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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • (goes back to No Child)

    In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

    After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different “customers”. The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

    Then, to make sure we didn’t fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same “University” paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn’t do anything “real.”

    The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There’s genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.




  • That said, for a small overall community, I think the example of Reddit did the Threadiverse a disservice. Ideally, I think specialized communities should arise out of generalized ones, forking off when they start to clutter the general community or at least become self-sustaining conversations. Instead, a non-trivial percentage of subreddits was just plopped down with the welcome sign put out, but that caused users to assume that they shouldn’t post a certain question in a general community, and made them not want to post it in the desert community that had been set up but had no traffic.

    Fortunately, [email protected] seems to be doing okay, but I know I in particular wouldn’t be annoyed to see questions outside my usual interests posted here.





  • So you need SpaceX to increase its launch capacity to somewhere between 20 to 80 times its current rate, completely reimagine the economics of space-based radiators and solar panels, accept that all that shiny new power and cooling CapEx is just as disposable as the GPUs, and you have to adjust the expected use cases and SLAs to allow for nothing being repairable and latency making them unsuitable for many AI tasks.

    Yes. “Possible.” I mean, I guess, but we’ve got some powerful Hyperloop energy here. I cannot imagine it ever being more economical than bullying and bribing rural areas with access to a power grid.



  • Also, at least officially, the reason they baptize teenagers with the names of your dead ancestors is because they believe baptism of a physical body is necessary for salvation, AND that they will continue to pester said dead ancestors to convert to Mormonism in heaven’s waiting room.

    If some random little shit who lied to his local bishop about cranking it three times a week will get dunked when they read the right name, apparently that helps with the backlog or something, and White Jesus really wants them to get right on that, I assume because his dad is up his ass about TPS Reports or something.








  • Yeah. I don’t think this is too hard to parse, nor is it likely to be some cogent political protest.

    1. New flat surface attracts graffiti.
    2. Within a short time, someone else breaks the glass to get access to the balls because they can’t or won’t use the app.

    There could easily be an element of “fuck that app,” but the “reward” here is access to a basketball while at the park. I think Occam’s razor is an appropriate initial framework.

    It also looks like the city was prudent and avoided a major investment of tax money.