skillpass

Why is it “certainly a loss for users”? Many are likely to enjoy the ability to post without censorship on topics they care about.

Article says they’re still up year over year

431,000 deliveries would still be a small growth year-over-ear[sic]

Seems like half of this is complaining about the low quality content that many people in our population genuinely enjoy, and the other half is complaining about the algorithm over fitting on small amounts of interaction. The latter of which primarily impacts brand new accounts.

the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world

It's not. Measles, for example, is more transmissible.

No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.

Not true. Spanish Flu, for example, killed more both in raw numbers and proportionally in a similar time frame.

Here's a helpful infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadli...

Can you expand on what's broken and how Stripe is trying to address it?

Similarly, American ash (white ash) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraxinus_americana

I grew up in a neighborhood full of beautiful mature Ash trees. In the past 20 years, almost all of them have died and been cut down due to the emerald ash borer.

Yes, use them on frontend, backend, and mobile. They feed into an AB experimentation system which is the gate for shipping features and catching regressions.

Appreciate the link, it was an informative read.

Based off what I read there, I don't think reducing burden on nurses to prevent burnout at any cost is the right response here.

The article makes clear there are two pipelines here:

Nursing student applicants -> Nursing students -> Nurses, and Nurses -> Nursing faculty

There are more qualified applicants than can be accepted as students due in part to shortages in the faculty, according to the article. So why is there a shortage of faculty? There are several items noted in the article, but I'll point out the one I think is relevant to our conversation.

the pandemic has forced much of nursing education to an online, virtual format ... An overnight switch to virtual learning has not been seamless or easy on students or faculty ... The risk of burnout in these prolonged conditions is high—especially for faculty members who have young children or who are caretakers in the home.

So, this article is arguing nursing faculty is burning out because teaching virtually is too taxing. I don't think this article supports the idea that a nursing shortage will result due to overtaxed nurses in hospitals.

Covid spread throughout the entire world very quickly. "Locking down harder" in any region simply delays the inevitable spike in cases once those lockdowns end.

I understand you are making the argument that removing mandates for masks at schools will lead us to have a shortage of medical practitioners? That seems dubious to me.

From what I know, the limits on number of doctors licensed each year are tightly controlled. If students drop out, there are countless others who will be willing to take their place.

I'm sorry about your experience. I do wish your wife would have received better care, but I'm not sure we can jump to the conclusion that the experience you had implies mandates and restrictions upon society are worthwhile.

Do you know that it would have been a shorter wait time during a period where the hospital wasn't overwhelmed? If so, how much shorter? Perhaps the medical staff were able to tell the signs of ectopic pregnancy in a way that allowed them put your wife lower on the triage priority list than you thought she should have been.

Does your area have any sort of restrictions? If not, how would the amount of time you had to wait be changed in a world where your area did have restrictions?

Even if you can show some benefit from the restrictions, are the benefits great enough to be worthwhile given the costs?

I agree - I am worried about taking hospital capacity claims at face value though.

From what I've seen, it was common for hospitals to report being overwhelmed even during flu seasons pre-covid. I wouldn't classify that level of 'overwhelmed' worthy of mandates upon society.

I don't doubt that during these periods of time hospital resources are strained in some way, but there's a difference between this routine level of being overwhelmed and a level where freedoms should be restricted from the general public.

I don't have a good model for where the line should be drawn, but I lean towards not imposing restrictions unless massive benefit can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt.

Personally I feel like the Collapse movement is full of histrionics and hysteria, and for a while I was ignoring it. But the movement seems to have a psychological pull. Most of the people I talk to in the US who are tuned into the news cycle or culture war on both the right and the left have started to accept parts of the Collapse narrative (rampant crime leading to breakdown of social order, climate change induced disasters leading to mass displacement of populations, etc.).

It worries me to see so many people accept Collapse as inevitable. I think such pessimistic attitudes will lead more people towards radicalization as they see revolutionary change as the only means to preventing collapse.

There must be some part of the human psyche which is attracted to the idea of world ending disasters. Ideas of apocalypse are found in many religions throughout the world.

Perhaps the Collapse movement is the new eschatology for a post-religion world.

I'm surprised by the antipathy towards both author and technology expressed by many of the top level comments here. Personally I found the piece moving, even from the first generated sequence. By the last iteration I had tears in my eyes.

I admit I might be biased. I also have access to the GPT3 beta and have used it for this same purpose of writing assistance. To me GPT3 as of now is like a super advanced thesaurus, a tool that you can use to broaden your perspective and get out of a rut in your writing.

I use a Vim extension in my browser which converts 'j' and 'k' into scroll keys. I've found that on many sites which employ the modal overlay and suppress scrolling I can still scroll around using these keys even when arrow keys and mouse scrolling don't work.

My first hypothesis was like the others here - that it somehow screws with my brain chemistry to make me permanently dependent on it for my mood.

Another possibility is that coffee enforces some level of ritual and regularity into my mornings. Since I have a physical dependency on it, I'll go out of my way each morning to get caffeine and usually induce some tangential benefit, whether that be by brewing some coffee (benefit - I usually make breakfast while waiting on it to brew), by going to a coffee shop (benefit - I go for a walk), or by taking preworkout (benefit - I get a workout in).

So I guess if I was able to be super consistent about some alternative positive morning ritual (like a physical warm up) maybe it would fix the problem of feeling more depressed when not drinking it.

I recently noticed the same thing about depression and coffee after trying to quit several times over the past several years. Even months after the headaches ceased, I generally felt more depressive. Upon resumption of drinking, I started feeling more elevated in mood.

I hope similar efforts at genetic modification can save American ash trees, which are being wiped out by the Emerald Ash Borer.

In my childhood town in the Midwest my street was lined with massive 80 year old ashes that shaded and sheltered the neighborhood. Most of them have now died and been cut down.

I notice certain pattern among some internet communities.

Extreme hype / popularity around a community, followed by degeneration (or increased visibility of prior degeneracy) of that community, followed by bans and/or deplatforming. Off the top of my head FatPeopleHate, TheDonald, and recently Parler are prior examples, I bet there are others though.

WallStreetBets seems like it's heading down a similar path. In fact, I bet a lot of the people in these communities overlap, though I have no proof.

There's a great SlateStarCodex essay on this called "Studies on Slack", where this tradeoff of investing resources in preparation for low-likelihood catastrophic events is examined.

Here is a link to the full article on LessWrong - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GZSzMqr8hAB2dR8pk/studies-on...

This is explicitly refuted in the article.

In an early 2018 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christopher J. Ruhm, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia, suggested that "the ‘deaths of despair’ framing, while provocative, is unlikely to explain the main sources of the fatal drug epidemic." He continued: "The fatal overdose epidemic is likely to primarily reflect drug problems rather than deaths of despair." Case and Deaton responded that they had explicitly tested and rejected his hypothesis, and that in their work "despair" was meant to be "a label, not an explanation."

I was introduced to Dvorak and the New World Symphony through the anime Shin Sekai Yori (From the New World).

My favorite part of the New World Symphony is the largo, and found some of the background in this article interesting.

Dvořák was also moved by the tale of Hiawatha, a founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. The largo is, in part, meant to describe the end of Hiawatha’s life. The old chief, weary from a life of labor, loss, and ardent service to his people, sits on the shores of the Great Sea Water and faces his own final homegoing.

Python is definitely more real-world practical. Most students will go on to learn it in future classes anyways though. An Intro class is better off preparing a conceptual foundation that will serve students across many languages and paradigms.

My university has taken this approach. The main intro class is still Racket based, but they offer a Python alternative which satisfies the same requirements. I hope they're tracking the difference in outcomes!

Full disclosure - I took 3 classes in Racket: Intro to CS, Programming Languages, and Compilers.

Racket is not a very popular language in teaching communities

This list of schools with introductory Racket classes isn't accurate, because the author did not look beyond the naming of the courses on the Github page. My school was missed.

Students are unlikely to have had prior experience with Racket

This is good because it means students from varying backgrounds of programming experience start from a level playing field.

Racket’s aesthetic beauty has limited relevance to CS1

Computer Science is first and foremost an ivory tower and students are (imo) better off being confronted with this fact up front. Software Engineering is probably better taught with a more practical language.

Students do not use Racket again later in their degree

At my school the Programming Languages core curriculum all used Racket. A good percentage of students funneled into at least the first PL-core class as part of their requirements. The class was very popular.

Students do not like Racket

Sorry, but I don't think we should base our decisions on what Intro students like/dislike. People hate leaving their comfort zone - that doesn't mean they shouldn't be pushed out of it.

The Design Recipe Is Not Well-Evidenced

Valid criticisms. On the other hand, no evidence is presented that other languages are better.