I'm fairly certain it's highly related to our health and diet. Anecdotally, I've noticed a huge difference both with myself and others.

I've made a number of observations on this, personally, and over the years have figured out some things that help them avoid me (or prefer others):

* High vitamin D. You're either getting this from sunlight secondarily or foods (eggs, fish, etc.)
* Garlic. Lots of garlic. This one's the biggest, and for me one of the easiest to address since it tastes good with food.
* No perfumes or scented deodorants. They love that shit. Avoid it like the plague.
* Generally low-carb diet (no crap starches).
* Sulfur. This one surprised me, but it's something we naturally need and don't usually get enough of in our diets. I found it out on a lark during a particularly buggy camping trip when a woman I was with (who wasn't being bothered as much, contrary to my experience that women are bothered more often) swore by it.

My wife also noticed a marked decrease in skeeter interest in her when she stopped being vegan.

Also anecdotally and related, because i know this comes up a lot in outdoor talks lately: ticks. They hate oregano and garlic oil. And neem oil, topically, mixed with lotion. I've had them climb up my sock and then fall off (seemingly intentionally) repeatedly when trying to get onto my skin after a diet heavy in garlic and oregano. It's at least as effective as DEET and sticks around longer.

Sweat also seems to attract them, perhaps due to it causing the odors to be more airborne.

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:

• They could afford to go to Harvard, and therefore applied.
• They thought they were the best of the best, and therefore applied.
• Their parents went to Harvard and convinced them to apply.

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:

• didn't have the money to afford it,
• didn't perceive themselves to be good enough (impostor syndrome),
• didn't want to live in the Boston area (B is for Boston, B is for brr),
• didn't want to go to school with what they assumed would be a bunch of spoiled rich kids,
• wanted to save their money for a good grad school, preferred to stay closer to home, or
• were majoring in an area where Harvard is only middle-of-the-pack.

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.

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.

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 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.

- it received "digital confirmation of data destruction"
- it had been informed that no Instructure customers would be extorted as a result of the incident
- the agreement covers all affected customers, with no need for individuals to engage with the hackers

I'm 100% sure criminals would never lie. It's bad for business. I'm also 100% sure they didn't create any additional means for future compromise.

You're describing the situation in places where demand doesn't exceed capacity. I'm describing how any sane person running an electrical utility would bill things in a place where a company wants to put in a data center that exceeds available capacity. They'll hit them with capacity charges based on their usage during peak demand periods, or they'll make them pay for capacity improvements as part of the connection charge, or both.

And the "or they will go somewhere that will" part shouldn't really be a concern. They want to build there. The generating capacity isn't adequate. They either pay whatever fees are necessary to ensure the stability of the grid or they don't build. If that cause them to build somewhere else where adequate capacity exists, that's also fine.

Given that big companies have already made it clear that they think AI will let them do the same work with fewer people, and given that using AI costs the company a lot in terms of compute resources, it seems intuitively obvious that the only reason execs would want to encourage more AI use is to find out what jobs can easily have their headcount reduced by more use of AI.

The people using the most tokens are the ones for whom more of their jobs can be most easily automated. This is not, IMO, a positive sign for the long-term survival of that particular job role. The only rational response is to use AI just enough to show a speed-up, assuming the speed-up actually happens at all, but not enough to be high up on the chart of AI users. Using it way more than that seems self-defeating.

Yeah, that was confusing. But Kenya's president is almost certainly wrong. Here's why:

1. It is not numerically correct, assuming the numbers in the summary are accurate. The country has a surplus adequate to power the data center at somewhere around half to three-quarters capacity even at peak power use, and probably at full capacity for 99 days out of 100. So even if they built it at full capacity right off the bat and did nothing else, you'd still only lose power to a small fraction of Kenya occasionally.

2. They're not building it at full capacity. They're building a small data center at first, then building it up over time as more generating capacity comes online.

3. They're a reliable customer of power. That means that they will alway pay the bill, even if it is high. The grid operators and generation plant operators can charge them a huge premium for bulk power, then use that extra revenue to build more power plants. By the time the data center is running at full capacity, they could have more than enough power to power it.

4. Even if that extra investment in production doesn't happen, they can just refuse to provide the additional power from the grid. I'm sure Microsoft knows how to do solar + storage by now, and if not, they can pay someone to do it for them who does. Or they can build their own geothermal plant right next to the existing one. Or they can do any number of other things to produce power, like installing an SMR.

5. Nothing inherently prevents them from reducing power usage during peak load periods. Service will get slower, but should gracefully degrade, assuming they're doing it right. Nobody will lose power, realistically speaking.

It is unfortunate that so many people look at these data centers and the current worst-case state of resource availability and conclude wrongly that they are infeasible, but this is a common mistake made by planners, legislators, and members of the general public. They fail to account for how the existence of the data center with its need for resources will trigger the production of facilities to exploit previously unusable resources and make them available, and they fail to recognize that in a true power emergency, they can just turn 90% of it off and shift the load to other data centers.

But the reality of the matter is that nobody is going to build a gigawatt of additional power capacity in Kenya unless the government or some private company that needs power pays them to do it. They already have a 23 to 30% surplus compared with their worst-case power consumption. That means that adding more production will just drive power prices down, so they'll get less money for the power they produce.

But as soon as someone like Microsoft starts needing enough power to pull those margins down, suddenly additional capacity becomes economically feasible, and you'll see either existing power companies expanding or new power companies entering the market. And the existence of an all-but-guaranteed higher future demand is the key to making that happen. Without the data center being approved, that motive to expand does not exist, and the grid will likely stay at or near its currently levels unless the government forces the hand of the market by paying someone to build more generating capacity.

Different areas I guess. Around here almost everyone I know owns a 4x4 SUV or Truck that is the 'winter beater'. You don't want the salt and potholes ruining your nice car and often the fact it's a car at all means you are going to be high sided on the streets that almost never get plowed before you need to go anywhere. Hell it's already May and I still can't take the motor cycle out because the roads are just hole after hole.

You can call it a winter beater or the 'work vehicle' that you use for towing, trips to the gardening supply, dealing with winter, and general hauling. I see it with my friends who live on way less than 100k a year and with my friends who live on way more. It's not a status or wealth thing. I'd say it's much less likely to be seen with wealth. Thats why I get to laugh at the guy trying to drive a maserati in our winters wondering why he's stuck on the road.

FTFY.

What I'm saying is that if everyone had IPv6 in their homes and offices, remote access wouldn't require all the silly cloud server games. You could just hit the device directly by its IPv6 address, and assuming your router suppoerts UPNP pinholes, you're done. You'd need dynamic DNS and that's it.

An emergency stop button in the app should be able to do the same thing. If that's not possible, it's a rather bad design flaw.

Also, if something jams in a way that could cause meaningful damage (beyond having to brush blobs of filament off of the hot end) and the printer doesn't detect it, that's also a rather bad design flaw.

CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter: $565. If adapters in the reverse direction from NACS to CHAdeMO cost thousands, it's because the market is too small to achieve economies of scale. Yeah, you need some active electronics to negotiate the protocol, whereas NACS uses the CCS protocol, so you can do it with a passive adapter, but the actual DC is still DC.

About the only thing any cloud service for printing provides is a way to monitor the printer and send jobs to it when you're not on the same network. And the only reason this is still an issue at all is that too many folks are still stuck on IPv4.

I've been a rider for about 15 years. The absence of shifting is one of the things which makes EVs significantly less fun (in both cars and bikes/scooters). Even video games and movies recognize this in how they implement futuristic EVs.

The clutch on a bike is also more important than the clutch on a car, and it's a big part of the feel of a bike. Motorcycle clutches are 'wet', you can be half-on and half-off clutch. This is useful for helping control against engine torque to the wheels, 'engine braking' as well as controlling launch. For anyone accustomed to riding, it's a necessary feature, because it's literally how motorcycles work. Remove it and it doesn't feel like the same thing; it removes a lot of the enjoyment and tactility of the activity, and subsequently the enjoyment, of controlling a machine. It feels like you're doing something (and you are).

EVs feel more like a railcar, it's the exact opposite of the freedom of movement that motorcycles give you.