It's pointless. Just an arms race of gimmicks. There's really no option besides making homework all optional, and putting 100% of the grade into in-person exams. I basically don't trust that any new graduate has earned their degree, and won't until schools do what's necessary to crush cheaters.
I agree with you in spirit, but the last meta pre-LLM was that exams were bad at measuring student skill and that students felt more fairly treated when their grade was the result of multiple assignments and projects. I think it's a shame we have move away from that
They are. I have a friend who was significantly more smart and thorough in our studies but often get bad scores on exams not being able to concentrate under the pressure.
I also struggled with exams, but that's because my understanding was often shallow, due to a lack of effort to study and understand the material. I'm very suspicious of people that say they're smart, but can't perform on exams. That said, there's plenty of ways to structure things to avoid this. Have weekly, easy, pass / fail exams that ensure you've read the material at a basic level, or understood some basic concepts. Lab work. Presentations with live grilling from the professor to ensure you understand the topic.
I don’t think my friend would claim to be smart (and not I’m not talking about myself in third person to sound more convincingly, I have a real las in mind). I say they are. I saw them in a day to day work and they are both more knowledgeable and more productive than I am. It’s being put on the spot, with high stakes and limited time, they had a difficulty with.
> there's plenty of ways to structure things to avoid this
Sure, I was arguing specifically against GGP’s solution, i.e. betting everything on the finals.
Exams also rarely measured skill in the course. Often just a subset. We would often spend the last month of each semester cramming exams instead of studying the curse material because it wasn't that useful.
I rarely felt I got a lot out of courses, but I often felt I would if I got to study it properly
Well, that is a way to test students’ ability to perform under pressure, but I’m adamant it’s not a fair assessment of their skill in the subject at hand, nor how much they’d worked and improved during the course. On several occasions I have gotten higher marks than my friend because of their anxiety issues, despite me being a worse student and arguably a worse researcher (what we studied for).
Huh? Not every job requires this trait, and even though some do, it’s not something nonlinear optics professor ought to evaluate.
Sure, it’s a nice quality to have and I find it useful at times: when it’s “suddenly” the last day to write a proposal, or when someone has to present at a conference. (However, these tasks many other skills besides just the ability to stay calm.) But I can’t agree that it is indispensable for a researcher.
Why would I give up my cushy place where I’m paid to do interesting stuff, for a stressful position full of management responsibilities? I swear, more people should learn the idea of lagom.
If it was easy to do with a lot of margin it would have been done by someone else in the private sector. In fact, they tricked these companies into making investments that weren't worthwhile for them. Sounds like the kind of people the deserve the shitty internet they have.
I hear vending machine ppl often have 1-3 very profitable locations and 10-40 locations that only barely make sense often only because they already are in the business.
I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.
It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?
Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?
The problem is all the regulatory stuff that means the bigger you are and the longer you've operated for the better you understand and have relationships with the often pretty inept regulatory bodies that can stop you.
Then as the local government, maybe start by removing that regulation. Or if the regulation is required, you're going to have to pay a premium for people willing and able to put up with it.
This is a fundamental problem of value creation and value extraction. Just because the ISP's can't extract the value of adding the additional fiber capacity doesn't mean it doesn't confer that value to the customers. We live in an age of value extraction, what's colloquially known as "enshittification", that can't go on forever. Somebody has to create the value that is being extracted.
It's the old Marx quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Except you know, the opposite.
I have a lot of ability. I'm not gonna flex it for others without pay that gives me significantly higher living standards than the average person. Are you going to force me to work?
No, however there's a bunch of people with your abilities that will do it because they're capable of seeing that something as crucial as internet access is a public good. You can choose to not work, plenty of us will make things move forwards without you, nor care about your living standards.
Thanks for writing a reply. I was wondering why this comment was floating around 0. I realize it's pretty contentious politics on HN, but I figured the philosophical point is at least interesting anyway, and that HN would be able to separate the two. Your reply helps me adjust that assumption.
Silly. You should be selling off th ese trash stocks. Don't know why people keep recommending market cap weighted funds when they're being manipulated by scam artists like Elon and Trump into making the world's retirement funds into bag holders.
A rolex is jewelry, meant to be flashy and catch the eye. Pebbles and apple watches are some of the least interesting things you could put in your wrist lol
Yeah I tried these health trackers for a while, but I got super irritated by having to plan around them. It's objectively not a big deal, but last time my Garmin died I just put it down and never picked it up again. Been living with a Casio on the wrist uninterrupted for years now, and whenever I think about trying on the Garmin again, I don't want to because I would need to charge it first. At least with a mechanical watch it's ready to go whenever.
A lot of people view tech as magic and are wow'd by it. But many people that work in tech, based on their experience working with it, view it more as an eldritch horror. There's something comforting about a mechanical watch that people have been making by hand for hundreds of years.
Hey, if you want me to be an AI's manager, I can only give you a manager's level of certainty that a task is done well :) if I could fire the AI that created the bug I would, the best I can do is Ctrl+c. But either way, by the time I'm fired the codebase will be an incomprehensible mess and any new engineer won't be able to provide a good review for months. Hopefully they don't decide to fire everyone all at once.
Trump took more than double the amount of vacation days in his first term, and if the golf tracker is accurate, he's on pace to increase it this term.
> Trump's talking basically every day in front of press
I'm not sure if talking === communicating_effectively. There are certainly noises coming out of his mouth, if that's the only metric we care about.
> Joe Biden was in far, far worse shape than Trump is
Given the choice between a president who recognizes his own weaknesses and delegates to competent team members and one who is unable to admit a single mistake and surrounds himself with grossly unqualified and incompetent sycophants, I'll take the former.
> There's absolutely no comparison
As with most comparisons made by Trump supporters - you're right, but not for the reasons you think.
The truth is Obama whether you like him or not was the last traditional post War American President.
Biden copied Trumps extremist way of Government. Biden said (totally abnormal comments for a president) "we've been patient with the unvaccinated, but our patience is wearing thin" highly aggressive comments. Trump is basically using that same language with illegal immigrants and Americans critical of Israel and the Iran war.
Both are senile. Bidens was more pronounced but less erratic/manic as Trumps. That make Trumps senility more dangerous.
Both Biden and Trump wanted to use media organizations to censor their political opponents. Trump using FCC to remove broadcast licenses for critical media, Biden administration communicating with social media companies to get users that post critical content banned.
If you still view this as a partisan problem, where one side is the good guy. We won't get anywhere. The United States and the interests that control it, both D and R, are at war with the American people. Im my opinion.
> highly aggressive comments. Trump is basically using that same language with illegal immigrants and Americans critical of Israel and the Iran war.
You're equating a _statement_ made by Biden (with regards to a public health crisis actively killing Americans) with Trump arresting US citizens, illegally deporting asylum-seekers, and bombing Iran without congressional approval, a plan for the strait of Hormuz, nor buy-in from allies. This is not a good faith comparison.
> Both Biden and Trump wanted to use media organizations to censor their political opponents
Again, you're comparing the Biden admin _asking_ Twitter to censor content (primarily relating to revenge porn against his adult son) with Trump actively threatening the broadcast license of networks because comedians were mean to him - another bad faith comparison.
...because he had competent people around him that he trusted enough to make decisions, and not former TV hosts.
This isn't to say "oh he was just a puppet" nor "all US presidents are puppets", but to say that the decision of who they choose to fill important positions is in and of itself the most important decision in every presidential term. They only really need to be not senile for the first month or so, for the rest of the term it's just a PR problem.
There’s just absolutely no comparison between one senile president who maintained our democracy and another senile president who loudly, proudly, and rapidly destroyed it.
He was the Democrat nominee in 2024, and all the shills were saying[0] he was extremely competent and focused still. It's only when he actually finally appeared on television suddenly Kamala Harris - not even a 2024 nominee, I don't think, and got zero votes in 2020 - was pushed in to replace the democratically nominated representative with a party elite-anointed one.
The 'unprincipled' simply remember how long it took the establishment and Biden to drop out of the race ( and even that was only after it became painfully clear he is barely there ).
I know it kinda goes against the tribal nature of political conversations, but, hear me out here, they both suck in their own unique ways and, more importantly, they both may be a little too old to manage this country ( though, to be fair, for different reasons ). We really need to start enforcing principles over tribe. It has gone a little too far.
Agreed, but if you have that choice Biden and/or Kamala over Trump shouldn't be a 'too close to call'. You might as well put Al Capone on the ballot (and I'm fairly sure he would have won).
Yet, only one of those two is an admitted pedophile, only one of those two has been convicted of fraud, only one of those two is in the Epstein files, only one of those two is convinced we need to deploy a nuclear weapon in Iran...
These are for high stakes business, and even those are based on a lot of trust. If you commit a minor crime, where the cost of settling things is lower than what you'll get, it's easy to get away with it. It requires a great deal of trust on the individual level that many perpetually developing countries lack.
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