ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
12hr ago
Lack of rigor barely describes how bad modern university education is.
I recently started an online master's program for computer science through the University of Colorado (Boulder). The amount of difficult work and overall rigor in the courses has been, uh, lacking to say the least. My undergraduate degree is in a humanities related discipline and all of my CS knowledge is self-taught, just to give you some context.
All assignments except for the final exam in each class have unlimited attempts, which makes the multiple choice quiz assignments a joke. But even the actual programming assignments haven't been any serious work. So far I've finished the general networking and Linux networking classes, and the assignments have been things like:
Analyze some packet dumps and find the maximum amount of TCP datagrams that are in flight at any given point in the stream.
Create ethernet devices in 4 different containers, connect them to a bridge in a 5th container, then run this premade script to ping between them and submit the packet dump.
Modify half a dozen lines in a couple of BGP config files, then turn off some ethernet interfaces, ping between two endpoints, and submit a packet dump showing that your BGP config worked correctly after turning off the interfaces.
The finals have been worth 10% of the total grade in the general networking class and 20% in the Linux networking class, and you only need a B in the first three networking classes to be admitted into the full computer science program (where, as the saying goes, C's get degrees, at least for the elective courses that make up half of the degree; you still only need B's in the required breadth courses).
And this degree doesn't have a special "online" caveat attached to it, it will appear exactly the same to employers as a Computer Science master's obtained in person at CU Boulder.
Indians are a model minority, speak English, from a pluralistic democracy and uniquely economically productive. Other than color and religion, they satisfy every bar for a model American.
They only speak English for certain definitions of "speak" and "English." That vast majority of my coworkers are based out of Mumbai, but I have several that are Indians living in southern California that have been in the US for years and their English is only marginally better than those who are still in India. Took me 4 months of listening to them talk daily to finally be able to understand them 75% of the time. Meanwhile my Russian and Belarusian coworkers still have noticeable accents but are quite easy to understand 98% of the time.
India's democracy is corrupt and full of ethnic/religious spoils, and I'm sure that America's slow but steady slide into a similar system is in no small part caused by immigration from countries like India that have ethnic spoils systems. Affirmative action in America is bad enough, but it has nothing on caste-based affirmative action in India. And don't get me started on caste-based discrimination by Indian employees in Anerican companies against other Indians. I see this pretty regularly at my work, I make a point of looking up my coworkers' last names since it's a fairly reliable indicator of caste and their treatment of and by other coworkers usually follows certain patterns based on caste.
And I don't know about other fields, but in software development Indians are not economically productive. In fact I would go so far as to say they are financial drains on most companies they work for. For every decently competent Indian dev at my company there are 30 drooling retards that make more work for the competent people. The reason companies still hire them is because demand for software development in the world is greater than the amount of competent software developers in the world are able to deliver. But with retarded project management systems like agile and scrum you can barely squeeze out a kind of functional product from incompetent devs. Combine this with the fact that most companies are awful at filtering out the competent devs from the incompetent ones and you get modern enterprise software development.
It's revealing that Indians, Mexicans and Filipinos are the main groups they have issues with.
I have pretty much zero issues with Filipinos so long as they actually speak English fluently. Pinoys tend to be bros in my experience.
With Mexicans, my biggest issue is criminality, followed by dilution of my vote, and suppression of wages in third. Legal Mexicans that speak English well and integrate well with society don't bother me. Got a lovely couple (Mexican husband, white wife) across the street from me and they're fantastic neighbors.
I have a problem with Indians because I hate the content of their character. Indians that do not fit the stereotypes of their poor character are few and far between in my experience, and I work with tons of them (both ones in India and the US) every damn day.
Whiteness and race in general don't matter too much for me, except inasmuch as they are useful proxies for who is likely to be a civilization builder vs. a civilization destroyer. One specific example I think of often is this guy: https://imgur.com/rawhide-kobayashi-4FjiGcJ
I know it's a meme and probably not a real person, but I don't give a damn that he's Japanese, he's culturally American for all I care. I hope someone like him was actually able to move to Texas and marry a hot blonde cowgirl with big boobs and make lots of hapa babies with her on his cattle ranch. Some Filipinos and Mexicans are able to do the same kind of assimilation, very few Indians are.
EDIT: To clarify my position a bit, I am in favor of drastically reducing all immigration, even from groups that I generally like, because of my issues with vote dilution, wage suppression, housing prices, etc. But I'm especially in favor of outright ending or drastically limiting immigration from shithole countries/cultures like India.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Which is probably part of why the US is claiming they are military irregulars operating under the command of the Venezuelan government: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8j4ye5x0mo
Whether or not that claim is true is, again, an entirely different matter. But if they are then they are both non-uniformed and operating flagless vessels in international waters, which means the amount of protection they have against pretty much any action another state chooses to take is effectively zero.
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
We also have Luke 1:41, where unborn John the Baptist reacted to Mary and unborn Jesus:
"And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:"
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
And even if people want to argue over the definition of terrorist, "non-uniformed combatants" in general are not covered by the Geneva Conventions (or most of the laws of war in general). Non-uniformed combatants are generally punished when found via... summary execution. Whether or not alleged drug dealers allegedly bringing drugs to the US (allegedly on behalf of the Venezuelan government) count as non-uniformed combatants is a whole different question though.
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
If I'm not mistaken, you are an Indian immigrant to the UK
Thats the greatest insult you could have given him, he's Pakistani
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Given that microstates like Monaco and Liechtenstein have similarly high PPP adjusted GDPs per capita, the rural-urban divide is likely the cause.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
I'm not saying China isn't a manufacturing powerhouse. I'm saying PPP doesn't give me any useful information about how much China manufactures. Nominal dollar value isn't perfect either, but it's a hell of a lot more useful than PPP adjusted nonsense. Actual number of widgets produced (or artillery shells, etc. in the case of Russia) would probably be the most useful.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Because when I'm buying a transmission from China I'm not paying the PPP-adjusted price for it, I'm paying in nominal dollars (or RMB or whatever).
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Yes, and if you wanted to compare total manufacturing output of two countries you would do it without adjusting for PPP
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
Not at all? We each had our own beds, and we each had our own "half" of the room that we wouldn't go into (other than passing through on our way in/out of the room). Really nothing awkward at all. The brother I shared a room with was 5 years older than me so I had my own room from age 13 onward.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
According to the original post, making $100,000 in 1959 would be the equivalent of making $800,000/year today
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
$1.12 million in today's money
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
My brothers and I shared rooms (2 per room) until they were 18 and went off to college. Only my sister had her own room until then.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
What does that have to do with, well, anything? This thread is about cost of living/quality of life in 1959 vs. now, not who manuactures the most. I omly brought up GDP at all because Tretiak was trying to make a point about cost of living in China vs. the US using GDP adjusted for PPP.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP.
PPP is absolutely, utterly useless when applied to total GDP (as opposed to per capita GDP). In fact I'm convinced the only reason to use it for total GDP is to be able to make misleading claims like this. There is zero useful information derived from the number because GDP is a measure of the total economic output of a country, while PPP adjusts things for cost of living in a country (which means the amount per capita is essential to getting any useful information from it). In fact, on /pol/ they're regularly called "Poor People Points" because they make shithole countries that have large populations look a bit less shitty. If we look at GDP per capita adjusted by PPP it's a completely different story:
China: $27k
India: $11k
US: $85k
Japan: $51k
South Korea: $52k
Singapore: $150k
Taiwan: $84k
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
You can turn a text generation chatbot into a do-things AI by just asking it what should be done next and then following its advice… in theory. In practice that seems not to work well, and it’s not clear why.
Because it's just picking statistically likely responses based on its training data, so it can't really suggest anything radically different (or more insightful or creative) than the human-generated information it was trained on.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Rational or not, companies are radically reducing full time employees (FTEs) in their long term plans (LTPs).
Got any specific examples? Would this be something they announce in their annual earnings reports or something else?
20 years later, that wasn't really true. People seem to buy into the BS, or at least keep plausible deniability about it, such that you never really know. You can't openly call this out to your acquaintances, because you need rely on them for job referrals.
Maybe it's because I'm an autist working in tech with fellow autists, but we absolutely complain about this crap to each other all the time (just not to the bosses directly). In fact one of my work buddies specifically makes TPS report jokes every time management gets after us about not tracking enough information in our ticketing system. The only thing we don't openly say (but all of us obviously imply/hint about) is the incompetence of our Indian coworkers.
ChickenOverlord
9d ago
or were shot by a random shooter who was in a quarrel with a completely different person
I mean that's been the modus operandi for these sorts of things since at least as far back as Harvey Milk (killed over what was essentially an employment dispute).
Moses Maimonides says the only punishment the rapist should face is lashings for homosexuality. And perhaps more importantly, on the previous paragraphs hes lists no punishment for women that rape 8 year old boys except thet they have lost any eligibility to marry a member of the priesthood. It seems pretty clear that Maimonides interpreted that section the same way modern normies reading it do.
Out of context.
Nope, that's a different section of the Talmud. Sanhedrin 54b is what you want:
במאי קמיפלגי רב סבר כל דאיתיה בשוכב איתיה" בנשכב וכל דליתיה בשוכב ליתיה בנשכב The Gemara asks: With regard to what principle do Rav and Shmuel disagree? The Gemara answers: Rav holds that any halakha that applies to one who engages in intercourse actively applies to one who engages in intercourse passively, and any halakha that does not apply to one who engages in intercourse actively does not apply to one who engages in intercourse passively. Therefore, just as one who engages in intercourse actively is not liable if he is less than nine years old, as the intercourse of such a child does not have the halakhic status of intercourse, so too, if a child who is less than nine years old engages in homosexual intercourse passively, the one who engages in intercourse with him is not liable."
And Maimonides, applying this part of the Torah many centuries later:
"Once a male has penetrated another male, if both are adults, they are stoned…
If one was a minor but at least nine years and a day old, the active or passive adult is stoned while the minor is exempt.
If the minor was exactly nine years old or less, they are both exempt. Still, it is fitting for the court to give lashes of insubordination to the adult for sleeping with a male, even though that male was less than nine." - Laws of Forbidden Relations 1:14
This is what I'm talking about, there are plenty of things in the Talmud that sound awful out of context but are unobjectionable in context (or the person referencing it is incorrectly summarizing what it actually says). But there are also several that are absolutely horrendous regardless of context.
ChickenOverlord
11d ago
Another example I've seen is the Talmud saying it's ok to rape boys under the age of 9, apologists for the Talmud claiming it was just one rabbi's opinion and not actual Jewish law, but then you look up what Maimonides had to say about it and he agrees it is actual Jewish law
ChickenOverlord
13d ago
Saying, “I think what these government agents are doing is bad and illegal,” is quite squarely within the core area of first-amendment protections for speech on matters of public concern.
I agree, but saying that plus "and I urge members of the military and federal agencies to disobey these orders" would likely fall under incitement.
ChickenOverlord
13d ago
The person you're replying to seems to be constitutionally incapable of engaging in actual argument or debate, at least when the topic is related to feminism or gender roles and similar. Not worth wasting your time with them.
Yeah, the only reason I'm in the program is because I want to boost my resume for future employment (especially since my undergrad degree isn't in a STEM field), and because my current employer is paying for it. I have actually learned some useful things from it, but only because I applied myself more than someone just looking to pass the class would need to. And everything I did learn from it I could have learned on my own without the program, the program just provided a minimal amount of guidance and direction as to what to learn.
I did find out I can take some electives from the electrical engineering master's program and have them count for my degree, so I'll probably do that since a lot of them seem more interesting (and hopefully more rigorous).
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