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mkl95

6,522 karma · joined July 2, 2020

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mkl95··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
I've been enrolled in an online CS program provided by a respectable university for a while. I get a lot of joy from continuous learning and being in a university program helps me stay focused, plus I'll get credentials to prove it eventually.

Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.

mkl95··on Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.

This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.

mkl95··on Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
It seems there is no working around learning to write and read properly. We've drifted away from this idea, which might lead to a "soft" dark age.
mkl95··on It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta
Mark Zuckerberg is the PT Barnum of tech and Meta is his predatory circus. Meta doesn't make much sense without him.
mkl95··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
EU states do an excellent job at tolerating each other, with the odd hiccup. They are also gerontocracies fronted by middle aged leaders focused on pleasing older wealthy people, who last cared about entrepreneurship in the 70s. When you combine it with extremely low birth rates, you get a rotting economy.
mkl95··on The computer science degree isn’t dead
I had a hard time with probability and stats, although it was way more mind expanding than calculus.
mkl95··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
> you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people

A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.

mkl95··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
From an EU perspective it can look complicated. But when you look at the data, the American electorate is relatively simple-minded. For example: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...
mkl95··on The computer science degree isn’t dead
> probability, calculus, linear algebra

All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.

mkl95··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.

It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.

mkl95··on We indexed the Delve audit leak: 533 reports, 455 companies, 99.8% identical
I've worked with SOC2-certified companies where employees would email each other plaintext credentials, publish them in Notion pages, etc. You cannot cure stupidity by "complying".
mkl95··on Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?
That was only Q1! So much winning left!
mkl95··on "I can't do that, Dave" – No agent yet
It's very unique to LinkedIn. OP's prose is difficult to process even if you've abused your brain for years with LinkedIn content, though. In a more merciful timeline, only people like James Ellroy or Cormac McCarthy would ever attempt to write like that.
mkl95··on I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
The CEO role at Mozilla is unstable. Even if Mozilla didn't require a LinkedIn page, chances are their CEOs would have an up to date account. Also, Mozilla's ARR is mostly their Google partnership.
mkl95··on The three year myth
In the zero-interest rate economy, it was easy for early to mid-career engineers with average skill to switch to a company that paid them 20%+ more money. I did it myself multiple times.

The current economy and AI have turned the tables. Even today, waiting for three years is pushing it for most folks, but understandable. Career growth is being decimated across the industry, and opportunities simply aren't there anymore like they used to be. You can be dedicated and above average, but you are still stuck in the same industry as everyone else.

mkl95··on France's homegrown open source online office suite
Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days. Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done with.
mkl95··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.
mkl95··on Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
OP defines herself as a mediocre engineer. She's trying to sell you Slop Town, not engineering principles.
mkl95··on European lawmakers suspend U.S. trade deal
The US won't stop bullying the rest of the world until it has drastic consequences for its economy. Make of that what you will.
mkl95··on C Is Best (2025)
C is like a classic car. It's cool and you might have fun with it, but if something goes wrong out there, there's a significant chance you'll end up in a very bad shape.
mkl95··on A web developer posted a payment shaming message on their client's site
It looks like the company's owners didn't give a simple heads up to their providers before dissolving it. In my eyes, that's way worse than what this particular provider has done. If the sums aren't large, they might lose money by going to court.
mkl95··on Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
Could a company other than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company manufacture the chips that Nvidia products are made of, and could that happen in America? The answer is yes to both. But if Nvidia attempted it today, it would be doomed. Jensen knows that sometimes it's more convenient to be Jen-Hsun.
mkl95··on Matz 2/2: The trajectory of Ruby's growth, Open-Source Software today etc.
Ruby is an insular language by design. It's intended to be easy to use and "make programmers happy". Whereas popular languages are usually adopted for falsifiable reasons such as performance, type safety, memory safety, etc.

When it comes to languages that don't take themselves that seriously, the tragedy of Ruby is that Python is easier to get into with its much bigger community and ecosystem. Python is more likely to make the average programmer happy.

mkl95··on Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
Rust++ would be a nicer name then
mkl95··on Ruby website redesigned
The Lighthouse report is telling. It scores 100% for Best practices and SEO, but 54% for Performance. Pages like these used to be caricatures of the modern web, but are now acceptable. DHH's statement doesn't help either.
mkl95··on Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language"
Ruby is one of the most fun programming languages out of the 6+ languages I've worked with, and I was very productive with it. Unfortunately, due to my experience working at a Ruby shop where Rails misuse and abuse crippled the company, I don't enjoy using Ruby anymore, and will never recommend using Rails for production-grade software. Hopefully you've had a better experience with Ruby and still enjoy writing beautiful software with it - hopefully not with Rails.
mkl95··on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)
If you mostly write software with Go you'll likely enjoy working with protocol buffers. If you use the Python or Ruby wrappers you'd wish you had picked another tech.
mkl95··on Next.js is infuriating
Most of the modern frontend ecosystem is infuriating. The early React + Typescript era was mildly upsetting but bearable, and it hinted at a relatively nice future if abstractions improved. Then Vercel et al threw that slow progress into an overpriced garbage can.
mkl95··on Netflix Revamps Tudum's CQRS Architecture with Raw Hollow In-Memory Object Store
Isn't Tudum mostly a static site? It must be a great project to try out cool stuff on, with a near zero chance of that cool stuff making it to the main product and having a significant impact on customers. Most of the traffic probably comes from bots.
mkl95··on Log by time, not by count
> Log rate should be consistent

If you want to know if an application is running, implement health checks. I hope I never have to deal with the pattern suggested in this article in a production system.

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