My university did the opposite, and to this day I think it was good.

At the end of the first semester, you were given a test in the three most important subjects for your field. If you failed, you could re-take it after the summer break, before next semester starts. If you failed it again, you could repeat the first semester and try a third and final time. Fail that, you're out.

It was hard, too. In my class, we were just over a hundred when we started. We were 28 in the 2nd semester. But of those 28, almost everyone made it to the end. Everyone who would've failed somewhere along the way had already been weeded out.

It was brutal, it was stressful - but IMHO it was the best way to do it and be respectful of both student time and university resources.

We had that in 1st grade. Not university, school. So students starting university have now regressed to the level of 6-year-olds ?

I get that it's stressful. I don't get how "managing stress" has vanished from the requirements of getting a degree.

Dude, if you're commenting on this site, you're my age or older. When you were a freshman, the information age was either just starting or not a thing. When I entered college, we were using Netscape still. Websites were nearly useless. Commentators were downplaying the internet saying it's just for Star Trek debates and low-res porn....no one would do real work, like banking, on it. You and I didn't deal with the impact of social media. Life was a lot simpler when we were freshman. Remember boredom? I fucking do. I was REALLY FUCKING BUSY as a college student working 2 student jobs and having a challenging major. Even then, lots of hours of downtime and boredom...commuting on the subway, hanging out in the dorms and later my apt. LOTS of hours sitting in some kid's dorm bored entertaining each other. We'd play old games we were sick of and make the best of it. We'd watch movies we had seen before because it's what he had in his room. We'd watch lame old movies because we watched all the good ones at our university's campus video rental place. Being bored is extinct today....replaced by a feeling you're not doing enough or missing something...no sense of downtime....that fucking phone in your pocket, a constant connection to every self-doubt you have, everything in life more fun than what you need to do, every bit of information to make you realize how daunting your path to success is.

I focused on studying and getting laid and my peers from wealthier families got to sit around the dorms bored getting high and doing enough to pass. No one knew shit. It took fucking effort to be informed. You'd have to read the newspaper and watch the nightly news and no one in college had the time for that shit. We learned things via word of mouth. I couldn't compare myself to those in my high school class. I had no clue who was dating or thriving.

Kids today? They're FLOODED with more information than human brains can handle. They can see boastful exaggerated posts of their former friends from home living their best lives. Everyone is more successful than you. Everyone has a better relationship than you. Everyone went on a cooler vacation than you. Oh, there's an article about some kid 2 years older than you that now has a multi-million dollar startup that may reach a billion dollar valuation...oh yeah, and he grew up somewhere in your state...isn't that cool???? ...and what are you doing with your life?...barely getting As, no girlfriend, a very uncertain path to success....Oh yeah, and AI?....that's in the news every fucking day....your profession may be extinct by the time you graduate. Certainly, ever CEO with an AI offering is saying we're 2 years from replacing all software engineers....which if that was true, would mean they can replace accountants, lawyers, most managers, even most doctors, etc. So....you could be taking on all this debt, get a law degree, and have to become a plumber to make a living.

Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation....meaning your success in life is a mixture of skill and luck and really much much more luck than skill. I know mine was. I am very skilled....but so are a fuckton of people who achieved less than me....and many less skilled people achieved a lot more. I was at the right place at the right time and I used my skill not to fuck things up....those far more successful?...most were in a better place at the right time. The point?...you're not successful in life because of your mental fortitude. If you were their age, you could not replicate your success perfectly. You'd have to be MUCH MUCH MUCH better and more skilled at life to replicate your success today. I know I would. I know there are 100x more interesting distractions today than before. I know things are more confusing, the standards are higher, the amount of information to process is impossible. When I was 18/19?....you could be smart by not being a dumbass...shit was easy. Our programming projects were tiny in scope compared to what is expected of kids today. We could have a 100line C program that doesn't do much of anything be a successful thesis in the 90s. Kids today need to build full stack apps in at least 3 different languages and know a FUCKTON more stuff than anyone who graduated in the 90s/00s. I could easily master the technology I was expected to know on graduating. it was usually a single language. NO ONE can master a full stack today. Anyone who says they do, just don't realize how little the know about databases...which aren't even just RDBMS any more, but a dozen types.

Fuck off with the kids are soft bullshit. I heard it all my life about me and we all listened to it about millennials and gen z...it's a tale as old as time and it's bullshit every time. I feel sorry for today's kids because A LOT MORE is expected of them than what was expected of Gen X people like me to make it into the middle class and have a basic standard of living. Life got a lot harder and more complex. You forget how simple things were for us.

If the experts think this may help, I am all for it. However, I do sympathize with kids today....shitting on the youth and pretending they're soft and inferior to you won't change the fact that your relevance diminishes each year, like it does for every other aging person. It won't change the fact that they have many more years on this planet than you and I do at this point.

I expect they are indicating there's no depth / distance data, but I'd still call it a 3D map because it is the inner surface of a sphere. You can't really compare even the relative 2D positions of things on this map correctly without considering an additional spatial dimension.

I would imagine they decay into something else in like 10e-15 seconds.

And that is a good phone.

Neo: Are... are you high right now?
Morpheus: Uhh... a little bit-but the question still appli-
Neo: Go home, Rick, it's late.
Morpheus: Don't call me by my slave name!
Neo: Goodnight, Rick.

I'm not about to believe this until netcraft confirms it.

If you have no point to make them you are merely chattering on. Good day.

You didn't get it. This is speeding tickets issued by fully automated systems. No court has ever seen this.

The solution is to stop treating it as a money-printing system. Punish people who speed in front of kindergardens, and leave people alone who at the city edge in the industrial zone on a Sunday evening didn't decelerate quite fast enough coming in from the highway.

I literally have no clue why you're saying that or who you think you're talking to.

Not at all. Because COMFORT is the key word here, not processing.

Which is often intentional.

We live in 2026. You can order an artillery or drone strike in Ukraine from a tablet and it'll be delivered within minutes. Data processing speeds are essentially instant for data sets not on LLM sizes. We have automation everywhere when it suits the right people. e.g. that speeding ticket you received for going 12 km/h over the limit? No human ever so much as saw that. Full automated process. Takes 6-12 weeks. Why? Because otherwise you might still remember how fast you were actually going or that you weren't even in that street on that day, and fight it. Same principle here: The slower the bureaucracy, the more people will just give up and go away. It's a self-regulating system to reduce the number of inquiries to the amount that the public servants can comfortably process.

that's a per-character stat.

If your average license plate has, say, 6 characters, you get a 78% total probability that it reads them right.

If you have 8 Flock cameras in your town of let's say 100,000 people, sitting at busy roads or intersections, 10 to 20 thousand cars per day is a reasonable estimate, which means you get 62,400 to 124,800 mis-read license plates. Per day. Every day. Under optimal conditions.

That's more false readings than you have people.

I wonder if just randomly assigning traffic tickets to license plates in your register wouldn't get you a lower false positive rate.

Of course...and many like Pilsner beer, like a Bud or Coors....I personally like those beers myself. However, I also really appreciate a Guinness and many other types of beer that taste nothing like bud light. If you like impersonal fucking....well, the world is your oyster...those are the default and dominant form. 99% of professionally produced and even the vast majority of amateur porn falls under that category. You're all set.

My wife prefers stuff where the couple is less tacky and the sex is more realistic. So for us, having more of that is great. If you're into stuff that resembles traditional loving sex?...it's an underserved market...those wanting a rough fuck?...well, I think it's safe to say you have many choices.

Is this something you do often?

No, it's pretty much one day a year (but usually several times on that day): spring cleanup (though my smizmar and I call it "truck day" (*)).

It's uncompostable/tainted yard waste, even furniture (if it's in truly horrible shape), and all sorts of other random trashy shit. When it happens, the amount of resulting trash is many times the size of our trash bin or what can even be put on on the curb for "large item pickup." The usual weekly process is overwhelmed and can't handle it; there simply isn't room. So we haul it.

* "Truck day" because I decided paying $72 to rent U-haul's big pickup truck for a few hours is preferable to paying $72k to buy a big pickup truck. And it usually gets used for more than just dumping trash; it's often a large-item shopping day too. (To be next decade's trash? Don't ask!)