I am really laughing at this one. You got me good. This is either some kind of farming game where I need to "unlock" a valuable skill... ("training" makes me think of NES Super Marios Brothers 3 with the slot machine game after each level), or a skill that I need to add to my LinkedIn profile to check if anyone is reading it. (I recall years ago two guys adding recommendations to each other's profiles with very funny and implausible notes to see if anyone was looking. Does anyone remember that?)
> NES Super Marios Brothers 3 with the slot machine game after each level
a) It's either Super Mario Brothers or Super Marios Brother
b) SMB2 (aka Super Mario USA in Japan) has the Bonus Chance slot machine after each level, SMB3 does have the Goal card at the end of each level with a match 3 mechanic, but I don't consider that to really be a slot machine.
The impact for me was I quit and founded a company, got funded. I work with my friends and it's great.
Corpos are very sick right now, friends that stayed behind with +8y xp are very burnt out and annoyed having to deal with barely functional employees for a "peanut butter" raise.
AI has been an excellent excuse for holding back new hires. It might give me a 20% productivity boost, but that doesn't help if my workload increases by 50%.
Exactly this, if you stay on the ship you only get everyone else's job. It sounds like you're more valuable which is the trap, because there is no more money in the banana stand.
I'd rather make -20% less and work with people who don't drive me crazy while having an equity stake in the company. It may not pay off, but I'll tell ya what, my blood pressure is a lot lower!
I was the kid with the backpack Zip drive and Zip disks, like a weird Santa Claus of game piracy. Duke3d, Descent, Quake, you name it. All of it was in service of modem dueling each other. Wild times!
I use a private gitlab that was setup by claude, have my own runners and everything. It's fine. I have my own little home cluster, net storage compute around 2.5k. Go NUCs, cluster, don't look back.
I've written sse2 optimized C, web apps, and probably everything in between (hw, datasci, etl, devops).
I like coding with AI both vibe and assisted, since as soon as the question enters my head I can create a prototype or a test or a xyz to verify my thoughts. The whole time I'm writing in my notebook or whiteboard or any other thing I would have gotten up to. This is enabling tech, the trouble for me is there is a small thread that leads out of the room into the pockets of billion dollar companies.
It is no longer you vs the machine.
I have spent tons of time debugging weird undocumented hardware with throwaway code, or sat in a debugger doing hex math.
I think one wire that is crossed right now in this world is that computing is more corporate than ever, with what seems like ever growing platforms and wealth extraction at scale. Don't let them get you down, host your own shit and ignore them. YES IT WILL COST MORE -> YOUR FREEDOM HAS A PRICE.
Another observation is that people that got into the game for pure money are big mad right now. I didn't make money in the 00s, I did in the end of the 10s, and we're back at job desolation. In my groups, the most annoyed are code boot campers who have faked it until they made it and have just managed to survive this cycle with javascript.
Cycles come and go, the tech changes, but problem solving is always there.
I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!).
What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized.
A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol.
There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two.
Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse.
Also, no phonics?! Wtf?
People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4.
Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least.
I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system.
EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.
A national curriculum is a deeply suspicious idea. The US has an insane range of socioeconomic, and thus educational, environments, ranging from high-performing states like Massachusetts, to deeply alarmingly under-performing states like West Virginia. Any standard that could be established would at best suffer from being either unreachable with the resources available on the low end, or a pointless bureaucratic headache for states that would completely eclipse it.
At worst, it would become a cudgel to be used by federal governments sympathetic to the over-represented and under-educated states against the ones that actually provide value to the nation and an education to their residents.
It is entirely possible that we cannot do it with the current setup. Resourcing of public schools is largely shit across the various states, I went to NJ public schools which are consistently second or third in the nation. I live in Philadelphia whose public schools are notoriously bad.
The rise of charters has probably hurt areas with marginal public schooling, but it does give parents an option.
I don't think there's anything suspicious or sinister about it, considering how administrations appear to be running absolutely out of control in schools now which seems pretty bad. You are likely right about the federal govt getting this wrong and screwing up the current good thing which is public schools in areas that work :D.
I would counter with things like, calculus is not a regional bias. If we expect to compete internationally we have to raise the bar up, not create a generation of people who can't do fractions. I'll def have to think about how the fed would misuse this. Thanks for the insight.
My bias:
I am a product of DoDDS schools, which is as close to a national curriculum as we've ever had and the numbers seem to be off the charts: https://archive.is/OpZnr
For me, my parents are both from poor backgrounds. My dad joined the Marines and apparently got me access to the best academy in the USA, the DoDDS System. I am the only person in my family to ever make more than 100k or have degrees.
There's also the little unspoken part of this article that if your kid misbehaves bad enough it becomes your parent's problem via their commanding officer.
It is entirely possible I'm some kind of outlier. (I doubt it.)
I doubt there are any states that don't currently have fractions in their curricula. The problem isn't standards, it's that large swathes of the country simply don't care about educating their children, as indicated at a societal level by where tax revenue goes, and at the individual level by parental involvement in children's education.
How to solve that short of charging people with neglect, I've got no idea.
I didn't learn phonics in school, while my only 2-year younger sibling did (not sure why, maybe related to the school being super low income?) yet I always had a much higher grade reading level. Obviously that's just one point of anecdata, but I don't think phonics is a very big influence on literacy, and why would it be? pronunciation is one tiny part of reading. I think the sheer amount of time spent online is probably the biggest culprit.
Phonics gives you the raw material with how to understand language, including English with all its problems. Similar to how numbers work, you understand that a combination of symbols seen in different contexts contains "a sound". It is a system used to teach nearly all languages with a phonetic alphabet around the world. It is a system that transcends borders, and is useful around the world to teach similar languages.
This is a bottom up vs top down approach. The claim is that whole word reading gets you reading faster and so it has a knock on effect. Phonics was completely removed from curriculums under "Whole Word" and "Balanced Literacy" movements(!?). The claim being that phonics is meaningless because it's technical and "people care about story telling!" and more. Note, these are not my opinions I am restating recent "discoveries".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Calkins
This rhymes with how people thought common core math was better because it didn't contain all of that annoying practice. Now that kids cannot interpret similar words at all (ex: house, boat, houseboat, boathouse), now they're bringing phonics as "science of reading".
My point of all this, is why do we keep throwing out DECADES of work for fringe theories justified by kooks in an attempt to min max a KPI? It all implies that high level skills are not built from fundamentals but instead osmosed, as if you either get it or you don't which seems to be how these models view high skills. Seems crazy to me!
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