Fun to see this on the front page. I'm curious if ops intent was to share something cool is trigger a bunch of nostalgia because they definitely did the latter.
I remember using this when it first came out. It was a game changer for doing forensics back before full disk encryption was a common thing.
Every generation in history has said the younger generation is lazy. Didn't make it true when I was a young xenial / millennial and I suspect it's not true for Gen Z and Gen Alpha either.
I hd to do a 4-bit version of this back in 2006 for my Computer Science undergrad. Interesting to see EE students doing it as well. Like many people here, we had to build it on actual breadboards. Which I think adds a ton to the experience.
My undergrad was in computer science and my master's is a MBA. Both from good schools (think top 50 not top 5).
I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean throw 12 on the floor and 3 are fluff, I mean, take a 12 page case study and 3 of the pages are not adding value.
Articles are even worse because the pay is often by the word and there are min lengths to get into the print edition.
Speaking from experience. I actually wrote a book for a major publisher and the main metric that determined how much I got paid was page count. We had a page count decided before the first word outside of the proposal was written.
> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?
This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.
In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.
My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.
First, colleges don't generally give loans. The lenders are not affiliated with the college.
Second, as with anything it is more complex than you are making it. For example, I've known people who have:
- Had a variable interest go up with little to no notice and no adjustment to the payments so if you're not paying attention month to month you end up underpaying.
- Been put in deferment without notice (so their payments stopped) and without requesting it, but continued to accumulate interest.
- Interest is sometimes compounding while in deferment or paying less than interest.
- Were mislead about how interest accumulated while they were still in school (i.e. lead to believe there was no interest when in reality there was just "no payments")
And in that last one in particular, the person I know in that situation (happened to be married to her now), it was her boomer parents that signed the loan paperwork and they didn't even give her access until after she graduated when she found out interest compounding that whole time.
I think the whole debate is putting too much on 17 kids and not enough on their parents who need to co-sign these documents. When I was that age the school didn't tell me how interest worked, my parents did.
100%, accepting pre-generated board meeting notes is egregious. This whole thing is awful and I am in no way defending it. The opposite, I think other compliance as a service companies also need to be scrutinized as well.
There is a lot of serious allegations in here. But some of these complaints apply to most SOC 2 compliance services. For example: it points out that Delve provides pre-filled documents and encourages you to accept them as is. In my experience that is typical. I have seen companies just rubber stamp pre-created documents that describe IT processes that do not accurately reflect actual policy because the MBA[1] running the project didn't want to pull in IT and had no idea what any of it meant.
[1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.
I was literally just attending a course on "innovation" and the topic of Apple vs Android was covered. Interestingly enough, a majority of students commenting cited iOS "security" as a core value proposition. As an Android user, however, I know there are a lot of CVEs in volume but in terms of severity, when an iOS issue happens it appears to generally be much more severe.
First I will say, I am very much against dark patterns and I believe servers should be paid a fair wage and not have to rely on tips.
But until that I do tip for dine-in service. But I found the "buy me a coffee" link on the button of this to be much funnier / ironic than it probably should have been.
It's also missing what I think is the worst dark pattern:
Having no option not to tip at all. Instead requiring that the customer press "Custom" and manually entering "0.00"
First, I'm using frontier models with Cursor agenic mode.
> Also, if you use an LLM haphazardly and it introduces a security flaw, you as the user are responsible. The LLM is a power tool, not a person.
I 100% agree. That was my point. A lot of people (not saying you, I don't know you) are not qualified to take on that level of responsibility yet they do it anyway and ship it to the user.
And on the human side, that is precisely why procedures like code review have been standard for a while.
But my main objection to the parent post was not that LLMs can't be powerful tools but that specifically the examples used of maintainability and security are (IMO) possibly the worst examples you can use. Since 70k line un-reviewable pull requests are not maintainable and probably also not secure (how would you know?).
> If the programmers goal is to produce valuable software that works and is secure and easy to maintain then they will gravitate to LLM assisted programming.
Just this week alone I had the LLMs:
- Introduce a serious security flaw.
- Decided it was better to duplicate the same 5 lines of code 20 times instead of making a function and calling that.
And that is actually just this week. And to be clear, I am not making that up to prove a point, I use AI day in and day out and it happens consistently. Which is fine, humans can do that too, the issue is when there is a whole new generation of "programmers" that have absolutely zero clue how to spot those issues when (not if) they come up.
And as AI gets better (which it will) it actually makes it more dangerous because people start blindly trusting the code it produces.
I'm not convinced that will fix the problem. Even in situations where identity is well known such as work or school, we commonly have bad actors.
It's also pretty unpopular for a good reason.
There is a chilling effect that would go along with it. Like it or not, a lot of people use these social platforms to be their true selves when they can't in their real life for safety reasons. Unfortunately for some people their "true self" is pretty trashy. But it's a slippery slope to put restrictions (like ID verification) on everyone just because of a few bad actors.
Granted I'm sure there's some way we could do that while maintaining moderate privacy but it's technologically challenging and I'm not alone in wanting tech companies to have less of my personal information not more.
If you consider "skimpy outfits" pornographic that both Facebook and X are worse than TikTok for me. I've seen a few pieces of content I had to report before but not many.
X, on the other hand, has literal advertisements for adult products on my feed and I get followed by "adult" bot accounts several times a week that when I click through to block them often shows me literal porn. Same with spam facebook friend requests.
I think it boils down to a simple fact that trying to police user-generated content is always going to be an up-hill battle and it doesn't necessarily reflect on the company itself.
> Global Witness claimed TikTok was in breach of the OSA, which requires tech companies to prevent children from encountering harmful content...
Ok, that is noble goal but I feel that the gap between "reasonable measures" and "prevent" is vast.
Thank you on presenting the research. I appreciate that.
To address you points though:
> A handful of very bad students can easily derail the education of an entire class
Private school had plenty of bad apples too. In fact, some kids I went to school with were explicitly there because they were trouble makers and their parents though the nuns would break them (they didn't). In contrast, I've found my daughter's public school to be pretty zero tolerance when it comes to disruptors.
But even if you are right, that is also the strength of public schools. The same thing that makes them unable to turn down the bad apple is also what makes sure kids with special needs or low family means don't get left behind.
> math is racist, or the contemporary 'reimaginings' of history that mix critical theory and contemporary values, and retrofit them into the past in an antagonistic fashion.
Except every time one of those stories come out and you dig deeper it is almost never actually what the media says. It's usually either extremely isolated or taken entirely out of context for sensationalism.
For example, there have been several documented cases of public school teachers teaching creationism, and also that the Civil war wasn't about slavery (despite slavery being specifically mentioned by multiple states when they joined the Confederacy), but I would never represent that as wide spread and try to tear down the whole system over it.
I didn't get a sense the article singled out charter schools specifically rather it just lists it as a alternative place that funds get funneled instead of to neighborhood public schools.
Which brings me to:
> The main reason "private" (in their sense of the word) schools are gaining in popularity is precisely because they are seen as delivering a better education by an ever wider chunk of society.
If you accept that the article is talking about charter schools, then yes, perhaps the narrow focus of the charter could allow for a stronger education in a specialized area could allow for better education in that area.
But, if you accept it as private schools as a whole, then I don't buy that argument fully. The administration has been very clear that the motivation is "anti-woke" and "traditional family values" and nothing to do with education quality. In fact, as someone who went to a religious school in a small town (granted 30+ years ago) I can vouch that my education (especially in science and math) was FAR worse than the public schools at the time and homeschooling quality varies wildly.
Edit: As far as
> More specifically the US currently spends more than the vast majority of the world per pupil
I also find this focus on spending per pupil very odd because it doesn't account for cost of living.
And if you dive into the fine print it says:
> Includes both government and private expenditures.
So what if (and this is a completely untested hypothesis) the reason we spend so much per pupil in that chart is being exasperated by the private school system.
Edit 2: after diving into it, that source provided is greatly inflated by private school spending including private colleges (which are insanely expensive). So that same data can also be used to argue the US is really spending too much on private schools not public ones.
It takes experience to know why this doesn't work and some CEOs / CTOs / PMs / etc get there faster than others.
I was involved with a company once (larger than this one) where something very similar this happened.
They threatened layoffs. What happened was that the team became immediately LESS productive. Effectively instant burnout. If not from the hours than from the loss of morale.
One of the biggest "mistakes" is they told everyone when the layoffs would happen so all the top performers had better jobs lined up for that next Monday. The really high performers phoned it in just enough to not be fired early and took their severance package when they were inevitably laid off.
Personally, I tried not to phone it in. But I actually lobbied to be laid off (there was a significant group of people that wanted to keep me). I built up my vacation time (in the US it becomes due to you as cash when you leave) and got a month severance on top of it plus a 20% raise. And I timed my start date for a week after getting laid off just to have some rest. I was a key player on the product team... the other key players left too and that entire product died a couple months later.
It takes a while for people to realize that workers will stretch or compress their work to meet the schedule. If you expect them to work weekends they will just do the same amount of work just over 7 days instead of 5. Conversely, some studies have shown a four day week has no negative effect on productivity.
Thinking to meet KPIs you throw more hours at it is a sign of a "leader" who hasn't figured that out yet. Maybe by their 5th startup they'll get it.
Edit: As an aside. I too have asked my team to work weekends occasionally (I'm a CTO not CEO but same premise). It always goes like this:
> I'm really sorry to have to do this but we really need you to put in some extra time on the weekend to meet the deadline next week. Pick a couple days next month to take off and we'll let you take them off without using your PTO. Thank you, I really appreciate it! As a company we'll try to make sure this doesn't happen very often.
I remember using this when it first came out. It was a game changer for doing forensics back before full disk encryption was a common thing.