tptacek

We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.

The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

That doesn't mean they're required to faithfully represent the interests of any one person with majority voting power, but it does mean they can't select some random subset of minority voters and serve them instead.

The board has every right to fire the CEO. That's not at issue. The board could reasonably do that even if the CEO has majority voting control --- iff the board is certain the CEO won't immediately reverse the decision and replace the board. If they fire the CEO performatively (or as a hail mary) knowing the CEO will reverse them, they're causing operational chaos with no upside, and that's not something the board can legitimately do.

There's a subtext in some comments about this that the board can legitimately express a position that it's better that the company not exist than exist with Mullenweg at the helm. That's not a legitimate thing for the board to pursue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The most important thing to understand about Math Academy is that it's all problems, problems over and over again, with just enough pedagogy to get you from one kind of problem to the next. It's a form of spaced-repetition system (often with the repetition cleverly arranged through interleaved topics, so that solving problems in the "next" unit also depends on techniques from the previous) and a drilling tool.

I'd echo any other observation about that structure being limiting for deeper understanding. The thing about that is, though, we already have ample resources for deeper understanding! For my part, GPT4 and GPT5 were more than enough supplementation, to drill into topics, connect them to other topics, ask "why the fuck does this work", etc.

When I got to Calc II (in Math Foundations III), Herbert Gross MIT lectures were super handy too. If you're doing Linear Algebra, I'd pair Math Academy with Strang's lectures.

To me, the limitations of the approach aren't interesting. The problem Math Academy is solving is the limiting reagent for self-study: boundless exercises and worked examples, a clear syllabus, and a forcing function for actually doing the problems. If you're self-studying math, you probably don't need extra structure to get you to read about math; you need the structure to get you to do math.

Easily the most valuable learning resource I've ever spent money on. Highly recommend.

I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.

I'm not suggesting the board actually did anything legally risky here. The standards for that in Delaware are high. But morally, it's much harder to defend, so long as they knew this is what the outcome would be --- which it seems like they kind of clearly did.