I think he’s basically saying that it’s racist to “artificially” integrate communities, because (I think he’s saying) if they need to be integrated, then that’s the same as saying that black folks are necessarily inferior. I don’t think he’s trying to say they’re inferior, but that laws forcing integration are based on that assumption. So he can be well educated and successful because he isn’t inherently inferior, therefore there is no need for forced integration.
… Which is such a weird stretch of naturalism in a direction I wasn’t ready for. Naturalist BS is usually, “X deserves fewer rights because they are naturally inferior”, whereas this is “We should ignore historical circumstances because X is not naturally inferior”.
Start a game of monopoly after three other players have already gone around the board 10 times and created lots of rules explicitly preventing you from playing how they did and see how much the argument of “well, to give you any kind of advantage here would just be stating you’re inferior, and we can’t do that.”
Man probably got angry at his golf handicap making him feel inferior and took things too far. Among other things.
There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can’t remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it’s really helped me as an intro lecturer.
Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It’s easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.
Absolutely! One of the difficulties that I have with my intro courses is working out when to introduce the vocabulary correctly, because it is important to be able to engage with the industry and the literature, but it adds a lot of noise to learning the underlying concepts and some assessments end up losing sight of the concept and go straight to recalling the vocab.
Knowing the terms can help you self-learn, but a textbook glossary could do the same thing.
Yeah, I may be wrong but I think it usually comes down to a very specific kind of precision needed. It’s not meant to be hostile, I think, but meant to provide a domain-specific explanation clearly to those who need to interpret it in a specific way. In law, specific jargon infers very specific behaviour, so it’s meant to be precise in its own way (not a law major, can’t say for sure), but it can seem completely meaningless if you aren’t prepped for it.
Same thing in other fields. I had a professor who was very pedantic about {braces} vs [brackets] vs (parentheses), and it seemed totally unnecessary to be so corrective in discussions, but when explaining where things went wrong with a student’s work it was vital to be able to quickly differentiate them in their work so they could review the right areas or understand things faster during a lecture later down the line.
But that noise takes longer to teach through, so if it is important, it needs it’s own time to learn, and it will make it inaccessible to anyone who didn’t get that time to learn and digest it.
I really want to see if worker owned cooperatives plus AI could do help democratize running companies (where appropriate). Not just LLMs, but a mix of techniques for different purposes (e.g., hierarchial task networks to help with operations and pipelining, LLM for assembling/disseminating information to workers).
It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don’t want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.
But don’t worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they’ll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.
My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.
I don’t know why, but I still can’t open a core file without going I’m in. I don’t do QA, though, and so tinkering with final breath of my program frozen in time maintains some novelty.
I get both sides of the argument here. I think we need to have this big reaction because companies have held so much power over employees for so long - I’ll avoid ranting about worker-owned cooperatives here - but the past few years I’ve surprised myself by moving into a bit of a “slippery slope” camp with these things. Not to say it shouldn’t happen, but that we need to be prepared for the follow-up.
Hopefully related example, in education: There were some really big push backs recently where I am over bad treatment of the students in highschool, all legit. The school board ignored it for a long time, it got bad, they finally took it seriously. Then they overcorrected and stopped believing teachers at all and started jumping straight to firing at almost any complaint. Then students started weaponizing complaints, and now teachers are getting fired for trying to enforce deadlines and for giving low marks because students are complaining about how deadlines, grades, and meeting grading requirements are detrimental to mental health and well-being, and now there are a bunch of these students from this board in my university classes failing hard and filing complaints about courses being too difficult and other things despite them having glowing reviews just a few years prior.
I guess what I’m getting at: I think it’s fair for someone to choose not to hire people like this because it’s possible that the people willing to stand up and make an important fuss over these things might not know where the line stands between a worthwhile complaint and a non-worthwhile one, and might make a company look badexternally even though it’s doing good internally, just not to someone new to the workforce’s expectations.
I also think it’s fair to go the opposite direction, because ultimately we need major change in the way companies/everything are structured that lead to these nasty layoffs and poor conditions and if someone does raise issues where there aren’t, hopefully we are prepared enough and in the right enough to take it seriously, but weather it and act in everyone’s best interests.
I almost exclusivity self-checkout for groceries, and it had drastically sped up my checkout time as most people in my area opt to use traditional checkout and the stores are still keeping lots of lanes open (just closing the express lanes). The last 3 times I’ve used a non-self checkout, each time I was double charged for items or didn’t have reduced prices applied and didn’t notice because I was bagging.
Totally agree. I forgot about those, as I’ve only encountered the weighing ones once in the past very long time and it was a mess, I can totally get hate if weighing ones are the only experience with them.
I’ve experienced burnout throughout work and education since I was sixteen. Usually around once every 12-18 months. I’ve accrued a lot of associated trauma....
I agree with the recommendation for talking to the doctor; I’m in a similar position. This might be completely unrelated to your situation, so take it with many grains of salt.
What I’ve been learning is that a lot of my own burnout cycling seems to be cycles of intense and constant masking. I struggle with social situations, following “chronos” time instead of “Kairos” (if you will entertain the misuse of these), and eventually get so buried in obligations and actively resisting my natural impulses that my wants and needs get muddied and untended to and the pain of pretending or entering social modes builds up too much. Being in a mode, “professor mode”, “friend mode”, “colleague mode”, “spouse mode”, they all build up the tension and while I can seem socially adept, if I’m not in a mode I’m pretty useless. My Uber drivers can attest. Sometimes I do need a break from social activities while I break down the mask that builds up. A decalcifying of the brain. My friends seem to understand.
I’m a teaching professor, and I love the work, it has high flexibility but strict accountability, lots of room to experiment and find novelty, but a massive social burden and ridiculous workload. The only thing I’ve found to help so far, besides medication, is doing less. Fewer work obligations meant more time to de-mask, it meant I could take the more time on my tasks that I refused to admit to myself I needed compared to colleagues, more time to do stupid random impulsive (but safe) BS which I’ve found is the most relaxing to me, and that naturally led to meditating, exercising, and eating a bit healthier, which made things feel more manageable.
I don’t know what the long term prospects of this realization are for me, but consider that ADHD usually means that tasks will take longer and more effort than typical people. Admitting to myself that it’s a disability and I don’t need to work twice or three times as hard as other people to make up for it all the time has been really important.
You also mentioned trauma; a lifetime of letting people down without knowing why really turned me into an over-supporter as an adult. Fawning response to stress - feeling the stress build up and instinctively doing whatever you can to help other people at cost of yourself, rather than fighting or running away or freezing up - and then when you’re alone you fight yourself, freeze, or run away from everything. I’ve been told it’s a form of invisible self harm, and it’s nefarious because the goal is to make everyone else see things as all right.
So I don’t know if any of this clicks true for you, and I don’t fully know the solution to these, but awareness of my own issues has helped a lot, and I think awareness and recognition is key to getting started. Years of therapy, meditation, medication, it’s all making progress, but it’s slow, and awareness has been key to any of the positives. For me, it seems like working less and admitting to myself I have a disability, undoing years of traumatic people pleasing at my own expense, and learning to unmask more in social interactions and at home are key, however that path is treaded.
Hah, yeah I learned I wasn’t so much a night person as much as someone who indulges in revenge sleep procrastinating and doesn’t get enough alone time in the day.
When I became more environmentally conscious many years ago, I decided to switch to a safety razor to reduce plastic waste. I landed on a reputable safety razor with a ‘mild’ angle, something that would be good for sensitive skin. Even with a good shaving soap, I found that I would regularly still get some discomfort from...
+1 to safety razors in general. The disposables always used to make my neck and chin look like a horror film, not for lack of research on using. Switching to safety razors, I only shave around my beard so I use the same blades for a long while and shave infrequently, and I’ve been using the same pack of blades that I bought 5+ years ago. A little cardboard and metal, way less waste, I have a huge supply of razors so I haven’t thought about buying in ages, and I get a way better shave after just a little practice.
This isn’t a informed statement just a hot take, but maybe capitalism wouldn’t be so evil if everyone tipped into the growth end of Maslow’s before turning insulin into high-end consumer goods.
Yeah, this is the approach people are trying to take more now, the problem is generally amount of that data needed and verifying it’s high quality in the first place, but these systems are positive feedback loops both in training and in use. If you train on higher quality code, it will write higher quality code, but be less able to handle edge cases or potentially complete code in a salient way that wasn’t at the same quality bar or style as the training code.
On the use side, if you provide higher quality code as input when prompting, it is more likely to predict higher quality code because it’s continuing what was written. Using standard approaches, documenting, just generally following good practice with code before sending it to the LLM will majorly improve results.
I researched creative AI and how AI can help people be creative, people thought it was a ridiculous and pointless topic. I’m biased.
Firstly, I think it’s important to see the non-chat applications. Goblin Tools is a great example of code we just couldn’t have written before. Purely from an NLP perspective, these tools are outstanding, if imperfect.
I’m excited to see new paradigms of applications come up when talented new developers are able to locally run LLMs and integrate them into their everyday programming, and too see what they can cook up in a world where that’s normal.
I’m interested in LLMs not to generate data on the fly, but to pre-generate and validate massive amounts of content or data than we’d otherwise be able to for things like games.
From a chat perspective, I like that it can support fleshing out ideas, parsing lots of data in a usable way.
And finally I’m excited for how lightweight LLMs could affect user interface design. I could imagine a future where OSs have swappable LLMs like they have shells that can allow for natural language interfacing with programs.
I don’t know, it’s just really accessible NLP, and that’s great.
I sit somewhere tangential on this - I think Bret Victor’s thoughts are valid here, or my interpretation of them - that we need to start revisiting our tooling. Our IDEs should be doing a lot more heavy lifting to suit our needs and reduce the amount of cognitive load that’s better suited for the computer anyways. I get it’s not as valid here as other use cases, but there’s some room for improvements.
Having it in separate functions is more testable and maintainable and more readable when we’re thinking about control flow. Sometimes we want to look at a function and understand the nuts and bolts and sometimes we just want to know the overall flow. Why can’t we swap between views and inline the functions in our IDE when we want to see the full flow? In fact, why can’t we see the function inline but with the parameter variables replaced by passed values to get a feel for how the function will flow and compute what can be easily computed (assuming no global state)?
I could be completely off base, but more and more recently - especially after years of teaching introductory programming - I’m leaning more toward the idea that our IDEs should be doubling down on taking advantage of language features, live computation, and co-operating with our coding style… and not just OOP. I’d love to hear some places that I might be overlooking. Maybe this is all a moot point, but I think code design and tooling should go hand in hand.
Every time. Try to get ahead of your work? Well, good for you, that first 20% went really well, now let’s spend the next two weeks on “work” that interferes with your other needs and needs to get thrown out because there’s no way it’s integrating with the other 80% that needs to happen within the next hour and also everything that you did for the other 20% is useless and needs to be redone now that you broke it with that tangent.
It’s been a painful summer “preparing” to teach my fall courses.
Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner: “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
I will let go of all my normal home maintenance tasks, such as cleaning, laundry, taking out the trash, changing bed sheets, etc., until I have a deadline for work approaching. All of a sudden, I have all the energy in the world to focus on said tasks while I avoid the looming deadline that I must absolutely accomplish if I...
It’s also tough to reconcile that I may thrive in high pressure situations, but they’re still exhausting and I don’t like them, and definitely not being dependent on them to do anything. Medication helped the minute to minute, but the week to week is still a total blur.
I think this is mostly a US thing. Why use yearly salary? You’re not paid once a year, are you? Most likely once a month. Referencing monthly salary makes much more sense....
Yeah, I knew freelance folks who provided long term support with such complicated setups. The base daily rate plus hourly with a monthly retainer and weekly on call fees. Wild.
Clarence Thomas Just Set Civil Rights Back 70 Years (www.theroot.com)
Calculus made easy (lemmy.world)
“All the little bits”
AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of execs in a survey (www.theregister.com)
Millennials are exhausted by working more for less. (www.theguardian.com)
(water is wet and fire is hot).
Solutions? Where we're going, we don't need solutions. (lemmy.world)
Please dont take this seriously guys its just a dumb meme I haven’t written a single line of code in half of these languages
Gen Z is recording themselves getting fired in growing TikTok trend (www.cbsnews.com)
With guns and animal slavery (reddthat.com)
cross-posted from: reddthat.com/post/12803046
'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology (www.bbc.com)
How does one find a career that won't cause them burnout?
I’ve experienced burnout throughout work and education since I was sixteen. Usually around once every 12-18 months. I’ve accrued a lot of associated trauma....
Night vs Morning people (startrek.website)
The Henson Safety Razor, a nearly 1-to-1 replacement for disposable razors, with all the environmental benefits of a regular safety razor, and certifiably BIFL
When I became more environmentally conscious many years ago, I decided to switch to a safety razor to reduce plastic waste. I landed on a reputable safety razor with a ‘mild’ angle, something that would be good for sensitive skin. Even with a good shaving soap, I found that I would regularly still get some discomfort from...
"Innovation" (lemmy.world)
There once was a programmer (feddit.de)
Why do you like LLMs?
Genuinely curious....
Linear code is more readable (blog.separateconcerns.com)
Adrenaline Wave (file.coffee)
Crosspost from lemm.ee/post/7910550
CEO says COVID gave us bad habits, prescribes unemployment of 40-50% (twitter.com)
Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner: “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
Nothing helps me complete typical home tasks like avoiding a work deadline
I will let go of all my normal home maintenance tasks, such as cleaning, laundry, taking out the trash, changing bed sheets, etc., until I have a deadline for work approaching. All of a sudden, I have all the energy in the world to focus on said tasks while I avoid the looming deadline that I must absolutely accomplish if I...
What's with telling YEARLY salaries?
I think this is mostly a US thing. Why use yearly salary? You’re not paid once a year, are you? Most likely once a month. Referencing monthly salary makes much more sense....