853 karma · joined January 20, 2020
Some parents pay hundreds of dollars an hour for tutoring for their kids (as young as 4 years old) to score well on the gifted and talented tests.
And it works. (To an extent. I imagine such tutoring could bring a student in the 85th percentile into the 95th percentile, for example)
As a result the program favors kids whose parents have more money.
Agreed.
> gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs
Does anyone have a solution for this?
Amazon 386B USD
Google 183B USD
Microsoft 143B USD
Cloudflare 431M USD
Similar story ...
Google market cap 1.89T
Microsoft market cap 2.289T
Cloudflare market cap 55.86B
Who do you expect to provide competition to Amazon/Google/Microsoft for egress pricing if not smaller company who is a "leading CDN provider" ?
Your comment seems to be justifying why Cloudflare is ideally suited to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers with its R2 offering ...
I don’t understand your argument. A relatively small but innovative company is working to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers … and you cringe?
Even if their service turns out to be more or less a S3 replicate with better pricing (for some applications involving a fixed amount of data that needs to be widely distributed) it’s a win for consumers and innovation
As a result, the signal coming from the dislike button was not very useful, and just added unnecessary complexity. Instead, the algorithm can present the user a fixed song in different settings to see if they continue to skip it. A nice result is that the user doesn’t have the negative reaction “hey I disliked this song why are you presenting it to me again”
So basically Spotify is performing reinforcement learning on you— beautiful!
>To dislike a song is easy – to like one, you have to actually invest time in it.
Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the dislike button.
In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a song and the user not paying attention (in that case the user will provide no input whether they like the song or not.)
I definitely could believe that the life span of a Framework laptop could be slightly longer (say 8-9 years) and that adding some incremental upgrades could make it a better overall experience
My personal experience is that a thinkpad laptop lasts 6 years if you replace the keyboard and battery. I am sure that the same is true for other brands.
After 6 years, my old laptop started having other issues with the screen, and ssd. Everything about the laptop was out of date, low resolution screen, comparatively slow processor, bad webcam, not a lot of memory, keyboard started having issues. So it made sense to buy a new laptop.
I am having trouble imaging how things would be different with a Framework laptop. What is the imagined life span of this laptop?
TLDR you posted at a non optimal time so your post didn’t count
This is very true, and I had never thought about it before.
I often hear phrases like “well the statement is morally true” or “morally speaking”
My feeling is that the word “morally” is used to indicate that you are sharing your intuition which does not have a precise meaning (for example, I would say a statement is morally true it is should be true under appropriate conditions which may or may not be difficult to specify)
So it does seem ironic to write an essay about a word used to indicate that an idea should not be investigated in any precise way, but I did find the essay interesting!
My only point is that this particular "John Carlson Lecture" is itself a public relations event whose purpose is to promote MIT to the local public and enhance its image, they allude to this in the official statement [1].
In my opinion, a PR lecture cancellation is different from telling a student group or department that they are not allow to invite a specific speaker: it is bad, but much less dangerous to academic discourse than previous cancellations (even if in past examples the speakers mentioned in the article had extreme or bizarre views).
[1] https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa...
As a disclaimer I am against any censorship of academia and think that even Charles Murray should be allowed to speak at a university (assuming he is invited by an academic department or student group) and that the university should never have veto power.
However, I think the example in the Atlantic is actually more mild than past cases: the John Carlson Lecture is a general audience talk that the university holds to boost its public image.
It’s not an academic talk discussing new research or a political perspective, but rather summarizes ideas for the public. If MIT wants to decide who should give such talks I don’t care.
In contrast, if a department or student group wants to invite a specific speaker for a specialized talk about politics, science, math, then the university censoring such discourse is what is truly dangerous.
In this light, the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos who was invited by the College Republican club is much worse. Even though personally I do not think Yiannopoulos is anything but a provocateur, if someone (group/department) wants to invite him the university should not block him from speaking.
The full title and subtitle is
“ Mathematicians Prove Melting Ice Stays Smooth:
After decades of effort, mathematicians now have a complete understanding of the complicated equations that model the motion of free boundaries, like the one between ice and water.”
Hard to think of a more concise and accurate way to describe the problem. The article does a nice job describing the problem, and like all quanta articles links the arxiv paper in the first few paragraphs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.13379
The title is to catch your interest, the subtitle provides an accurate summary, if you have a more advanced understanding of math the arxiv link is included at the beginning, otherwise the article is a nice summary…
Ideally the reader should fully understand the statement and still feel amazed, rather than doubting the statement for a valid reason: perfect zero knowledge proof systems (which do not fail sometimes) are impossible and a reader would be right to think so
Once someone explains the idea, and provides a few examples it is very natural.
I also don’t like the text explaining zero knowledge proof. It needs the phrase “practically speaking” somewhere or “for practical purposes” since it’s not true in a strict sense
But overall there were some fun ideas on the list!
However this article about Ivermectin is not well reasoned:
> As infection rates soared, some people were taking excessively high doses of the medicine every day, hoping to stave off COVID-19, but in a few rare cases that move prompted liver failure.
>Other patients were unknowingly given the "kit" drugs by doctors in private hospitals instead of more standard treatments — and some of them died.
These quotes from the article don’t support … anything. People had Covid, they took a treatment, but some died? Really? Could they at least pretend to use some statistics or even an antidotal control group?
You can pontificate about likely contents of Cloudfare’s blog post, just like others who did not read it, but clearly you have no idea what it actually contains
I agree. This is a crucial part of the story which should be discussed…
What are humans build to do? And do we have an obligation to do what we are built for? Should I start persisting hunting [1] my meals? Should all my decision be dictated towards minimizing physical and mental health issues?
Obviously this true… in particular, anyone getting a PhD in a quantitative field could make more money in tech or finance.
You seem to misunderstand why people pursue a PhD. At some level there has to be love of learning and pursuit of knowledge.
Getting job in academia is difficult but not impossible…
> If today’s successful academics habitually work late in the laboratory, they’re likely to advocate that the next generation does the same.
If all successful academics work late, then advocating others do the same seems reasonable?
I was always assuming that if I reply, then they would send the spam links, but your theory is better.
from: kate.random.but.reasonable.name38 @ gmail . com
Sorry for the delay, here is my email.
Best, Kate
Sometimes they are more obviously spam, but other times it seems nearly impossible for a spam filter to stop, like the example I provided.
> toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution [by] violent duels with phallic lightsabers
surely this cannot be a real reason we cannot use the easily memorable acronym JEDI to draw attention to an initiative ?
It also does not work for subjects. For example, if you search "discrete math" it links to academic webpages, but most of them do not have any notes posted. It is just a plain text website with the syllabus of a class.
They no longer let regular NYT subscribers from accessing Wirecutter, one has to buy an extra subscription (I assume almost everyone buying this will also pay for basic NYT access so it is effectively a two layer pay wall)
https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/wirecutter
This is part of NYT plan to divide their content into different groups and charge a subscription for each.
I am not sure if this strategy is smart or not, but my gut feeling is that it is a horrible strategy, and could hurt customer retention rates.