BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
Fair point, perhaps my counter-signalling should instead be that I never had any tutoring before beginning my university education and then afterwards I only got what everyone else with me also got, I didn't have to do any "special" guided learning that me or my parents paid for to give me an edge.
Supervisions though are genuinely one of the things that make the experience unique and yes, I'll admit I wouldn't be as comfortable with my academic learning if I'd instead gotten the UK's bog standard university experience where classes have 15+ people on average instead of supos.
graduates of elite British universities have received a more rigorous university education than graduates of elite American universities
Absolutely agree on this. I've had the (mis)fortune to meet more than my fair share of US elite graduates through my job and otherwise and apart from the MIT grads none struck me as particularly impressive on average (this includes Harvard, Yale and perhaps surprisingly Stanford, but my Stanford sample size is low). All I'll say is I'd wager 60% of elite US students who major in what I studied would have likely failed our end of year exams and been thrown out (fun fact: effectively no resits, you get one shot; if you fail, you are out), this is not an exaggeration and the rest would mostly have gotten thirds or lower second class honours. I refer back to my post here on why I think the US higher education system for undergrad is fundamentally broken.
I think Eton provides a more rigorous pre-University education than traditional-elite American prep schools
Didn't go to Eton but I can believe this, my Etonian friends (who made it to Oxbridge, so not an unbiased sample) were not merely more polished than the average in terms of social interactions but also tended to do better. Same for Westminster, Oundle and the Leys.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
2d ago
The problem in the UK is actually the opposite. We have startups that have working viable products with actual repeat customers and they still have trouble getting funding a lot of the time, especially Series B onwards (Seed funding is better resourced). These companies are usually already making money, they just need further funding to expand their offering which is unfortunately not available here in the UK for various reasons.
Yeah, people say the UK and Europe are generally bad for startups however the US showers even shitty companies with so much cash that I'd treat a random UK company that managed to raise £100k from UK investors as being more promising than a US startup that's been handed $2 million for their idea. Seems like an allocation inefficiency for humanity as a whole with a corresponding deadweight loss that can be avoided if the US VCs were funding the UK companies instead of Juicero v2.5 (now with electrolytes!).
Instead of getting Trump to sign meaningless promises on data center investment in the UK when he visited Starmer would have been much better advised to get him to make promises on forcing American VCs to invest in UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term. That would genuinely have been a lot better for the country than yet another mega datacenter when we have some of the highest industrial electricity costs in the world.
The amount of cash shoshing around in the US is obscene, relative to basically anywhere else in the world.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
2d ago
This is the place where I counter signal and make it known far and wide that I never had or needed any after school tutoring to get to where I am. The absolute numbers of people sitting these countrywide enterance exams is massive but 95%+ of them are abysmally bad, the real competition is within the top 2-3% and you'll know if you're in with a realistic shot well before test day. Otherwise you might as well be playing the lottery here, except that the lottery has better odds.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
4d ago
No cookies for either of us then, the model has revealed that we're splitting the same biscuit.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
4d ago
Hey, do me now. I know I can do this myself but I'm feeling too lazy right now.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
4d ago
And I think that the big hyperscalers grossly underestimate how much optimizations are left in the pipeline.
Strongly agree on this. Deepseek V4 already brought down the output cost per million tokens below $1 (they say it's a promotion, but they keep extending it) for a model that's perfectly good enough for all "normal person" uses. I expect further optimisations will bring this cost down to $0.01 or so per million output tokens (with two more zeros in front for the input cost) within 5 years or so for models that are as capable as the stuff out there today (see how Qwen 3.6 27B today which you can run locally if you have a decent GPU outperforms Opus 4.0 from less than 12 months ago and which used to cost $75 per million output tokens).
For the vast majority of tasks you don't need the smartest model out there, you just need one which is good enough, and once the baseline for "good enough" is established Chinese competition will drive down the marginal price for "good enough" tokens to the point that some companies are going to be left nursing huge losses.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
6d ago
Can confim - Having nukes is great!
Not a fan of Scandi minimalism at all, it reminds me of middle age Dutch iconoclasm. Coffee is just a much nicer colour scheme if you want to actually live in your home (I reserve judgment on crimson, to me if you overdo it you risk your house looking like a bordello).
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