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Comment Re: It's all about definitions. (Score 1) 177

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

Comment Re: Addictive Design is just Good Design (Score 1) 65

Addictive products are just good products! Have a cigar.

If you're an adult who understands the risks and still wants a cigar, why not? I've never understood this obsession some people have with forcing others to be virtuous in spite of themselves. If your religion and/or personal code of beliefs says you can't partake in $VICE, that's entirely on you.

Comment Re: Well "just" vibe code you a new API, then eh? (Score 3, Informative) 46

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

Comment Re:Market forces at work (Score 1) 214

I drove one for a couple of weeks on a business trip and it was fine

My brother rented one and it absolutely refused to connect to any DC fast charger that he'd tried using. He ended up bringing it back to the rental company and swapping it for an ICE car. Apparently, this is a somewhat common problem with the car.

Comment Re: China (Score 1) 214

If you are looking for something designed for duty, the Japanese kei style trucks are pretty great. An EV conversion with a Tesla battery will give you excellent range and a bed that can be modified to hold more than most American pickups.

Some people don't even like changing their own oil, and you just drop an EV conversion as if were as simple as changing the lock screen background on your phone. Anyone who has all the tools, know-how and inclination to take on such a product probably doesn't need the suggestion in the first place.

I think a more realistic answer would be along the lines of "cross your fingers that the Slate Truck isn't vaporware, then buy that."

Comment Re:lmao (Score 2) 32

Or for the H.S. kid down the street* who is willing to split the discount with me for purchases made on her ID.

For some odd reason, K-12 students are not discount eligible unless they're homeschooled or are a high school student with a college acceptance letter. I think lower education used to be eligible under the previous pinky promise terms, but it was moot back then as they never verified anyway.

Also, there are purchase limits, which kind of puts a bit of a damper on trying the same scheme, but with college students.

Comment Re: All according to plan. (Score 1) 214

Never had an issue super fast charging at a Tesla station, outside the ridiculous electricity cost of that network.

You must have an EV that has the charging port on either the rear left (as Teslas do) or front right, otherwise you would've mentioned those damned short cords too.

I drive an EV with the charging port on the front left, so I've run into both the situations where there's no spots available that I can charge, and confrontations with confused Tesla drivers who don't understand why I'm not plugged into the charger I'm parked in front of.

Comment Re:Good timing (Score 1) 32

Assuming responsible usage, having more credit cards actually helps your credit score (up to a point anyway, it's still possible to have too many credit cards). As for being a potential fraud target, most credit cards in the USA offer zero liability for fraud that is promptly reported.

What signing up for a new credit card does do however, is trigger a hard pull on your credit report.

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