FigurativeVoid

You're correct. But I think that it is still difficult to make an argument that is original enough to make a professor happy.

I have been working on a bash only static site generator. I don’t think that I’ll share it, but its nice to know I own the tool chain and that I should be able to replicate it forever.

I have a few thoughts, so I’m just going to write them out and see where they all go. I went to school in the US, so everything here applies for the US.

- Credentialism isn’t a secret. Students attend university not to learn, but to get a credential. The only way to get said credential is to get good grades, and there are lots of ways to get good grades. When I studied chemical engineering, it was an open secret that everyone was cheating. The professors didn’t care so long as it appeared that you weren’t. People readily took easy classes or sought easy professors. Many people looked to get accommodations that they didn’t need so that tests would be easier. I don’t hate accommodations, I had a few.

- This professor that authored this post is complaining that students don’t have original thoughts. For undergraduates, classes are primarily about competency. Having an original thought is really hard work. You have to have a breadth of knowledge in a field that can’t be attained in an undergraduate course.

- I hate to blame technology. Our phones and computers are some of the most valuable tools that we have. I love to read. My parents went out of their way to make sure that my siblings and I could all read well, and we weren’t allowed to watch television. TikTok is more fun than reading. Phones are more fun than reading. I don’t blame people for using them over reading.

The state of education and reading in America is a travesty. I don’t have any solutions.

I did.

The article makes no claims about dreams or the relationship between dreams and sleep quality.

Anecdotally, I’ve found that theanine radically increases the vividness and memorability of my dreams.

Of course that might be be a great effect depending on the content of my dreams.

That could mean deeper sleep, but I’ve not really measured that.

The more that we have AI trawling our writing, the more important I think it is to realize that AI is part of the audience.

I have been thinking about writing more "cookbook" style posts so that users and AI have good modern examples to look at. CSS-tricks is a great example. It has good code and and is easy to search.

One thing that articles that include code need to tag good and bad examples. AI will get better at recognizing the bad, but we should have more comments that say "This is bad. Use the better pattern."

A second thought. It leads to lazy application development. Whenever you have production intervention that happens more than a few times, you should just make a feature that does it safely via application code.

I have so many horror stories from there.

When they did decide to lock down the database, the DB admin only locked in down in the sql server client most people used. If you used some other client, you still had access. _sigh_

At my first gig, I had "god" level access to our production database.

All I learned is that nobody should have this level of access unless it is some sort of temporary break glass situation. It is extremely dangerous and even experienced engineers can cause irreparable data loss or some other bad outcome. In our case, some engineer accidentally sent around 10,000 invoices to customers that shouldn't have gotten them.

There are far better data access patterns. In the case of US gov data, I don't see why the DOGE team would need anything more than a read replica to query. It could even be obfuscated in some way to protect citizens' identities.

Isn’t the aeropress premium aluminum?

My younger brother has his phd in engineering from a top tier university and I often worry about what it will mean for his career long term. He’s at a consulting firm now, but I’m not really sure where he’ll go next. He’s incredibly intelligent and hard working, but I’m unsure what firms are looking for engineers that have the phd price tag.

I also have many friends with humanities phds that I really hope figure something out. They are all extremely intelligent. But one is literally getting a phd in Shakespeare. Cool. I love it. But there’s like 3 openings a year and they aren’t even at a top tier school. It’s all a mess.

And they won't have to bear any consequences for killing them.

If it was a local government taking that funding instead of using it to treat HIV, we would call it a genocide. They are calling it cost cutting.

That’s not true though.

Tik Tok chose to block US users this evening even though that’s technically not what the bill asks for.

This is a statement of privilege: find a doctor who cares and stick with them.

I'm T1 diabetic, and it took me a long time to find an endo and a PCP that care. I have long since moved away from their offices, but I still make the drive because they are worth it.

My tip on finding good providers is basically to get lucky and find a good one. Then you should ask who they recommend. They know who the bad ones are.

It would be fascinating to see how this number trends over time. Many of my peers never wanted to be managers, but then they had children. Suddenly they were much more open to being managers and getting the associated pay increases.

I suspect this number trends down over time.

It’s also a bit of a joke to ask if Rails is dead in the community.

No I agree. I always want a belt and suspenders with my data validations

I was going to write about more things that I want, but it didn’t feel like it fit so much.

I would love a basic admin interface plus some auth.

It would be cool if rails mirrored some Devise helpers so that Pundit/Cancancan worked out of the box.

Huh. TIL.

But in the rails context couldn’t you mostly manage with an ActiveRecord validation? I know it wouldn’t be ideal.

I was going to write a bite more about convention over configuration in regards to AI, but it didn’t feel super tight.

I think that the doctrine of convention over configuration leads to content that is much more legible to LLMs in training. I find querying Claude for Rails issues to be really helpful. I suspect would be very helpful to a novice.

But this was always the case. When I was studying chemical engineering, it was an open secret that all the students were cheating. There was a giant google drive with all the solutions manuals, old tests, old programs, lab reports, whatever you wanted.

That's why pencil and paper tests were worth 80% of the grade.

I agree. It's nice if you have something you can get into flow on.

The biggest issue with 10s is commute time. If you work 10s with an hour+ commute, that's just awful.

I have had friends and family that work 4x10s or even 3x12s and they all vastly prefer the trade-off of more hours per work day for fewer days.

Clarifying point: this is the Tokyo local government not a national policy.

We have been implementing Diátaxis style engineering documentation. We have "librarians" that make sure information is going to the place, and that we aren't creating unnecessary duplication.

I think that voter ID laws are probably fine. I'm in a state that has them, and I suspect that I would feel weird if the requirement were repealed.

I don't know if IDs are free in all states, but if they are, I would be more inclined to support it as a requirement for voting.

I also would want to get an objective handle on how the IDs are treated. I have had friends get questioned because "Their signature didn't match the ID." I can see how that would quickly get perverted.

How do you feel about their revisionism around Jan 6?

When the pandemic started, I really enjoyed the podcast. They seemed to have some good insights, and I found them funny. It was a vibe that I sorely missed being home alone.

If one them sees this, I hope they take it kindly. The podcast has gone downhill drastically. The level of discourse has dropped considerably. They make all sorts of claims with very little evidence.

Recently they have all agreed that voter ID laws "just make sense." But they don't even bring up any of the unpleasant history around IDs.

When DeSantis was running, they didn't ever talk about him flying immigrant around as a horrible political stunt.

They've been leaning closer and closer to anti vax stances.

I still listen.. but I'll probably stop soon. It's becoming a bro podcast.

David Friedberg has the best mind for evidence, and he speaks less and less.

During a class discussion, one of my fellow students said the classic, “but they will use the money to buy drugs.” And the teacher responded, “So what?”

I think I agree. Drugs are bad, but withdrawal is also bad. Alcohol withdrawal can be fatal.

A few thoughts:

1. I have never really understood people that throw others under the bus. It seems like the wrong strategy to get people to like you.

2. Most people understand that these sorts of things aren't "the right way" to measure a peer. Fundamentally, I most remember how a person made me felt, not what they produced.

3. At a prior job, our weekly planning sessions were rated on a scale of 1-10 on how effective we thought the meeting was. After we found out that our manager was being evaluated on this score, we all started giving 10s no matter what.

This is really very inspiring. As this sort of writing become increasingly less valuable (in terms of income), I wonder what if more people would be interested in these sorts of endowment models.