dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8hr ago
Well, I think that's the chief complaint about public school already in these parts? We spend a fortune to try to bring up the low end and mostly leave the above average kids to suffer with boredom and turn into misanthropes.
How do we make them more efficient? Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains? What do you have in mind?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12hr ago
I replied already but wanted to address a different point more fully. I don't think public education changes that much if we embrace HBD. E.g. even if we can't turn inner city black youth with 75 IQ into doctors, it still probably is worth sending them to public school to try to get them up to 90. What's the alternative?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14hr ago
My view from the inside of orgs is even if you fall all over yourselves to do AA (like Google did) it barely increases diversity.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16hr ago
HBD, by which we probably mean IQ is what like 30-60% genetic and average IQ scores for whole racial groups vary, is only really worth discussing because so much of academia and society goes berserk if you bring it up. It's a truth that upsets the blank slatists so much that they pervert scientific discourse to bury it.
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
LLMs have this uncanny valley problem where the more capable they become, the more ambitious the task I give them and the more time they ultimately waste me because I go down a rabbit hole chasing a solution that can't work but I don't figure it out for hours. Meanwhile it confidently tells me this is how you do it until the error is undeniable.
I feel like I was more productive with them a year ago than I am today.
It also astonishes me how relatively good they are at coding but kind of bad at everything else?
Ask it to walk you through plot points of a popular sci-fi book you're reading and it hallucinates left and right. It has likely been trained on the full text and also ten thousand book reports and reviews and it still can't keep its shit together.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
I originally got into computer programming as a teenager because I wanted to make video games, but I found windows insufferable and got distracted by Linux and a career in SRE.
I've since decided to try to go back to my roots, so to speak. This would all be a lot easier if I just used UE5, but what's the fun in that?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Sure but if this is brought before the SCOTUS they may rule the POTUS only has the authority to do this because the 14th does not confer birthright citizenship to illegal immigrant children.
Doesn't seem like the best idea if you have declining fertility because you can't even get your own domestic original stock bloods to reproduce.
You eventually have to make up the deficit with foreigners and it's better to have foreigners with domestic great grandparents than no relation at all.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
Too many undesirables from Brazil using it to resettle, apparently.
So! There's a tiny chance I'll be booted out of the US because 5 decades ago my parents were illegal immigrants and the SCOTUS might agree they were foreign invaders, thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.
Meanwhile, right-wing nativist Chuds in my parents' country have decided they think bloodline-based citizenship is the actual menace and are taking steps towards ending it.
I don't really want to live in the old country, but to add insult to injury it's narrowly possible I'll lose residency in the US while my kids become ineligible for residence in the old country and navigating that sounds really unpleasant.
This is really speculative of course. But for peace of mind, are there any decent countries that I can buy a citizenship in? Either cash money or via "investment"? The obvious contenders like Cyprus and Portugal seem to have scaled back the enticements recently.
Homies: Ride or Die
FINALLY got most major issues with car solved. Switched to PBR ("physically based rendering") from old school Phong-style. Really took this to the next level (pic attached).
Also the wheels now spin properly, the lighting and normal maps stay consistent, I can even select the brake callipers and steer them along with the the front wheels.
The problem the entire time is seemingly that the obj/mtl data files were garbage, and I lost several weeks worth of time using those instead of going with gltf. I cannot believe how consequential stupid shit like choice of file format is. I'm sure there are dev teams that have wasted millions of dollars from this one decision.
Anyway! I'm told the next thing I want to do is add environment mapping (having the skydome, etc reflect off the car) to really make it pop.
TRON bike lighting
Finally getting back to this. The parts arrived for the $4 PC case fan and charcoal filter and I made myself a fume extractor that impressed my daughter.
I dunno, based on interviews he seems sappy enough that he believes in the institution of marriage.
One view is he felt his sex life dwindling and his mortality creeping in and didn't want to accept that, so he started lifting and doing roids and wanting to party a bit but his then wife wasn't really into picking up that same lifestyle.
If being the richest man in the world was worth anything, surely it would be cheating old age at least a little bit.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
He also thought it was important to get almost comically enormous biceps entering his 60s, having been a scrub most of his life.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
There's a fairly lucid section in the article about how genius level masters didn't appear born with intrinsic motivation and the simple explanations like "they just love practicing more" don't hold.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
Some will ship to Canada.
Not sure what the rules are for this so I don't want to give direct links here.
The general shape of it is you want to find vendors that sell peptides for research purposes only, and also ensure they get their stuff independently tested including with links to the test lab report that you can verify yourself. Additionally, they will have robust Telegram communities where customers will get together in a group for each batch and randomly pick a few to send their samples to a lab as well.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
I'm not sure what you're responding to exactly. Are you saying this seems inane and that school shouldn't focus on this, or that this doesn't seem like a hard academic competition to win. Is this even an academic competition?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap.
Without looking this up, how much do you think the state spends per kid in a public school in a major but not very high cost of living city?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
It's tragic the entire article is derailed by people hyperfixating on this one bit.
DUOLINGO
An Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."
This is pretty interesting.
All of the GT Workshops are focused on a measurable, legible output. They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties. The school’s “100% Money Back guarantee” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade). This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.
Winning national academic competitions is a bold claim, but maybe there is that much alpha (ha!) to find versus conventional schooling.
Additionally
Airbnb: Maybe the most impressive one. The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)
I find this fucking awesome. You're clearly not only paying for kids to practice Duolingo. Also, an Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."
Mostly, I just enjoy how willing they are to experiment and iterate even in the face of unpopular ideas. And apparently paying kids to read books is insanely unpopular?
Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).
There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.
So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.
The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.
We homeschool our kid and while he is crushing it academically, we do notice his motivation sagging a bit in some areas. Our headline update from reading this entire post was not to move to Austin and send him to Alpha schools, but to try greasing him a bit.
We've been paying for online piano lessons because his mind was blown by Elton John videos and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how to play and we were like sure why not.
And he's been practicing pretty consistently with very little prodding from us for almost 18 months and plays really well. He's decent enough that the last Christmas party we went to he just played and kept it bumping while everyone else sang along. I find this impressive enough because I can't play piano for shit.
But! He hit this one module that has one song that he just doesn't like and his motivation to finish it fell through the floor. It's pretty surprising since it's not even a hard song, it just doesn't seem to satisfy him the way the other ones do. He's been stuck on it for months, just does not care at all to practice it. So... having just read this post we decided to offer him $1 to finish the song by Monday and he bunkered down and has been practicing it hard since.
Are we worried about ruining his intrinsic motivation entirely? Not really. There's some rationalization later about how bribing kids does not render them incapable of doing things without external motivation as adults, and indeed it might be a solid way to push them more towards having intrinsic motivation later.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
I get your conflict theory view on law.
I don't understand this part though
You accepted violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in. On what grounds do you appeal to the law now?
Where have I accepted violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
If might makes right is your morality: so did you. 😇
From time to time I read movie screenplays for movies I've already seen to help me fall asleep at night.
I read The Matrix screenplay right after a close friend of mine came out as trans and talked to me about it so it was top of mind and let me tell you the script is suspiciously full of trans messaging.
The police let their guard down in the beginning when arresting Trinity, not expecting a girl to be all that dangerous. Except she kills them
Then there's this
Tee hee.
Then, Neo specifically says to Trinity when she confronts him at a party that he thought she was a guy. She replies that most guys do.
This all seems very Hollywood girlboss by today's standards but in 1999 I think they were playing with something deeper.
You're out of the closet buddy.
She continues, talking about Morpheus helping her wake up from the Matrix
I've spoken to a few trans people now and a recurring story is the collapse of their denial.They wake up and realize their whole life is a lie. It's really upsetting. They can't go back but they're also scared to go ahead.
Neo attempts to follow Morpheus' plan at work but he chickens out when he has to go out the window. Maybe he can go on without finding out? Then he's arrested.
The pill to wake up being like the first time you take hormones, etc.
Uhh anyway there's more of this stuff. Might need to make a fun thread post.
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