shanghaibebop

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

That’s the amazing part of this for me, the mental gymnastics to get here is pretty crazy

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Seems like a bit of an oversight to not spec the panels to be extremely hail proof when you’re in the Midwest supercell central.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

As someone who went to an "elite institution," coming from a first-generation immigrant background, and used it as a vehicle for massive social mobility, I am quite ambivalent (not in apathetic, but strong feelings about it on both sides) about the elimination of race-based admissions at these institutions.

The people who truly benefit from the current state of race-based affirmative action are not real "underprivileged people". 99.999% of those will never even reach the academic qualification needed to get past the first round of screening at these schools. The overwhelming number of people who "benefit" from this are under-represented minorities from extremely elite backgrounds - the black of latino kid who went to top-tier private schools. If you have two applicants: 1 White/Asian kid from a poor background, vs 1 black/latino kid from Philip Exeter, who do you think these schools will take?

These schools are institutions with the goal of perpetuating elitism. period. Legacy, athletes, "extracurriculars" are all just forms of gatekeeping for people without the knowledge, or social economic freedoms to partake in these activities. (I'm very confident about this from my years of helping underprivileged kids get into universities)

Now I do think race-based affirmative action does 2 things very well:

1. It broadens the racial and international perspectives of the new "wave" of elites, and there are numerous studies on how that improves the performance (mostly from a capitalistic point of view) of those students in the new international world.
2. It makes it so that there is some semblance of race diversity (at the cost of economic class diversity) within the new wave of "elites" coming out of these schools.

IMO, the path to more social equality isn't by changing the skin color of people who become elite, but by opening the gate for more people from non-traditional backgrounds in the form of community colleges and an easy path to transfer to universities (a la California university system, though the current pace of UCs is also aiming to join the ranks of these "elite" institutions)

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I'm going to copy over parts of my response from another thread on this topic. I don't think it's a loss for every single person, and the topic of equity is much more complex than just race.

As someone who went to an “elite institution,” coming from a low-income, first-generation college student, and immigrant background, and used it as a vehicle for massive social mobility, I am quite ambivalent (not in apathetic, but strong feelings about it on both sides) about the elimination of race-based admissions at these institutions.

The people who truly benefit from the current state of race-based affirmative action are not real “underprivileged people”. 99.999% of those will never even reach the academic qualification needed to get past the first round of screening at these schools. The overwhelming number of people who “benefit” from this are under-represented minorities from extremely elite backgrounds - the black of latino kid who went to top-tier private schools. If you have two applicants: 1 White/Asian kid from a poor background, vs 1 black/latino kid from Philip Exeter, who do you think these schools will take?

These schools are institutions with the goal of perpetuating elitism. period. Legacy, athletes, and “extracurriculars” are all just forms of gatekeeping for people without the knowledge, or social economic freedoms to partake in these activities. (I’m very confident about this from my years of helping underprivileged kids get into universities)

Now I do think race-based affirmative action does 2 things very well:

1. It broadens the racial and international perspectives of the new “wave” of elites, and there are numerous studies on how that improves the performance (mostly from a capitalistic point of view) of those students in the new international world. This flows into your argument about how allowing race-based affirmative action actually makes schools better. However, this could be a dangerous justification. What if segregation makes schools better? That same logic can be used to justify private school admissions metrics that we can agree are objectively unjust.
2. It makes it so that there is some semblance of race diversity (at the cost of economic class diversity) within the new wave of “elites” coming out of these schools. I think this is actually quite a good thing, which is one of the reasons that I am quite ambivalent about race-based affirmative action at these private schools.

In many ways, the current race-based admissions system in the elite schools actually sacrifices economic affirmative action, for race-based affirmative action. Again, we can debate how intersectional the two topics are, but that's just the reality of how these systems work.

IMO, the path to more social equality isn’t by changing the skin color of people who become elite, but by opening the gate for more people from non-traditional backgrounds in the form of community colleges and an easy path to transfer to universities (a la California university system, though the current pace of UCs is also aiming to join the ranks of these “elite” institutions). There needs to be a non-"luxury" path, a non-rarified path, towards quality higher education.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Curious about your thoughts on how UCs do their affirmative action, which is race-blind, but socially and economically focused?

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

The alternative is what the UC system does, which takes into account social economic background but is race blind.

But the outcome of that is much less “sexy” from a diversity perspective. You end up with a bunch of Asian kids. (I’d argue disproportionally pushed out by these other top private universities, so the demographics is even more distorted) But if you peel back a layer, the portion of the UC student body that was previously on free and reduced lunch, that portion is much higher than that of Stanford or any of the Ivy leagues.

There is definitely some consideration for economic backgrounds at these top schools, I was part of the low income first generation student group at my school. But it’s very very tough for many of these kids because they have a tough time keeping up with their peers, especially in STEM fields. (Imagine coming into school ready to take calculus, because that’s all your school offered, when some of your peers have already finished linear algebra, that really does a number on your confidence to pursue STEM fields)

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

University of California system

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

IMO the interesting part is that this is not American politics. Ironically out of all the western countries, the US actually talks about it the most, but the legacy of colonialism and white supremacy is still taken as the default in much of the world. Most folks in Europe are quite blind to it since it’s really taken as the default. It’s a pretty global issue, but very few places do people openly confront it.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Honestly, that’s probably an underestimate. 3.4m at 20/hr (so 15/hr plus overhead) with 2000 work hours in a year only comes out to ~84 full time employees.

I really doubt they can do what most of the mods do with 84 minimum wage (sf Bay Area) workers.

Even if you outsource, the amount of expertise in specific fields is very hard to find even with money.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

the US is a fractal scam. At every level, everything is an attempt to extract money from ill-informed “suckers”, from the running of the government, to the prices of supermarket groceries, to the tipping culture at restaurants, to even finding a place to put your car [1]. Every single thing is someone’s grift. In order to function in America, you need to be willing to be suckered to some extent. There’s no way around it. Unfairness is baked into every transaction, and increasingly more social interactions.

What a quote. I will add that “we” also like to believe we have the most fair system. And in many ways, the “gotchas” are much more hidden and systemic than other countries. For example, you might be scammed haggling with someone in Southeast Asia, but we get scammed everyday by credit card companies making bank on every single transactions.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Well, you should try living in Europe. In the Country side, everything closes on Sunday.

I think expecting things 24/7 is a very US concept. (Perhaps with the exception of Asian mega cities)

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Why would Apple follow? They sell hardware, they want you to buy the physical device. If anything Apple has been pushing on-device compute more than anyone else these few years.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Disagree.

All the software companies i work with has switched to MacBook Pros as their mainline professional laptop of choice in the past decade.

It’s literally a better product for most of developer work and much easier to support.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

My experience has been all GPU-intensive workflows have been pushed to the cloud. It works a lot better for CI/CD purposes as well, and most of the larger datasets are too practically large for your laptop, it ends up being prohibitively slow to download datasets from databases to your own laptop and then train on your local machine.

I could be biased since most of my network is in the startup scene in SV, where hardware cost is generally the LAST thing most companies worry about. I haven't seen a non-mac software company that's not a 5000+ dinosaur person company.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

I struggle with it, mostly because I get frustrated how much faster I can type compared to handwriting things. I haven't hand written things since I left school.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Until there are fundamental economics and regulatory work to de-incentivize the purchases of these monster cars, they won't stop. It's a much higher margin item from the auto makers perspectives, so they will keep trying to sell and market these cars.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Tulare lake used to support lots of different native tribes in the area. Until they were killed by settlers and disease and the lake was drained to feed the agriculture in the inland empire.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Seems more like an alternative to TikTok no?

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Establishing battlefield control - Standby

Pick your poison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHqsHRwUDzM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyrgK7DsRTw

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Yes, it's exactly that. They also tap into the "rust-belt" decay along with the sense of economic nihilism of former GDR eastern states(Especially in Thuringia, Saxony). They started specifically as a right-wing Eurosceptic party during the time I was living in Germany in 2013. Even then, it was clear they were attracting some of the more dangerous far-right factions that has been "shut out" of the political system in Germany due to how the voting system works.

They very much toe the line, however, the party has gotten more extreme over the years, especially those in Saxony and Thuringia. People like Hocke does get charged for violating anti-nazism rules, but somehow is still quite influential in the AfD as they have failed to oust him in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rn_H%C3%B6cke

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Great Scott, what year is this? JNCO, Tamagotchi, Grudge, and even platform shoes?

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Work on yourself and build self efficacy. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s incredibly fulfilling when you can do things that you previously can’t. If you want money and you’re young, try to figure out what you’re good at and also what society seems to need. Whether that’s a skilled trade if you like working with your hands, or programming if you like that, find something at that intersection of what you’re good at and what people will pay you for and get really good at it.

Exercise consistently, go out and get some sun, set goals for yourself. I find that our digital lifestyle has really trained our brain for instant gratification constantly chasing that dopamine hit. But the real world doesn’t function that way.

Who cares if you’re a bit weird, everyone has their quirks.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

I'm on a large T mobile family plan and was able to stack on insider as well as free line bonus. Ends up being around same price as Mint's unlimited tier, but with much better international roaming and in-flight wifi for half of the domestic us airlines. That's another option if you're interested in that.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

Each step drastically lowers the barriers to get to that end, and also distorts the monetary incentives for people operating that technology to make them more likely to deceive you.

It used to be you have to go to a bookstore/library to read some crack theory on the ailment of your choice. In order to get your crack theories published, you had gatekeepers, publishers, bookstore owners, and then librarians, who would choose what books to stock. Pretty hard to abuse your powers to deceive people.

Then it became easier because you can do it on a desktop with google. Then it became easier because you can just ask google on your phone. Now if you can get a solid SEO page, you're not gatekept by anyone.

Now it's easier since you have an authoritative AI that tells you exactly how to do it, and in theory, you can freely develop these AIs to give answers that match your "version" of reality in order to get the most engagement and money out of you. Imagine you go to a website and some "doctor" chats you up that's actually just a conversational AI, and it just persuades you via pseudo-scientific language that is targeted towards your personal preferences just to get you to buy their snake oil.

shanghaibebop, 10 months ago

I think we need to separate copyright, patents, and trademarks.

Trademarks are obviously useful and helps the consumer distinguish between products.

Patents incentivize the sharing of novel technology by granting short term monopolies. But many patent systems around the world are largely besieged by trolls. IMO, patents should be tied to intent to manufacture. If you don’t, it should expire sooner. Your example about shenzhen tech scene is mostly around this issue of patents.

Copyright on the other hand, is intended to allow artists to gain monetary rewards from their work. This one is probably the most complex especially in the age of AI. I don’t have good thoughts there, as there are so many edge cases. I definitely agree the length of copyright is way too long.