So if our universe is inside a black hole from a parent universe, does that mean every black hole in our universe contains its own child universe? We could be living in cosmic Russian dolls all the way down?
Thanks for all the comments so far everyone! I’m quickly getting the impression that I need to work on my resume. Also, I have never used a recruiter. I apply directly to the jobs through their website. Perhaps I need to rethink this approach as well. Again, thanks for the responses! Also I might have to bite the bullet and create a LinkedIn.
Creating a linkedIn account is also a great opportunity to reach out to previous colleagues and acquaintances, which allows you to ask if they know anyone who would be in the market for your skills.
"Hi <X>, I enjoyed working with you at <Y>, and am finally getting on linkedin, so let's connect."
And then if they actually respond to the message, tell them that you're looking for opportunities building XYZ or in a role doing ABC. It sounds like you've had a good career so far, and you probably have dozens or hundreds of people you've worked with over the years who may know somebody who would love to employ you.
I’m a home roaster and buy my green beans from a website called www.sweetmarias.com. Everything about this company is awesome but there’s guy there named Tom who knows probably as much as anyone could know about the entire coffee process from growing to wholesaling to roasting. He always travels to farms to meets with growers before purchasing. I guarantee if you get a hold of their customer service and explain your situation, you’ll be able to get a hold of someone there who can give you answers to most of your coffee-related questions.
As easy solution to this is the just not give any credit for homework that goes toward a final grade.
Have a number of in person closed book tests that are difficult enough to prove satisfactory understanding of the topic.
Homework is just a mechanism for a teacher/professor to force a student to dig into and really understand a subject. If the student can use these AI tools to subvert that, then instead of wasting energy or god forbid even more AI to fight the AI, just give students a good enough incentive to actually do the homework. Having the entire grade rely on several of these difficult-enough in-person closed-book tests should be incentive enough.
That would pretty much guarantee nobody would do any homework ever again.
Homework isn't effective at making students "dig into and really understand a subject" - it's a method of externalizing school expenses onto parents, because teacher time and school funds are finite, and the time of parents and children is... not the school's problem. Making the final grade conditioned on homework performance is just about the only way to ensure kids do it (or are made to do it) at all.
Now, I'm not saying homework is entirely a bad idea - I'm complaining that it's being treated as an externality, making it almost unbounded. Teachers don't coordinate among themselves the amount of homework each of them assigns, so the only thing limiting the total amount of homework is a good chunk of the class being systematically exhausted by it, or (hopefully) parents making a fuss before things reach this level. But, the only reason the teachers can push so much homework on kids in the first place is that homework grades matter for the finals.
that's a good point, I just made a comment next to yours responding to the same original comment about whether homework should exist at all, and I think you're idea that it is a way to extend the "learning time" of students without requiring more time and resources from teachers is a good counter-point.
If you have the time to read my other comment, what would you think about the idea of only making homework mandatory for students who's quiz/test grades are below a certain level, say 70% for example
About your idea, I'm not sure either way. On the surface it makes sense, and there probably is a real correlation between test performance and amount of after-school learning, so it would make sense to make homework mandatory for kids who scored low. It would also work as punishment, but at the same time reinforcing the kids' perception of homework as punishment.
What makes me really unsure, however, is parents. Families differ by the amount of time and resources they can, or are willing, to spend on child education. This is part of why I don't like the homework-as-externality model: even ignoring how students themselves feel about it, if the school is trying to maximize the amount of work they do after school, the first kids to hit the limit are ones with e.g. a single parent doing two jobs, poor household, or dysfunctional family that doesn't care. Overloading students with homework implicitly disadvantages those that don't have supporting parents with lots of free time. And those same kids will also be ones more likely to fail at tests, in which case dumping extra after-school work at them might do the opposite of the effect you intend.
But this is me speculating, I don't work in education, and I'm sure there's been research done on how to balance the amount of after-school work for the environment children live in. My complaint about homework-as-externality isn't trying to deny the work of education sciences - it's pointing out that even if the research is there and results are solid, it's not being applied anyway, because teachers are uncoordinated and they all individually think, "oh, that's just half an hour worth of work, no big deal". Almost textbook tragedy of the commons.
I resonate a lot with what you said. Homework or in the way it is used today as reinforcement work is most needed for those who have trouble picking up new concepts during limited instruction time. However, those who have trouble picking up concepts quickly will also have overlap with not having much time/resources outside of live instruction time. That just leads to a double whammy in terms of how homework further disadvantages them.
In the reading I've done, I've seen most advocate for smaller class sizes with more educators per class to help provide more 1:1 attention. This is again at odds with how public schools are funded where I am (US) so I don't know if anything will ever change.
My personal experience is homework was an excellent way to reinforce what was taught in school. For me, it felt especially useful in quantitative subjects and languages (French & Spanish) which both felt like they benefitted from having a concept stick. For qualitative subjects like writing, reading comprehension, I actually now look back and see homework as a way for teachers to see samples of your progress. "After reading this passage, did you learn how to construct a summary? Did you learn how to pull the author's main message? Did you learn how to make a convincing argument for or against the passage's main point" and I can't think of a fast way to do this in any kind of live instruction setting.
I personally prefer open-book exams: they discourage cheating in terms of “smuggling definitions by writing them on a calculator”, and force teachers to ask questions that require reasoning and deeper understanding
Agreed, but there are some levels of study where open-book just doesn't work well.
I think it would be hard to ask any kind of pre-college mathematics questions that don't become incredibly easy with an open book. The other challenge with open-book exams which focus on deeper understanding and reasoning is they still require understanding fundamentals to be successful, so how do you test for fundamentals?
In a college hackathon, I wrote a chrome extension that crowd sources answers for online tests and displays them next to the questions. So if one person with the extension took the test already, everyone would get the answers even if the questions/answers are randomized. And in the cases where no answer was available (because the test system doesn't show you the correct answers at the end, or something like that), then it would fall back to showing you percentages so you have an idea of which answer everyone else was choosing.
The reason I built that was just because I was annoyed by how lazy my professors were. Almost every single class (which I was paying for) was graded based on your performance on copy and pasted, endlessly reused tests on Blackboard. Sometimes you could just search the question on Google, and find pdf dumps of the exact same test from 5+ years ago. If you don't cheat, you risk getting a lower grade than the people who do cheat (aka everyone). Why spend all that money going to college if you're just going to let other people get ahead of you so easily? The point of degree is to make you more competitive in the job market, but deciding to not cheat is risking that investment.
Unfortunately, I never actually used it or deployed it once. Coordinating a whole class to install and use a chrome extension for cheating isn't exactly easy. And as far as cheating in online tests goes, there are easier ways to do it.
But yeah, in-person proctored exams are how it should be done. It's the only thing that's fair to everyone.
I agree, and can we have a discussion in general about homework being included in the grade in general? It's purpose is to help students learn the material, which should be reflected on the test.
If the student can perform well on the test without that, then they shouldn't be forced to do it and penalized when they don't(which you can imagine happens often, as if the student understand the material well enough already the homework is just useless busywork.
If the student can't perform well on the test without that, they will be forced to do the homework. In this case, including homework as part of the grade might be detrimental because they can cheat/copy/us AI to complete homework and boost their grade enough to pass while not understanding the material well enough to pass the tests.
The counter-argument here(that I can think of) is that doing homework, even if - or especially if - it's just easy busywork for the student, prepares them for the future where such tasks will almost always be necessary to succeed. A lot of good learners end up not developing this skill/discipline because they aren't forced to work hard in school, which causes them to fail when faced with tasks/problems that require serious effort, and this would arguably make things more difficult for them. In my opinion this problem would be better addressed by funneling kids into classes that are appropriately challenging for them rather than forcing them to do busywork, but that's a much more difficult thing to do, and also learning to complete easy/"useless" busywork is a related but different skill than learning to focus on and complete challenging tasks
In my opinion and experience, I think you’re right about “there’s Pandas for that” and “that” can be almost anything. It can do almost anything but making it do almost anything requires constant reference to the docs. And I find maintainability difficult. It seems like there’s 50 kwargs for every method. Sometimes things happen in place by default, other times they don’t. Compound indexes still confuse me. But I’m not a data scientist so I don’t do much ad-hoc analysis that seems typical with pandas users.
This is a great resource for pointing out the things you need to think about in designing a language.
To see the nitty gritty line-by-line walkthrough of everything that goes into actually building a language (all the way down to writing your own VM) I HIGHLY recommend reading Crafting Interpreters[1] by Bob Nystrom. I’m not a language hacker but found everything about this book worthwhile and very interesting.
To prevent some of the issues with blurring or compression leaking sensitive info, one simple workaround I’ve used is to just put black boxes over the text as usual in any program and then take a screenshot and save it out from there. No accidental history or compression leaking.
One thing that still leaks is the exact spacing between words adjacent to the black boxes. This is a particular concern one only one or two words are blacked out -- for example a name. With a known font (with known character widths and kerning tables) and a known text engine applying those kerning rules, there's often very few combinations of letters that give the exact pixel (or subpixel) width blank space.
Yes, but being able to rule out "Firstname Lastname" can itself be interesting. Depending on context, the space of names is not all people, but can be very restricted.
Tbh I think there needs to be some dedicated tool for censoring images. Even with this method there is a small chance that it isn’t 100% opaque. I have seen several images where you can pull them in to gimp and adjust the color levels until even the slightest color difference becomes blown out and you can read the censored text.
I definitely don’t disagree with this, but here’s a question for people: if Netflix used their original content budget to instead procure existing content like they originally did, would this save them? This is obviously complicated with everyone creating their own streaming service to charge for their own content, but I’d certainly be happier with Netflix if I had a much better selection of other stuff and not “Netflix Originals”.
The problem with the old Netflix business model is that it's basically just "cable but better". This only worked because streaming rights were priced cheaper than cable carriage fees, which wasn't going to last. If Netflix had continued just licensing existing shows and movies, they'd be charging closer to cable prices because they aren't getting a deal on licensing cost anymore.
