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elipsitzon Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

Grading was actually pretty fun. I kind of miss it! Exams are scanned and then graded electronically, which makes it less of a hassle. It’s still a lot of work, but you have an army of TAs to do it.

elipsitzon Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

Ah yeah, I believe the student health plan is part of it, but I can’t remember the cost.

For tuition remission, it’s only the in-state amount, even if you’re out of state.

elipsitzon Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

Some are, almost all in the introductory classes (including me) and many in the upper division classes are undergrads.

(u)GSIs at Berkeley are paid particularly well compared to other schools, I think in large part due to the TA union (UAW 2865).

elipsitzon Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

The largest classes (CS 61A and CS 61B) have roughly 1800 and 1600 students respectively during peak semesters.

A 20 hour TA is paid ~$2250/mo for approximately 4.5 months per semester, plus ~$7000/semester in tuition remission (so ~$17k). $350 is the total cost for the whole semester per student. 17k/350 is about 50 students per TA, which sounds about right (and even that is a higher than ideal ratio). There are other costs too, but these are the some of the highest.

elipsitzon Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

Correction— the author of the op-ed, Nicholas Weaver, is a former lecturer in the EECS department at UC Berkeley.

And a personal insight, as a former uGSI (TA) in the department, the problem isn’t paying TAs enough. The pay is actually quite high for a student job (especially when you factor in the fact that in-state tuition is paid for). But the course budgets simply aren’t high enough to hire the sheer quantity of TAs that would be required to handle all of the students who want to take the classes.

I was involved in hiring some semesters, and there were always more people we wanted to hire than the budget would allow. I believe the situation has only gotten worse since I left.

elipsitzon FOIA requests show Apple’s emails pitching state agencies on IDs and Wallet app

Yeah -- although Louisiana calls it a "Personal Driver's License", and New Jersey calls it an "Auto Driver License".

elipsitzon FOIA requests show Apple’s emails pitching state agencies on IDs and Wallet app

I was curious, so I looked at list of pictures of each state's licenses.

Based on https://www.insider.com/what-drivers-license-looks-like-in-e...:

17 states say "Driver's License". Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia.

Indiana and South Dakota actually call it an "Operator License", rather than "Driver" or "Driver's".

elipsitzon Stack size invisibility in C and the effects on "portability"

In many cases, with tail call optimization, turning specific types of recursion into iteration (which doesn’t use more than a constant amount of stack space).