company doesn't get sued.

As someone with ADHD, anxiety/depression, and chronic migraines; the bullshit conversations and 'management' meetings I've had to sit through because people very much still don't have any understanding of these issues is staggering. While I am not getting fired for calling out twice or thrice in a week once in a while, that's mostly due to me being in a "knowledge worker" job, if I was in a customer facing job or other position that requires "butt in seat hours" I am certain that I would have already gotten canned 100 times over due to these mild mental health issues; because quantity attendance is more important that quality attendance in a lot of jobs.

OCD isn't a "normal thing that most people will encounter" problem, neither is depression, neither is anxiety; OCD isn't some "lol I need to fill my gas tank to a round dollar amount," depression isn't "boy howdy did I feel sad for a few weeks after that break-up," anxiety isn't "that was a bit stressful firing that employee." You can feel depressed without having depression, you can feel anxious without having anxiety, you can be exacting without having OCD; but none of the prior are mental illnesses while all of the latter are. So, while the __feeling__ has been normalized, the actual illness absolutely hasn't been; and from experience it's been made more difficult by the generalizing of the words, where now people equate the action/feeling with the much more serious illness - so now I have to spend time explaining how debilitating the actual illness is, just to have people go "well I feel depressed sometimes, and I'm here."

Quite frankly, one of the many reasons folks have to put how bad things are or can get out there is due to this conflation of the feeling with the illness; so you seeing these expressions of "things are actually this bad for me," and conflating it with "emotional porn" because "everybody experiences things like OCD, depression, anxiety, etc" is actually a perfect example of why I can very confidently say that the stigma about mental health hasn't changed that much; it's just been repackaged with a nicer bow.

Perfect world, it probably has a jagged split north to south drawing through Great Falls down to Billings/Hardin.

With this year's state legislature and Governor Body-slam; they'll try some stupid ass bs drawing down the rockies along the I15 corridor and splitting the two major dem hubs in the state (Bozeman and Missoula) rendering it set up perfectly for 2 republican representatives from here to eternity.

Focusing on the business need filled and results seems to be the best tactic here; we all hype ourselves, but if we were honest most of our work is boring "plumbing" to solve a business need. I mean, that's what we're hired to do, that's why we get paid; if we're not producing value for who we're working for, that relationship has broken down.

Most day-to-day "programming" can be broken down into that "Pair a datastore with a processor" idea, or "know enough about the problem to google/SO a fix or solution," so I don't think being honest about the mundane is a bad quality. Honestly, I think it's important enough, to make it at least a few of my questions on any formal interview, something akin to "what was a project that you thought would be simple but turned into something bigger, and how did you handle communication and management of it from that point forward?"

Counterpoint; writing simply isn't useful in all cases, communicating simply is telling a first grade student that multiplication is repeated addition, yes it works in most day to day examples, but it breaks down when you start looking closely - how do you add something to itself zero time?

Communicating simply can leave vague generalities to a technical conversation or decision making process that allows for those involved to make the wrong assumptions; but if you take the time to give precision to the process you can remove those assumptions without harming the overall communication. One doesn't need to go in depth about how a decision tree works or a random forest works to explain the pros and cons of the process, and the assumptions made to get the results.

Writing simply in all cases is the equivalent of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," writing precisely is using a screwdriver when you're working with screws and a hammer with nails. Use the right tool for the job, sometimes simple isn't correct, and sometimes precision isn't either (elementary school algebra vs algebraic theory).

This exactly; most of my martial arts training has included the caveat of "try and de-escalate" as a form of neutralizing the weapon/target, including just talking with them, there are a myriad of ways to talk someone down from stabby-stabby or shooty-shooty unless they are intent on that purpose alone (and you're pretty screwed at that point without a lot of training), so verbal de-escalation techniques are almost more important than a disarm technique, which should be an absolute last resort.

Haven't been in any knife fights recently; but have done practice with "live weapons" and the base of the techniques are fairly solid.

How likely are you to use them in an actual confrontation though? Probably not likely, you would have to be put in a situation where other forms of neutralizing the situation are not possible (this includes running the fuck away); and at that point, primary importance is having a very limited set of general techniques that can be applied in multiple situation with the weapon so that through practice and training it's more of an autonomic function of your body (you don't want the lag of having to 'think' about which technique to use); secondary importance is experience with these situations - i.e. one of the marital arts groups I worked with would have us go to, and shoot at, a firing range so that we were used to the sounds that a gun would make at close range so that we were used to it in the unenviable case of being in that situation.

Generally, disarm techniques are going to be extremely similar, but with any sharp object it's going to be - expect to get cut, deflect with non-vital parts of your body (such as the outsides of your arms, not the supple insides of your wrists), and neutralize the weapon as quickly and safely as possible. Some martial arts systems even have scarf techniques for doing disarms with soft objects from a distance (it's super cool seeing someone do a gun disarm with a cloth/scarf).

One of the biggest improvements I saw in my Linux usage/admin was when I started trying to challenge myself to use the mouse as little as possible; it was absolutely eye-opening when I could navigate around my machine, do all of my everyday processes, and never really leave "home row". It also made VM'ing into a windows server a total pain because it was fairly quickly back to "clicky-clicky" navigation and processing (although win+R, tabbing and arrow keys could get you by about 90% of the time).

Great article, and great approach to learning the inner workings of the standard Linux suite!

As one of my martial arts sensai said:

"Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect."

But we're probably splitting hairs that a reasonable person would understand don't need splitting by looking at the whole piece, which can be boiled down to: "Make lots and seek feedback more."

I think that's more the product of VC culture; as a founder you're in a constant case of "selling your company" which in most cases is also selling yourself to people, i.e. investing in a startup is tantamount to investing in the person in the early stages. I haven't seen this mentality nearly as much in folks that are bootstrapping without the "extreme growth" required by VCs.

And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive.

TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...

I'm sure you are silently judging the fact I don't really like bagpipes too... Groundskeeper Willie fist shake

Corporate research is still going to somewhat be at the whimsy of what's bleeding edge AND has some applicable value; the idea of it just is a little different with things like the 10% or 20% "constructive free-time" model. Each engineer in FAANG-like companies just get a 10-20% salary allotment instead of the equivalent expense of researcher headcount. The idea of "constructive free time" for work is just the "agile" iteration of the research lab.

You're gussying up a "silicon valley" libertarian viewpoint in "philosophy of taxation."

When you just store, you don't benefit, and taking it is a purely negative experience. Many people are willing to share part of their new earnings. Few are willing to give up something that has always belonged to them.

That's a real stretch when just a sentence earlier you talked about earned benefits and taxation of those benefits. Storage is just the accumulation of earned benefits beyond your spending habits. Value isn't created in a vacuum nor is it used in one. And current taxation doesn't preclude future taxation, it's why us common folk are told to do any of our retirement funding that we can as pre-tax, since who's to say something that is taxed today (and is expressly stated as not being taxable in the future) won't be taxed again later on appreciated or total value. So, by this alone, the government saying taxes now, and deferred taxes later if that valuation meets certain thresholds isn't something that the government can't or even shouldn't do.

And, in many cases, the tax wouldn't apply to startups or their founders unless they're already sitting on multiple tens of millions of static personal valuation; which is where this whole argument really breaks down, and shows its disingenuous colors. When someone like PG talks about these wealth tax valuations in general terms of percentages, many of us are still thinking on OUR terms, which means we're thinking on "normie" scales of 10s or 100s of thousands, or maybe a couple million, where a 1% drop in valuation YoY would make a significant dent in what we can and can't do; when a wealth tax is floated (at least in the US) it's looking at $10M+ in static assets at the individual level, and applies to a wealth class that only a small percentage of people can actually comprehend. And, when a wealth tax is floated in the US, it also has discussions around non-realized asset valuation (such as small businesses, start-ups, etc) and what classes of assets contribute to the total value of an individual wealth tax.

Applying a wealth tax in a general way like how PG has done it is a bit disingenuous, not wrong; but is prone to personal wealth view biases. It becomes even more obvious when we take your example and put it towards something that would actually be taxed... $100M; which you end up with $81M for static assets or $550M instead of $672M in PERSONAL assets. Most only think of numbers in these terms if the "win the lottery" so who in the general public thinks the difference of $122M over a lifetime of nearly 3/4 of a billion dollars in wealth (not earnings, but accumulated valuation) isn't a bit of a "whatever," they'll pay more in taxes on that Mega Millions winner and won't bat an eye. (this also works for the usual lower bound as well, $10M, but $100M is guaranteed to be included in any of the recently floated wealth taxes).

In high school, it was wearing a three-piece suit (because if you're not wearing a vest, are you really wearing a suit?) for all of my speech and debate events; now, it's wearing one of my kilts. For those of us with anxiety, esp social anxiety this entire article isn't necessarily surprising, as many of us use some form of externalizing our confidence to get through big presentations, meetings, etc.

If I've got an important set of meetings that I'm going to be at it's always going to be a kilt (with appropriate vest as well, everything snazzy needs vests) or a full suit.

If I'm going to something where I know I'm going to need to be social, it's always the kilt. It's amazing how much a kilt is just a segue for other people to talk about their "scottish or irish" heritage; talking about myself is terrible, but listening to the 10,000th person today talk about their boring ass family tree is great (the convo will eventually turn to something interesting or the person will wander off). It also makes me extremely memorable and findable, so I don't have to initiate most conversations which is also a terrible, horrible thing.

You're completely skipping over the positivity rate; many countries are testing a heck of a lot more than the US is; and they're showing positivity rates in the 1-5% range.

If your hypothesis is correct, and infection rate is going up just because of more testing, then we should be pacing with other countries that are also testing more. We're seeing positivity rates of almost 25% in Arizona and 19% in Florida and Texas; which way out strips countries that have this more under control. At that rate of 15% or more, how many people are being missed (or are you also assuming we're catching 100% of all cases)? The more likely interpretation of the data is that not only are we testing more, but there are more cases; which fits with the overall data trend of BOTH more tests AND more infections.

I'm going to nip your goalpost moving in the bud here - since I'm sure you'll come back with "yeah, but deaths are going down."

Just because mortality has been going down doesn't mean that it isn't affecting the younger group and they're just magically recovering back to baseline. There's good evidence that there are lasting lung and immune response issues post "recovery" if it doesn't kill you. Further, deaths are a lagging indicator, and unfortunately what timeframe on that is unknown now because the age group is skewing younger and a large portion of our dataset is skewed towards the 65+ group due to how the initial wave of the disease spread.

This whole piece reminds me of those classmates in college that had no clue what they were talking about, so they used big words and overly effusive language to sound smarter than they actually are.

And while a pure meritocracy is what we're looking for in higher ed, at this moment we haven't found a way to separate the people from the process; we haven't found our orchestral blind auditions. Most tenured faculty positions are garnered through years of work at a university, and those years of work means years of human interactions and politicking. So, those "mandatory workshops" are necessary, because there's still very much a human element to the whole damn thing; and until we can remove the humans from the process, we'll need ways to learn how to better interact.

This is a really solid piece; it's unfortunate that it's written in a way that pushes a specific narrative view; and I would be interested in what the writing would have been like on another 'intellectual' site like Nautilus or Aion.

While he doesn't outright say that anthropogenic climate change is a thing, it's there. Hidden behind a paragraph telling you how he was supportive of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua - which, unfortunately, for a large portion of quillette's audience puts him in the camp of "I was a radical anarcho leftist, I've defected." Hidden in the weeds about how we've taken institutional and systemic steps to reduce emissions. Hidden behind a reasonable common sense path to reduce carbon emissions (wood -> coal -> petrol -> ng -> nuclear).

Computer Graphics; Data Science; and ML/AI are your obvious ones. Most engineers can benefit from it, because all you're doing is modelling systems; take a look at how Spice programs model electrical circuits as an example of this. There's a lot of math that needs an understanding of vector spaces to grasp the concepts. Most Lin Alg books and courses that are more geared towards graduate level students (so folks with the basic lin alg info under their belt) work on generalization, and it directly leads to some interesting applications in probability, graph theory, number theory, and a whole host of other more advanced topics. There's even whole programs built around solving things from a linear algebra perspective (see MatLab for example)

Linear algebra is just a tool that fits nicely in a lot of computer science and various engineering toolboxes.

Cooking meat well is easy, just throw it in until it looks and chews like shoe leather. Cooking meat properly on the otherhand.

Jokes aside, cooking meat properly should almost always have a leave in thermometer for anything that isn't being seared.

Linear Algebra Done Right is, without a doubt, one of my favorites in this category. It tends to be taught as an intermediate or graduate level approach, but things clicked for me with Axler's explanations way better than about anything else I've used.

http://linear.axler.net/