white-flame

The issue of unaffordability of universities if loans were drastically reduced would be a painful transition, but only a transition. Universities are unsustainable from a customer perspective as they are, and something needs to give.

A 4-year degree should also not be as widely required as it currently is, which is something else that needs to correct, which would happen with a collapse of graduates.

But as mentioned upthread, if we simply keep things as they are and throw good money after bad, people are going to have to be in school until they're 30 in order to meet the minimum requirements for mediocre jobs. Better to have some tough times to weather, given that you can always enroll later in life after things have settled, assuming it's something around a 5-year correction.

I would love for "Computology" to become the preferred term.

Low single digit percent of 1.5 billion is still tens of millions. Certainly you can make money with that size of a willingly paying customer base.

For any company that scales up past a certain size, it can be cheaper to run their own department to handle things at volume, than to pay an outside company the costs of handling things at volume plus their markup. They can customize and specialize for their own needs, too.

So there will always be integrated employees somewhere.

No. Unless there's a non-compete clause, which is yet another problem.

The very notion of independent sovereignty of nations means that you can't and shouldn't expect to normalize behavior between countries.

If doing business in the USA is free & good, many outsider businesses will do business there as well. If doing business in China is not all free & good, outsider business won't do business there. How much that hurts foreign businesses vs hurts China is up for debate. But governments individually rule what goes on in their borders, and use those rules both for internal ideological pursuit as well as to attract or detract external interest, as is their role.

"Fairness" of doing business isn't exactly extreme human rights violations or anything. (Other behaviors are, but not this particular point you're making.)

I do notice a lot more youtubers having their own advertiser segments (usually for the same 3 or 4 services, though that's probably due to similarity of channels I watch), and of course Patreon is very popular.

I "subscribe" to youtube channels with browser bookmarks. </old man yells at cloud>

My post has nothing to do with web page size. This is specifically on how monetization has affected that which we use for personal communication and seeking information.

It's not some nebulous evil of "capitalism" that is the issue here, it is the issue of filtering, manipulation, and distribution of people's private communications & data, and of the effective "town square". Money can be and has been made without these practices, which the laws have not caught up with, and to which there's strong ethical disagreement.

And yes, it cost a lot of money to get online and/or host data back then, which was subsidized by piggybacking corporate and university internet presence. Nowadays it's dirt cheap to personally host & access tons of content, so there's even less need to monetize.

In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web.

Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to inject unnecessary rent-seeking lock-ins into everybody's lives.

The general audience verbiage still changes over the time axis, though. Are you going to have different training sets for different time periods, and were would you cut the threshold between different corpuses? There's a lot of continuous flux, as well as discrete moments when a phrase turns sour when it was positive or neutral in the past. However, these are still classification issues which NNs could potentially resolve, but are still issues.

But it's certainly true that texts written to be specifically & clearly informative will always be easier to translate than fiction, opinion pieces, or informal conversations. It all depends on what you consider to be "high" on the result spectrum.

The successes already achieved leave the focus on the existing shortcomings as the ceiling, not necessarily on adding refinement to what it already does respectably well.

RS232 would probably be usable and convenient for said hypothetical setup as well. Don't run PPP or anything; manually initiate transfers on both sides.

Before you leave the car, do you just leave your trash on the seat or something? Certainly a bag or receptacle is desirable for food waste at the very minimum, and you don't want to gunk up your cupholders or door pockets with such things.

Being in the car for a few hours with an exposed banana peel isn't the greatest, regardless of what happens to it at the destination.

Communication is me taking an idea in my head, considering you the listener and our shared context, and deciding which outward signals will invoke that same idea in your head. The full meaning of a statement is NEVER completely contained in the words themselves; they are selected in empathetic prediction merely as triggers of hidden assumed shared state unique to various speaker/listener pairings.

As children, we blindly associate phrases to situations in which those phrases were heard, and attempt to map them in our outward communication, often to comical effect. It's a cargo cult model of communication, since at that stage we don't understand how those phrases were originally constructed under specific intention & purpose.

The meaning of words and phrases will change over time and location, as we have new experiences which text associates. Certainly as humans we can understand and continually update multiple simultaneous contexts in which things are said, and from which version an utterance is invoking its meaning.

These issues are why I don't see the direct text-to-text model of machine translation getting beyond a certain ceiling of usefulness. Text fundamentally refers to out-of-band human experiences, in very inconsistent associations.

It could be cultural, in that Japanese communication style can often be understated, with indirect implications pointing at a meaning without directly specifying it. That can vary greatly depending on the context and subject matter, though.

As somebody who's always been strong in math, I agree. For the MIT crowd it can be a reasonable expectation, but in general an introductory course in Topic A should not require advanced & unrelated Topic B knowledge.

Surely that's a transitive point. If the fact that they got in is supposed to be meaningful, then surely the high GPA is just some arbitrary slice of that meaningfully distinguished group. Yet they're still often clueless.

Combinatorics and graph theory have zero to do with this practical knowledge. I'll grant that computer architecture classes introduce some relevant concepts, but this foundation can be had from anywhere as its matters, history, and details are widely discussed in the open online as a persistently current practical concern.

People like the author, with a degree and lots of experience under their belt, really overestimate what the degree specifically gave them, vs what they learned through decades of experience as they developed their craft. When it comes to practical, applied programming and skills of abstraction, informed by deep knowledge of what goes on under the hood, vanishingly small amounts of that come from university education.

Again, I will be careful to separate out those who do actual Computer Science on the job from this practical craft of quality programming. The former is much more rare, but is a separate field.

IPFS is a rip off of Freenet, with all the anonymity ripped out.

Bootcamp vs CS degree really has to do with what sort of work you want to do, which is a missing variable in this article.

There's plenty of programming work out there that doesn't require any deep understanding of CS. You're not going to be creating algorithms when using existing frameworks to write yet another web thing, phone app, or internal businessy database-based system.

A bootcamp can get you started doing practical things. Yes, you won't have deep knowledge, but really you don't need deep knowledge for most employable work. Code doesn't need to be hyper-optimized at the scale you're working, and it's easy to learn common pitfalls & best practices from applied practice, reading, and mentorship.

And I say all this as an oldish fart who understands the chain from designing bespoke high level language environments down through to transistors. We don't need to count bytes & clock cycles anymore; people can let the machine & its provided environment simply work for them and learn the top-level interface.

I disagree strongly with your point #1. "This knowledge" specifically is deep full-system understanding, as quoted in the article:

> "They use languages, editors, compilers, and operating systems; but they don't have the first clue about how to create any of these things or even how they really work."

And yes, he is asserting that people should get this from a degree:

> If you want to build doghouses, just pick up some skills with hammer and nails, and then go for it. If you want to be an architect who designs and builds skyscrapers, then go get a degree in architecture first.

The full depth of applied understanding comes from personal interest & experience. Whether or not a person with such interest pursues a CS degree is completely orthogonal.

Plus, these applied low- & mid-level computational practicals have nothing to do with Computer Science; they are programming, architecture, and engineering. People generally do not complete CS degrees with any specific imparting of these 3 facets, unless they use their university time to pursue their own interests & ambitions in the field. And again, such people can and do pursue those outside of university, especially in their pre-university age exploratory years, and on-the-job experience with real systems.

"Simplicity" can be a negative indicator of security. If it's simpler for you, it might also be simpler for an attacker.

Manual steps with the physical hardware, or even requiring a local wifi/ethernet connection, are always going to be more secure than an internet-accessible god mode.

To my limited non-Haskellian understanding, you can give a block of expressions to a monad. It then decides which expressions to evaluate, in which order, optionally depending on the value they might return to the monad. So you could have a monad which does "evaluate all these in order unless something goes null" (which is a nuisance to type in C-style languages), or one that expands on the if-then-else concept. None of these carry forward internal/hidden state like an IO monad does, but are there to expand user control for how to flow from 1 expression to another in your custom scopes.

It's somewhat conceptually related to Command or Visitor Pattern programming, but Haskell has syntactic sugar to have them basically work similarly to normal statements. Alternatively, this is a runtime-only version of one specific thing that Lisp macros can do to &body scopes, in constructing custom control flow.

This also is only 1 way to use monads, as they're a technically pretty simple tool (an interface with 2 functions) that can be used in a bunch of scenarios.

[If I'm wrong, and I'm probably wrong, I'd love clarifications for myself, too!]

Or more precisely, take the flaky oven away from people who misuse it in high stakes situations.

But how do the temperatures differ before & after the update?

Of course, that's dependent on permitting, which can fine you or require you to tear everything down on a whim. It also has huge up front capital costs, with battery replacement being additional burdens going forward, and you probably need to change your lifestyle significantly and rework your house structurally to be more power efficient.

Certainly some of the local legislation regarding such permitting is affected by local electric companies wanting to dissuade that. But I would hope that the tides are turning in the direction of easier personal energy independence over the long term.

Moreso, I know and know of numerous people who preached about shared supporting of society and anti-capitalism... until they made a good chunk of money. Then they went off to their gated community walled gardens and started complaining about taxes.

These individual vs societal beliefs aren't constants. They're vehemently reflective of an individual's very current situation.

If your slide contains a picture, whose details you're describing (say for instance a medical photo or city zoning plan or something), certainly you want your audience's visual attention on it as you're describing its pertinent specifics.

I think the fundamental personal issue in this country is that nobody wants to be told exactly what their government-mandated health regimen should be, or have the government decide which procedures they'll be allowed to have for their condition.

That ultimately means that they're locked into what their insurance company mandated health regimen should be. But at least they can sort of choose their insurer, or no insurer (which is usually 10-100 times cheaper on the total medical bill).

Laundering money means someone is using their own dirty money in a clean transaction, not further stealing others' money. This is all happening after the initial theft has taken place.