Xi Jingping consolidated power by rallying people around the flag of anti-corruption. Same with Putin. Obviously, neither of those people is anywhere close to non-corrupt.
Don't rally around anti-corruption. Rally around accountability, oversight, openness, and balances of power.
Doing things right is harder than calling out others for doing things wrong, and plenty of horrible corrupt people are all too happy to call out wrong-doers. Support people who do things right, not people who complain about others doing things wrong.
OT, but does anyone know where the "learnings" phrase in corporatese come from? I noticed it five or six years ago and now it's everywhere. The first time I heard it was from a German VP and I assumed it was some sort of odd transliteration or maybe a Borat reference, but that hypothesis is obviously invalidated.
Seems tautological, especially for a platform biz. Companies that don't "aggregate demand" fail because "aggregating demand" is just a fancy way of saying "have a critical mass of customers". It's tautological because companies that "succeed" by aggregating supply eventually also aggregate demand because... well, because companies without customers don't "succeed". So, if you "succeed", you've aggregated demand, regardless of whether you were able to aggregate demand by aggregating supply. Teasing out the causality is hard, but it'll always be possible to post-facto confirm the hypothesis that successful (platform) companies aggregate demand.
The substantive conjecture behind his tautology is about the economics and business model of SDC-as-ridesharing. Seems like a moot point to me. A working SDC will be enormously profitable regardless of whether the company that builds it gets to own the platform. Plus, the big auto cos might be able to afford to not win the SDC race, but they certainly can't afford to not even play the game. A lot of the money spent on SDCs is seen as hedging, not as serious plays.
> Is there some realistic path for me to escalate?
Is the instructor an ad junct? Those are cheap and replaceable. They make maybe ~1/10th of what your average FAANG engineer makes because the labor supply is extraordinarily over-saturated. Enough complaints will probably get them fired, if that's what you're looking for, but realize you're probably putting someone with no prospects and no savings out on the street and they will almost certainly be replaced with someone who gives about as many shits as you can expect from someone with a PhD who makes 30k a year. That tuition you're paying isn't flowing to the people teaching the courses.
If the instructor is an actual professor, then probably there's nothing you can do.
BTW, let your kid at least try their hand at navigating this on their own, even if you provide oversight. Barely competent people doing a poor job is not unique to pandemic times and is definitely not unique to higher ed. Knowing how to use a bureaucracy to route around an incompetent person not doing their job well is a valuable life skill. Plus, everyone involved is going to be more sympathetic to an articulate student than to a "helicopter parent".
I'm mostly on board with the critique of university rankings, but I really don't buy this specific critique. It's a strawman.
Here's what they did: they took the top research universities and the top liberal arts colleges. They then observed that the rankings can't distinguish between the top institutions within each class, and that you can also flip which of those two classes is preferred.
But, in what sense is it even meaningful to compare Amherst College and Harvard [1]? Those are just enormously different types of institutions. It'd be like creating a ranking of "best cars" that includes the top 5 sedans and the top 5 trucks, and then observing that you can jiggle the rankings to get anyone on top. Is a Toyota Corolla better than an F-150? IDK. Stupid question. US News and World Report, for all its problems, does at least get this much right! they break down institutions by "type" and then rank within type.
Additionally, just because rankings are noisy and easy to game locally doesn't mean they are inaccurate or easy to game globally. Two institutions within 10-20 slots of one another are probably pretty similar and rankings aren't particularly helpful / are easy to game. But the #100 liberal arts college is probably not as good as Amherst, and the #78 National University is probably not as good as Harvard, and no amount of gaming is going to change that.
Rankings are indeed noisy and inaccurate and easy to game. But this particular article is not a compelling demonstration of that fact.
[1] For non-US readers: Amherst college (not to be confused with UMass Amherst) is in a class of peculiar institutions that are fairly unique to the USA as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_college TL;DR: they're basically the diametric opposite of super-charged research universities like Harvard.
Counter-point: The "everyone needs ridiculous amount of driveway space" rule existed in a suburb I lived in. We had exceptionally wide streets, but parking any car in the street for any amount of time was strictly forbidden. All of my neighbors complained about how "ghetto" our street looked when my parents visited and parked in the street. People really actually hated the idea of anyone parking in the street, even for a weekend, and so we needed driveways that were large enough to handle the 3 days of the year when we had a couple extra cars around.
That rule was dumb and unnecessary, but was also not a "pointless regulation", it was not "regulatory capture" by the Big Driveway Cartel, and it definitely wasn't a response to a legitimate need for more parking (again, super wide streets that sat empty). It was just a reflection of the deeply held convictions of an extraordinarily parochial population.
The large healthcare providers are already run like private businesses, because they are private businesses.
> education
Please no.
This is a favorite pet issue of the rich and powerful. Their ranks are littered with failed school reform activists. Sometimes those folks even have the self-awareness to realize they failed, e.g., the Gates Foundation. More often, they keep on proposing the same old ideas that are continuously tried and fail, while sending their own kinds to expensive private schools or public schools in the priciest zip codes in the country. Schools that are, aside from their wealth, operated in a quite traditional fashion.
If you look at education outcomes by country, there's really only two things that stand out as invariants that separate education systems that work from those that don't:
1. degree of heterogeneity in schooling (school choice without some strong equalizing effect on quality just rearranges the deck chairs on the titanic), and
2. level of respect for educators (pay != respect).
The "rich people can fix this" attitude is truly both a symptom and a cause of the biggest issue with America's education system: teaching is a low-status job (even places where it's well-paid).
When it comes to education, Americans respect literally anyone's opinion more than the opinion of educational professionals. Hell, even random people who were literally born into wealth get more voice than the professionals who spend their lives in the classroom. If that doesn't change, nothing else will.
Here's one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the past 100 years.
That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.
Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets
> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.
What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.
For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.
Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.
One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.
Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.
None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.
This talk is an amusing aside. I think the other posters are bit harsh for a talk that's clearly meant to be taken in that way.
If you're interested in actual psychology of programming languages, there is a small but growing research community at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering. The focus is mostly on usability research a la human-computer interaction, but there's also work on community psychology, etc. applies to programming languages and software engineering. See, for example, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7503516
I implemented neural networks before the advent of the good python frameworks. It sucked. And CNNs existed for decades before AlexNet. Honestly, the software and hardware engineers are the real heroes of the deep learning revolution.
By way of analogy, David Heinemeier Hansson didn't invent the webapp or even the MVC design pattern. But Ruby on Rails did change the way webapps were built, and enabled a bunch of stuff that wouldn't have been possible otherwise (or, at least, would've taken longer and been more expensive). Lots of websites were built because of Ruby on Rails that probably wouldn't have been built otherwise, even if people would've kept on doing the web thing regardless. We can say the same thing about lisps, about linux, and about a lot of other software infrastructure.
Any high schooler who's capable of learning python and can afford a gaming desktop can build and train a neural network. That's pretty amazing, and definitely wouldn't be the case without computation graph frameworks.
I've never worked for Google or with Jeff, and I'm not a huge fan of the ad tech industry, although I don't understand why either of those things should matter.
Yup, I absolutely agree. Almost all big leaps in software engineering and applied computer science come from building a powerful and simple abstraction. Powerful and simple abstractions are surprisingly difficult to get right.
It's a huge amount of code, hidden behind the tensorflow import statements. It's common to credit GPUs for the rapid spread of deep learning, but good GPUs were available for quite a few years before deep learning really took off. As someone who wrote * a lot* of OpenCL code, including my own python wrappers, I'm fairly certain this code would be thousands of lines without a computation graph framework library. These frameworks are really amazing pieces of software engineering and deserve some non-trivial fraction of the credit for the rise of deep learning.
If you want to know what the next hot thing in software engineering will be, just pay attention to whatever Jeff Dean is doing.
The ability of workers to capture their own productivity gains is a lower than it's been in a century. This crisis will push the second derivative lower.
Don't rally around anti-corruption. Rally around accountability, oversight, openness, and balances of power.
Doing things right is harder than calling out others for doing things wrong, and plenty of horrible corrupt people are all too happy to call out wrong-doers. Support people who do things right, not people who complain about others doing things wrong.