Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.
> incarcerated students really want to learn
They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.
> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens
Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.
> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.
The ability to cope with boredom is an essential skill, and boredom is a necessary aspect of life. Great ideas come from boredom. Great questions do too. Boredom is not the problem, attention spans are.
Not to mention, who actually cares? Not every aspect of learning is going to be fun. Sometimes you have to sit down and memorize times tables, or read about an important historical event you just have zero passion for. That’s okay.
As for the screen-time, it’s not about having enough hours in the day, it’s about the concerns regarding what this is doing to kids. Losing out on interaction with your parents because they throw the iPad at you when they’re tired of parenting is probably affecting kids in some unknown way. If it were just an hour a day, probably nobody would be complaining about it.
As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one.
>As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one.
It's pretty evident at this point. A degree has gone from something you get if you are genuinely interested in further learning and a career in that area to an absolute must-have if you don't want to be stuck in dead-end low-paying jobs. So yeah, the process is being seen as a gatekeeper to a successful adulthood as opposed to an opportunity, because while for some kids it may still be the latter, for all kids it is most definitely the former (and one that's likely to saddle them with a lot of debt in the process).
Imprisoning people without trial, for predicted future crimes, is what's unfair. Letting an algorithm make the prediction instead of a judge only punctuates the injustice.
What is a "fair" criteria to base this decision on? Is it fair to throw someone in jail because they are young, or they got layed off, or they don't have friends or family? How is any of that better than jailing them for their skin color?
These are exactly the things that justice is supposed to be blind to.
I'm rooting for the algorithms here, simply because they make the inherent injustice of pre-trial detention harder to ignore. We can convince ourselves that this injustice is somehow corrected by the presumed wisdom and compassion of a human judge. But by formalizing the logic, we have to acknowledge that we are literally throwing people in jail for plainly unfair reasons.
Is there any circumstance in which you would support detention before trial? If not, would you oppose the detention of a serial killer caught in the act? If you do support pre-trial detention in some cases, how do you distinguish these cases from those cases for which pre-trial detention is unjustified? Could such a decision scheme be "fair" in principle? What would make it fair?
I think detention before trial is always unfair in principle, but likely unavoidable in practice. I would like to see the issue acknowledged and taken more seriously, but it's a tricky problem and I have no easy solutions to offer. Practical mitigations may be the best we can do, which I'll grant may be expensive, non-trivial to implement, and allow more criminals to roam free. Here are some vague ideas off the cuff:
* Base decisions only on things that would be relevant in a trial, like evidence and criminal history.
* Nobody should be detained just because they haven't paid bail money. If we decide that someone can be released, it should be immediate and unconditional. The court should charge no more than they can immediately collect.
* Make detention as pleasant and convenient as possible for the accused. We should have facilities specifically for this purpose that are more like hotels than prisons, at least in principle.
* Eliminate any trial delays that aren't strictly necessary, i.e. due to congestion or beurocracy.
If a serial killer is caught in the act, there would presumably be enough evidence available at the bail hearing to justify detention.
You could apply pre-trial detention to anyone accused of a crime, not offer bail at all. The upper classes might start to care more about speedy trials and police harassment once it became impossible for them to buy their way out of pre-trial detention.
It is, but I think the OC was suggesting that the old code can be kept around and used for automated regression meta-testing, which is an interesting idea.
Would be cool if it could detect which users had access to the document and switch to the most recently used of those to open the link. Not sure if that can be done securely though.
No standard library, nor even a standard class/object model. Lua is more of a language engine than a complete language. In that capacity, it is quite a success.
Java probably outperforms JRuby primarily because the JVM was designed and tuned to run Java.
But in any case, if Twitter's architecture is truly scalable then any intrinsic slowness of the language shouldn't be a big problem, because they can just toss more hardware in to compensate. What is a problem is a buggy VM that leaks memory. To run thousands of instances in a heavily instrumented way, the VM must be stable and predictable.
Statically vs dynamically typed peformance difference is clear for virtually any static or dynamic language you care to name, it has nothing to do with the jvm being "tuned" for a language:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
The LuaJIT performance is pretty impressive for a dynamically typed language, but it's hard to deny the fact that mainstream dynamically typed languages our outperformed by their static counterparts.
Thats partly because they were not designed for performance. Lua of course was as it was designed partly for slow small systems. But pypy is getting on pretty well too and javascript, showing what you can do even if not designed for performance.
You pretty much have to enforce static type invariants (e.g. "this variable will never be other than an int") to JIT stuff performantly. I don't think that's a point against the GP's argument at all.
1) Their backend crashes constantly during normal use, so they have to shut it down when nobody is around to babysit.
2) The form submits directly to some poor soul's email, who then has to copy it onto a piece of paper and drop it in a folder. To manage the workload, the form is simply disabled when this person is not around.
3) The job of "web server" has not been mechanized in this particular office, in order to preserve the charm that only comes from a web site lovingly typed in real-time by a hard-working civil servant.
It's YouTube's responsibility to implement a system that doesn't defraud people. The users getting ripped off have no direct relationship with the other users who are abusing the system, and no way to hold them accountable.
YouTube has become a Kafkaesque nightmare, at least for regular users. They recently opened up monetization to everyone, but if you actually try to use it, half your videos will go "under review" and you will be asked to provide proof that you own all the content. They won't tell you specifically what you have to provide, and nobody I know has managed to figure it out or get a video out of this state. Of course, there is no way to contact anyone or get any more information.
Apparently, "full partners" can actually get real customer service and avoid these problems, but you need to get on the order of 1000 views/day before they offer you that, which most people never achieve.
I will absolutely never do business with that company.
Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.
> incarcerated students really want to learn
They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.
> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens
Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.
> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.