But with chronic illness where do you draw the line?
Chronic illness is rare, and at some point, you try to figure out a way to get the kid tutoring.
We had a kid at my school, Ferris, who was always sick and then his grandma died.
I see what you did there.
If half your kids are chronically sick, there's something wrong with your school — environmental issues like mold, social issues like bullying, or senioritis like Bueller.
https://outrider.org/climate-c...
Chinaâ(TM)s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities
"A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles."
Indeed. I pay $20 per month for Cursor, and it works great. Why should I pay 15 times that much to be Elon's beta tester?
My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.
Which is why it was there in the first place, obviously.
ChatGPT was trained on all the stuff that happened in the past, and none of the stuff that will happen in the future.
Who do you know that was trained on stuff that will happen in the future?
The real news is that they changed "inclusion" to "innovation," which is a grave sin.
Meh. If that is about their hiring practices, on principle I'd rather they be inclusive, but it isn't likely to destroy the quality of the product if they aren't. If it is a more general statement however — "We make our product available to everyone" — then that is a much bigger concern, because it could be an indication that the software might become a lot less available.
Personally, if I used their software, I'd be more worried about the transparency -> trust change. A company like that must be transparent, because if they aren't, you can't trust them. When I see a change like that, I read it as "Trust us. We aren't sending your passwords to the NSA."
The actual Apple modems when they use their own really suck. Although I think they still use Qualcomm modems in a lot of their hardware. You do have to pay attention though.
If that's true, it likely won't be true for long. Qualcomm modems sucked when Apple started using them, too — constant baseband crashes, etc. It took a couple of years before they were even kind of stable.
The nice thing about the Apple modems is that they are in control of the entire stack. That means when there's a bug, there's no fighting back and forth between two companies about whose problem it is. That means every baseband crash, no matter how rare, likely has enough stored data to figure out why it crashed, reproduce it, and fix it. That also means that they can do detailed analytics and experiment with different tower switching algorithms on a global scale to improve reliability over time. This is something that companies like Qualcomm simply are not equipped to do, because they don't make devices, and thus don't have the ability to send software updates or experiment flag changes to billions of devices out in the field.
The stories I've read say that Qualcomm's hardware is better (read: faster) when you have a strong signal, but that in weak-signal environments, Apple's modems are considerably more reliable. I hope so. I've found the Qualcomm modems to be absolute trash in moderate-signal environments ever since they made us switch us from Sprint towers to T-Mobile towers, and things have only gotten a little bit better in the half a decade since.
I'd gladly take a slower maximum speed in exchange for avoiding the constant problems I have with the signal dropping out entirely.
What property were they stealing from the people? Won't be a telephone pole, those are almost always owned by a phone or power company.
On land owned by someone else. The government compels the landowner to make that land available to whoever put up the pole. It's not like the landowner had any say in the matter.
...if only our legal system was that stringent?
Ban on practicing law for a year if your submission to the court includes AI slop, how about that?
A second offense, disbarment.
(Personally I think disbarment should be a first-offense result for an ostensibly high-competence field like law, but our society has gotten away from "consequences" for "easily predictable results of ones actions" in general...)
They'll learn all about Patreon just as soon as they discover this hidden gem of user-recorded videos called "YouTube".
In a book that refers to Netflix as "a new upstart service that Blockbuster Video should be wary of."
... alternatives most people haven't heard of like Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon, and Passport
I can't comment on Ghost, Beehiiv, or Passport; but even I have heard of Patreon, and that pretty much ensures that everyone and his dog knows about it. I would guess that Patreon and Substack have about equal name recognition among the general population.
Yeah, I saw "...alternatives most people haven't heard of like... Patreon", and was thinking, "What year is this?"
Let's go on the theory that they got into Harvard because they are the best of the best. If that were the case, then at most universities they should expect a top grade against the "lesser" students and why should they be penalized with sub-A grades just for being the best?
I think it's probably safe to say that there is pressure to inflate grades, and that such pressure comes from people who think that way.
And I know you know all this, but for the rest of the folks reading, realistically, most of them got into Harvard for one of three reasons:
Note that all three of those include the word "apply" in one form or another. The ones who got in are presumably some of the best of the people who applied, with the caveat that there is a large pool of people who were equally good, but did not get in, because there is a limit to how many students they can take, and there is a much, much larger pool of people who were equally good, but did not apply, because they:
For example, in CS undergrad education, Harvard is tied with UC Santa Cruz down at #37. And UCSC is a short (though moderately painful) drive from Silicon Valley, which makes it more desirable for part-time employment. Harvard is a few minutes on the red line from MIT (#5), which at best makes it an easy trip to another school's recruiting fairs.
So I'll recommend The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel (of Harvard). The more I think about it, the more I like his lottery ideas.
It's not a terrible thought. I'm not sure you'd see a meaningful difference in outcomes if you randomly picked from the top 20% of students nationwide and assigned them to Harvard versus carefully selecting with the level of rigor that they do. What would be really great would be if one of these schools randomly chose 2% of their incoming freshmen from the pool of all applicants, rather than going through the full process, and then compared outcomes.
For undergraduate courses, there is just no way that the large majority of students can master the material to get an A if the course is being taught at a reasonable level. There is just too much of a spread of abilities.
Of course it's possible. It is exceedingly unlikely once the class size gets sufficiently large, but it is absolutely possible in small classes.
Consider an honors general psychology class where everyone is in the honors program and chooses to take that class rather than taking their A in the non-honors version of the course. If they do well enough to get an A in the non-honors course, there's no good reason to give them a B in the honors version of the course, because that just penalizes their GPA for taking a version of the course that covers the subject in more depth and breadth. Now assume that this class has ten students, all of whom would probably have gotten an A in the standard general psych course. Consider that the policy proposed would cap it at 6 As.
And even if you reject the idea that the honors classes should be graded similarly to the non-honors classes and want folks to wear an A in an honors class as some sort of badge of honor (why?), a small elective class still has a real risk of having a section some quarter/semester where everyone is really good or really bad. And just as you wouldn't want to assign As if nobody deserves one, you wouldn't want to deny As if everyone does.
Policies like this only make sense if you cancel any section that has a small number of students or exclude them from the policy. The smaller the sample size, the larger the standard deviation becomes. This is basic statistics (which I mostly picked up in Dr. Zachry's honors general psych). Any policy that doesn't take that into account is fundamentally flawed. Ideally, the grades for each class need to be evaluated with a t-test or similar against all of the previous sections of that class, taking into account the class size as though they were both samples of a larger population. And if that says there's too much difference between the mean/variance of one class and another, that *might* be a hint that the other class was graded unfairly, or it might mean that they're just smarter/better students. To find out which, you then need to compare the group of students' overall per-semester/quarter GPAs against that same metric for the other historical sections of the class.
Simplifying it to some fixed number makes it easy to write the policy, but it doesn't make it a *good* policy.
In an elite school it doesn't seem there would be a whole lot of "year full of dumb people" happening.
In a given class, though, there will be variation. If your grade depends not just on how well you did, but on how well the other people in your class did, it's a fundamentally useless metric, because you can have one person who just happens to get into a couple of classes where half the people were valedictorian, and ends up with a B, while another person in the same year who takes classes in a different semester or ends up in a different section of the same class with different cohorts, turns in exactly the same quality of work, and gets an A.
Any sort of stack ranking makes grading completely and totally worthless, even when evaluating people who were at the same school at the same time. It literally tells you nothing more than that a particular student was better than the people in that specific section of that specific class.
This sort of stack ranking also creates a strong disincentive for smart people to take classes with a smaller numbers of students, because the variability in quality of students will be higher.
I would say that any sort of limits like this should be applied over a five-year rolling window, and including all sections taught by a specific professor. That way, a professor who is approaching the threshold can adjust the grading slightly overall to stay within the limits without excessively penalizing students in a section that has all really smart people.
Alternatively, you could provide an escape hatch where a professor can justify exceeding the policy on a one-off basis, but where it has to be independently reviewed, and if it keeps happening, it becomes a problem for the professor.
If you don't do one of those two things, then what you're doing is causing artificial grade *deflation*, which results in an unfairly/randomly biased ranking signal. And I'm of the opinion that doing so makes grades even less useful than their current questionable level of utility.
Or we could just acknowledge that grades are a poor measurement of students' ability in the real world and abandon them entirely, replacing them with pass/fail signals, where each subject area within a course must provide a pass signal for the class as a whole to be passing. Better yet, make it tristate: P, NMP, F, where P means it should count across the board, NMP means it is good enough to pass if it isn't a course in your major area, and F means it isn't good enough to get credit.
Let companies actually spend the time and money to interview more candidates to find out whether they are worth hiring instead of relying on noisy numeric signals as a crude filter.
Even bytes get lonely for a little bit.
