Every day the saddest, most awful pictures coming out of #Gaza. This one is from Jenin in the West Bank and it’s a school boy killed whilst riding his bike and like so many others it is just 💔💔💔💔💔💔😭😭😭😭😭
When I was a child the idea of memorisation and conformance was equal to academic success, and indeed success in life.
Independent thinking, challenge, tinkering, play.. were definitely not.
And yet invention needs the second.
Did this culture come from British colonialism and "Victorian" education designed to create unchallenging servants? Or did it exist previously? I guess it doesn't explain China's previous education values...
I sometimes listen to NN Taleb who is fervently against large institutions because they squish good culture. He suggests people who make progress do so despite their employer (academia, govt, corporate).
He gives many examples of historical inventors and discoverers who were lucky enough to have the time and resources to play and tinker.
For me this ties into the idea of UBI to free people up to follow their own instincts and not spend 100% of their time surviving.
🆕 blog! “It isn't who you know - it's who knows you”
I'm terrible at networking. I forget people's names minutes after meeting them, I never have business cards and lose the ones I'm given, and I can't go five minutes without burbling some nonsense. But I recognise that networking is a skill and, like any skill, it takes practice to succeed. I've always been told that […]
I’m so glad public libraries already exist. Could you I magine trying to sell the idea of libraries to politicians in 2024?
“You want to build a large public complex on prime real estate that gives away free books & education & community events—paid for by our tax dollars? Are you crazy??”
In the UK we're lucky to have already had the same for healthcare.
Publicly funded healthcare, free at the point of need and use.
If it didn't already exist, there's no way even the "centre left" party today would suggest it, I fear.
It goes to show how much of a victory establishing it was in the previous context of only private health, against eg the opposition of doctors associations.
New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD's licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD.
“At Microsoft, the share of senior employees as a portion of the company’s overall workforce declined more than 5 percentage points after the return-to-office mandate took effect, the researchers found. At Apple, the decline was 4 percentage points, while at SpaceX — the only company of the three to require workers to be fully in-person — the share of senior employees dropped 15 percentage points.”
In fact this is my day job. I "work in technology" but spend 99% of my time grappling the interesting challenge people, groups of people, and organisations.