ucm_edge

Related, I also have a hunch that the UC system dropping the SAT is going to promote inequality. I don't want to defend standardized tests as flawless, but the SAT has been around forever, you can go to basically any public library and get a prep book, one of the librarians can probably help explain it to you, most teachers are familiar with the strategies to improve score on it, resources exist on the internet, etc. So there exists a multitude of paths toward showing proficiency on it.

Now that we're not doing standardized tests and turning admission into high school transcript plus additional material it's really going to help the kids whose parents can organize and pay for the most extra circulars.

Math is one of the pure foundations for liberal arts so getting it done early is better. We should be focusing on getting high schools teaching it so well that colleges don't feel the need to rerun it not saying you can do it later. High school grads should be able to pass the AP Calc and AP Stats exams to the level colleges feel they can totally ditch the 100 level courses for those subjects.

If you don't have students repeating basic math (and chemistry) in college, they can do deeper on an elective track involving a STEM because because their STEM credit hours aren't spent getting a rerun of Calc I.

1633, 1633, 1634: Baltic War, 1635: The Eastern Front, 1636: The Saxon Uprising, 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught, 1637: Polish Maelstrom

Although honestly I lost interest around the first 1636 book. For me the initial setup of the United States of Europe was interesting but I feel like as the books progressed they got fairly fast and loose with history and historical characters become one dimensional. The first three books were really good as historical fiction that is clearly trying to be entertaining while trying keep some connection to reality, fourth one was decent, and by the time Flint got to 1636 it was too far out of left field for me and I preferred to going back to just reading nonfiction history books.

No, some element of the people operation whose job performance is in part judged on getting engineers through the door wanted to hire him. Likely all that person cared about was "This engineer will make it X months", where X is based on if the employee separates prior to X the recruiter gets yelled at for sourcing a bad candidate.

Other parts of the org clearly had no issues branding the employee as a low performer and target for termination because their performance reviews.

Very much this. You always want to be asking HR for an accommodation that is protected by law. Then HR enters into the mode of protecting the company by ensuring they don't get in trouble for violating the law.

You go in and say "Hey my wife is dying and my performance is probably going to be impacted, can something be done?", HR may opt to 'protect' the company by starting to build a case for terminating a low performing employee.

I'm very nostalgic for Blackberry again. I feel like on a platform where the whole point was to prevent anyone who wasn't the corporate IT department from being able to access it, this local code execution would have been a massive non starter.

They partner with police. The revenue play is charging governments access to a feed of events happening just in their jurisdiction (with some cleaning up/grouping of similar reports).

Citizen gets the police to pay them for access, then gets the police to advertise the app to them as an alternative to calling non emergency dispatch. In turn more people down Citizen and Citizen can probably monetize that.

In LA they even have Citizen branded patrol vehicles rather than community service officers as a pilot program. So rather than having like an unarmed (and normally unsworn) employee of LAPD in a Prius with a little orange light on the top, you get a private contractor in a citizen branded vehicle doing the patrol.

The big question is if Citizen gets into E911 systems, which have a lot more liability than non emergency type things. Is Citizen going to make a play to become the standard way of contacting 911 via text based communication at some point and attempt to generate revenue via running that infrastructure.

Often times if you change your address to be a CA address, websites will suddenly reveal an online cancel option. I swapped my parents' NYT account to be my CA address and suddenly "click here to cancel" was displayed on the website.

While I agree it should be a default setting, it's a useful little trick.

I had a similar experience at Amazon. About midway through the onsite at Amazon I kind of decided "I don't think I'd like working here and I already have other offers, so my brain will be going into neutral now." and kind of checked out. Felt very much like the interviewers didn't want to be in the room with me and just wanted me to fuck up so they could click "No hire" in the HR app and get out.

Walked out figuring I probably wouldn't get an offer, but given they apparently needed a ton of people maybe they'd down level me and offer (I figured I'd checked out to the point there was no way I'd get that SDE III level offer).

Recruiter actually sent me a very nasty email accusing me of wasting her time, I must be a bad engineer who over sold my experience, blah blah blah. Made it sound like I was blacklist for life. Three weeks later a hiring manager emails me and is like "So I found your interview notes in our internal database, you look like an amazing candidate and I want to fast track your hire onto my team."

I have no idea what is going on Amazon, I mean they built AWS so this must work on some level, but I just have such a bad taste in my mouth from my experience I don't want in on it. Maybe it's working as intended in that they want a process that skews toward hiring certain personality types so having other folks self select out is a win for them. Although I get pinged by them 2x a month and regularly offered fast track hirings based on those notes from that interview I did 14 months ago which is also weird. Which makes me think it's more likely their hiring a mess and they survive via throwing money at the problem and big old RSU offers at candidates.

e: Actually not 14 months, it was pre COVID lockdown, so even further back.

The candidate me likes cutting out some of the bullshit involved.

The hiring manager side of me on the other hand continues to remember that mishires are expensive. I've also very skeptical in that once a month some staffing agency comes along, tells us they have some fancy heuristic for matching good candidates to our jobs, and then unleashes a tsunami of mediocre leads into our recruiting database. They'll then proceed to act upset and surprised when we don't want to intervene sixty percent of them and most of those we do interview wash out. I guess TB can somehow promise that a certain baseline technical competence is present, but even that's of moderate value. If I really need a candidate who is skilled at X, I might be willing to sacrifice some skill in Y because I already have two engineers strong in Y. I never found TB sufficiently granular in how you configure the automatic screens to allow for that. Secondly, it's totally useless in soft skill assessment.

The cynic in me just sees a lot of this TB now trying to force you to expend internal resources to rank the unqualified people or people whose skill sets don't align with what you want (forcing you to respond with data on how you handled the application) because they can't crack the nut of doing it themselves. So they're going to leverage the customer's recruiting teams to code the data for them.

As a parent my workday has shifted to be 8 am to 6:30 pm and lots of people complain about that kind of shift, but I see that as a plus.

I used to be out of the house from 7:30 am to ~6:30 pm depending on commute, so it wasn't like that my time anyway. Now I'm working a slightly longer day, because during it I'm taking an hour to make my kids lunch, an hour to interact with them in the afternoon, some random downtime here and there when they pop their heads in, etc.

As schools reopen my plan is to basically just to set my core working hours to the schoolday which is going to be at 8:15 am to 3:30 pm and then I'll log a bit more in the evening if needed. We normally have the kids do some reading before bed to start winding them down and I can easily sit there with my laptop while the kids read. so many of the other parents I've seen struggle are the ones that rigidly stick to 9 to 5 vs a concept of "I should do about ~8 hours of work today". Those are the ones that really seem the most vocal about wanting the office back. Which honestly if that is what they want, that's fine. They can be the office crew and have the commute, pay for childcare, etc. I'm not looking to get back on that grind though.

I do feel bad for parents were both parents are constantly on Zoom. We're lucky in that we were able to rig it so all my meetings at AM meetings and my spouse has PM meeting, so we can have an on call parent most of the time. For families were both parents work sales, this probably sucks. Although I've seen some people in sales do enterprising things like setup little pods of rotating babysitting so they can just not schedule calls during their day to watch all the kids in the pod (do their reports or whatever).

I think going forward two things I'll advocate for at work is flexibility during summer hours and for parents with kids too young to be handed a Redwall novel and told to read quietly for a bit. Both are forms of investing your employees as short term thing for long term benefit since after all eventually the children get older (or you at least end up with a more mature child that can do tier 0 support duties and escalate to mom or dad when needed).

I don't think it's a development issue, it's an education issue. There are plenty of masks out there that fit well and are meant to be worn for extended periods of time, be it in a medical environment or a trades environment.

The problem is people who didn't wear the masks pre pandemic don't necessarily know how to properly fit a mask or how to identify product lines that are of higher quality and better for long term wear.

OSHA has a lot of great videos on this topic and has regularly published on it for decades, but we've done a poor job disseminating it to the general public.

What happened to voice commands in cars? I have a 2012 model that's about perfect from an ergonomics point. That is tactile buttons got first choice on positioning and every button is easily reachable from my driving position and there is an overall logic to the ordering of the buttons. Plus some of the buttons have little bumps on them similar to the home keys on a keyboard. The touchscreen got second choice so it's a little awkward to work, but that's fine because you're not supposed to fussing with it when in motion. The manufacturer tried to compensate for this by giving you voice controls to do things on the touch screen/nav system but you have to say the magic words just right so it's kind of a meh experience, as was a lot of that earlier voice controlled stuff.

Went into look at the same model of car in 2020. Now two touch screens and just a few buttons, also no more voice commands. Tested a couple similar models that did have voice, but it feels like it has barely progressed, especially when compared to say Siri.

We did't need all these dual touchscreens and such. We just needed the voice commands to get better.

One insight I did gather was that my 2012's buttons were apparently costly to the manufacturer since they had to worry about the feel of the buttons, their layout had to be worked out, you have to make sure they hold up, it's moving pieces you need to quality control in your build, and of course if you ever want to redesign this cabin you have to do it all again for those faceplates. So touchscreens are cheaper. Which is probably why even though a lot of manufacturers probably know they could offer a better overall experience if they put more effort into the buttons, they go with the touch screen.

Just having that choice though includes a cost. When everyone is forced onto the app store, Apple can censor as you point out, it can demand high percentages on in app transactions, and plenty of other negative things. But it can also demand certain behavior standards, easily deplatform people who abuse (in Apple's eyes) things like tracking (like when they revoked Facebook's cert in 2019), etc.

The minute you open up to multiple stores, much of that control is gone or reduced. Or at least limited. After all Apple also nuked Zoom's webserver off all OS X boxes in 2019 so I'm sure they could kill things via iOS updates.

As a more mundane issue, if now content is segregated across N store fronts, that's now N passwords I need to track, N potential places that my credit card can be stolen from, N stores I need up install, log into, and download apps from when I get a new iOS device, etc. I as a user do lose a lot of quality of life tweaks the moment balkanization of store fronts can occur. I as a consumer do feel I benefit from Apple being able to tell app providers "We have about 40% of the market on our devices and if you want to interact with them, it's our way or the highway. So if you want to sell to them, you will meet or exceed these standards, there are no other options."

Ideally this standard setting would be set by a neutral entity like say a government and applied equally across all personal devices, but US privacy regulations are a joke so basically I'm stuck hoping that Apple continues to see value in branding themselves as the more secure and private phone (I'm suddenly nostalgic for Blackberry).

You always have the recourse of buying an Android and side loading if you want total freedom.

Well on a macro scale American often tends to neglect the K-12 education, make college inaccessible due to costs and then think that some government retraining program whose duration is measured in months can turn X skilled labor force into members of Y knowledge/office worker force later in life.

For clarity I kind of want to say we neglect K-12 education funding, but compared to much of the world that's not true in terms of pure spending per head in the school. Perhaps more accurate we don't exactly get bang for our buck in many school systems.

I do see some value in Clubhouse. My spouse has been using it to hold open conferences with other professors, but they're seeding the room with a number of pre screened academics, their grad students, postdocs, etc. Then it's open for those that want to drop it.

It's nothing you couldn't have done with Ventrilo way back in the early 2000s, but I guess CH has a brand and people just browsing. It also seems inevitable though that their kind of content will remain a minority and it comes down to if CH will offer you the discover tools you need to weed through all the crap to find the discussion room on the topic you personally give a shit about.

Also apparently a bunch of top ranked academics got to hear me curse bilingually because my spouse was talking and rolled into the kitchen right as the drain hose came off the garbage disposal and dumped dirty water on my face. Loving the new garbage disposal though.

They seem to think there is, although Portal sales would disagree with that.

Supposedly the Portal is actually nice hardware wise, but the Facebook association was just toxic for them.

Baoshan was supposed to be a pure R&D facility. So they're literally building a production fab for Intel Xe there.

The more credible speculation I've seen (although arguably once you're arguing with speculation is more credible, you've already lost) is that Intel is doing a multiyear deal to have TSMC crank out its discrete Xe graphics/compute cards. Which frankly makes a lot more sense, they need a leading process to compete with NVidia who currently has access to Samsung's 7nm and AMD who has TSMC's 7nm and will probably move on to TSMC 5nm sometime next year as Apple moves on to TSMC 3nm.

So supposedly Intel is guaranteeing enough Xe business to get TSMC to convert part of its Baoshan complex over to making Xe. Intel will keep trying to fix its own fabs for its CPUs and probably intends to bring Xe cards back in house at a later date, but they also want to go challenge AMD and nVidia for datacenter GPUs now and that means getting access to a better process.

Outsourcing the commodity i3 whose main goal in life is run MS Office on a Dell Optiplex is definitely a strange rumor. Out of all the things Intel has, that's the area that has the least need of a process upgrade.

I also saw numbers saying a 50 mile by 50 mile piece of land could handle all of America's trash for 100 years if used as a landfill.

Always struck me as interesting in that you could easily section off a chunk of desert, properly sort and encapsulate the trash. At the same time fund research into ways to do recycling that is more cost efficient and more environmental friendly with regard to chemicals used, etc. Then once you have better tech for a certain class of garbage, go process it in bulk.

Of course humans being humans, we'd probably not bother to fund the research, not do upkeep on the encapsulation material and mess up the ground water, etc. Still interesting to think about just having one or two national trash dumps.

Iran just seized a South Korean oil tanker yesterday to give it civilian hostages as leverage in on going negotiations with South Korea, a country that has never engaged in any form of violence against Iran.

I've gotten to the point where whenever I setup a Windows machine, I tell it I have no internet connection, because that seems to be the only way to get it shut up about using a Microsoft Account to log in, configuring OneDrive, etc. Then once everything is setup I'll connect it to my home network. I recall years ago when I did my Windows 10 box they didn't push the Microsoft Account on you so hard during setup, but when doing newer laptops for family members that's clearly changed.

I've basically demoted my Windows 10 box to headless status. If I want to do anything I either use Remote Desktop or Steam Streaming to access it.

Interestingly OS X also has plenty of Cloud services, but Apple seems to have at least figured out how to sell them in a less intrusive manner while letting you feel like you're still in control of the machine. Just little things like you setup a local account and then Apple sells you on "Hey want to link your iCloud so you can remote wipe this machine if it is stolen?" vs forcing you to lie about internet connectivity so Windows 10 gives you the local account option.

I like how after every big Crypto scandal you see calls for "Well we should have X to prevent this from happening", and X is something virtually identical to a regulation/monetary policy put in place after some banking scandal or panic. History repeated itself on an accelerated scale thanks to the internet.

That's basically where I am with streaming sites. Exert minimal effort to find version of mediocre quality, let it run for a bit and then decide if I want to actually pay for the content or just stop watching.

The other big thing is that the illegal streaming site has everything. So part of the whole "Okay I want to actually pay for the HD version of this" is "Okay now is this on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, or...?"

I've honestly mostly just gone back to dvd.com. It has everything (except for digital only stuff that never got a Bluray/DVD release), you can actually get 5.1 or 7.1 sound, and since I live 45 miles from the San Jose facility it's 1 day shipping.

Why does Apple want the UAW contracts that come with any of the Big 3?

Tesla showed the preferable model (from the corporate perspective). Buy the factory (NUMMI), hire some of the ex-UAW workers, and go from there. They don't need the whole hog.

Plus if Apple really wants GM drivetrains, they can just buy crates them. GM's not going to turn down sales of any kind in this climate.