Yep. Packing unprepared students in based on non-merit items (including legacy) and disadvantaging prepared students is absolutely ridiculous. It's bad enough that the standards are low for student athletes because it's all about talent-recruitment business and NCAA $$$, where educational attainment is tertiary.
Some schools are actually quite good at ensuring student athletes need to actually be students in addition to athletes. The necessary discipline to simultaneously train in rigorous athletics and scholarship can make for a compelling case.
Alas, my alma mater did not, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were athletes first, and kept up appearances about schooling. I am reasonably confident that several degree programs that the school offered would not have existed if the football and basketball programs didn't exist.
Would they have been able to let in more students who would have bean more focused on schooling? Honestly, I don't know, but I strongly suspect there are lower hanging fruit to pick first.
Systemd is a swiss-army-kitchen-sink-knife monolith of brittle complexity.
A proper init system similar to runit or s6 would be written in something safer (minimum unsafe) like Rust, be modular, simpler, follow UNIX philosophy, and not try to do everything in one process. Microkernel-style.
I loved that guy, his writing and his shows. His end made me sad and it seems like an enigma. Perhaps he had everything material but felt isolated from meaningful human connections, like with his daughter. Undiagnosed/untreated depression, an existential dark place, didn't want to grow old alone, and/or didn't want to stick around for the way the world was headed. It's hard to say what goes on in someone's mind if they don't talk about it.
The problem with suicide is it eliminates all future good possibilities and it's likely that this is the only life.
You could see some of the despair setting in over the last few seasons of his show on CNN. Basically, he had been so many places in the world so he was revisiting a lot of places and was basically in mourning over the fact that they’re all the same now. Even places like Hanoi that shouldn’t be. There’s a lot of mourning over “the old ways” over those last few seasons.
If you watch some of his early shows, he was enchanted by the street food scene in Asia. But places like Bangkok and Shanghai cracked down hard on unlicensed street vendors over a decade ago, and the places that were lively environments in the mid-2000s have been gone for a long time.
Anecdotally, I tried to find street food in Shanghai and the only places were a few vendors next to the train station. I was told by the guide I hired that there really wasn’t much anymore and that western diets were all the rage among the under-40 crowd. In its place were sterile food courts with bright signs and cartoon mascots.
Often, the good just can’t cancel the bad. It doesn’t work that way.
I understand that suicide is hard on the people left behind, but I also understand that some people don’t want to continue to suffer to prevent others from suffering.
Suicide is a very hard step for people and although Futurama style suicide booths are a step way too far, there should be more humane avenues guided by medical professionals for people who are ‘done’.
Please if you do have suicidal thoughts, at least go to the doctor hand have a that about it, they can help you further.
At least in the US, seeking help can have seriously drastic consequences on your freedom. Involuntary psychiatric holds, red flag seizures, and worse. I do not think it will ever be worth the risk to seek help, because the potential costs are more than I am willing to pay. My freedom is worth more than my life.
I saw him in an airport - this tall, lanky man walking very slowly with his suitcase behind him, head down. He looked so weary and worn down with a heaviness over him and a face that looked much older than his age.
We see the beautiful end result of his work but I suspect much of it all was an endless grind he couldn’t get out from.
Interestingly, I interviewed at one of the many startups who wants to implant thousands of sensors directly into the brain. The only issue is they had the same problem that MIT Lincoln Labs has: they're snobs about hiring only PhD EEs, creating an ideological monoculture.
Maybe when putting things into peoples brains, competence is a highly necessary requirement. It's not enough to have "liked coding since high school" and "read a bunch of blogs" and "taught myself javascript" which may suffice for the average web shop, but when opening skulls, a broad and deep education definitely helps. Those crying about gatekeeping tend to be firmly on one side of the gate without putting in the necessary sweat.
The comment was not about heterogeneous or not. It was about Ph.D. or not. Everything else equal, I'd prefer a heterogeneous bunch of Ph.D.s to have designed and built the thing that's put inside my brain over a similarly heterogeneous bunch of "I've taught this myself in 1 year using youtube". Snobs or not.
Ph.D.s are trained in two things. "Reasoning about an unknown" is one of them. But the particular niche knowledge they acquired while training this is the other. That niche can save my life if the niche matches the thing to be implanted into my brain. No matter how many youtube-educated wannabe-experts take issue with formal education.
(I have many issues with the academic system, but this kind of critisism is ridiculous.)
Would you rather have a team of 10 PhDs and 3 "self taught hackers" or 13 PhDs?
It might just be me, but I actually feel more comfortable with the former.
If you ONLY hire people from specific backgrounds, you get blind spots. That's dangerous. Excluding anyone without a PhD should not be expected to improve safety.
That makes it sound like Ph.D. graduates are a homogenuous bunch. That's nonsense. Somebody with a Ph.D. degree is just that -- a person with a certain degree certifying a certain competence. Apart from that, it does not say anything. Not what background the person has, how they think, what they like. It's part of a Ph.D. degree to aquire knowledge and skills alone. "Self-taught" if you will.
The distinction you make does not exist in that sense. The only actual difference is that the "extra" 3 Ph.D. graduates have had a certification for a somewhat structured education in some research field, while the youtoube fans don't. So, everything else equal, that group has an advantage.
Interesting - out of curiosity a few years ago, I glanced at neuralink's hiring site and was surprised to see the same. I'm sure these folks are very qualified at what they do, but if we're hoping to put these devices in humans, at some point all of the models and "hard" data will have to be matched up to something messier - disease characteristics, quality of life, etc. How many PhD EE's does it take to come up with an operational definition of things like "Depression" or "Multiple Sclerosis symptoms" so you can just "turn this activity down"? Good luck...
The hemolysis must've been insane. I wonder why ECMO pumps aren't always mechanical baffles or a bulb to be easier on the blood. Just playing drums or a riding a motorcycle can lower your ferritin reserves from nuking RBCs in your hands and arms.
Twitter isn't FBI raid-proof and that's a SPoF. The US govt has the technical power and legal force to shut it off when it has or invents the authority to do so. This existential threat means Twitter, in the absence of moral/ethic leadership courage, is compelled to bow down to individual legal demands.
If end users want freedom with a centralized service, it has to be based in a neutral country and also accessible by VPN, p2p overlay network, etc. It would also be better if such a service were also distributed.
