> require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans
While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions.
There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.
>What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.
Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.
> You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?
I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.
I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.
Realistically, formal higher education is not simply a private matter. It's a part of the complex web of accreditation, government subsidies and entrenched social institutions (not necessarily state institutions).
A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.
So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".
Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.
"Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions."
The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.
> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community.
Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians.
Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.
There’s definitely some racism, but intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist. Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool. Overfitting arbitrary criteria is easy, but not productive.
> intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
In theory maybe. In practice the overwhelming majority of the time it's just used to admit fewer asians.
> Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist.
If we actually cared about whether people were interesting conversationalists in an objective sense (rather than just interesting to the person making the admissions decision - which mostly just comes down to having the same cultural background), we'd figure out a way to test it. These universities never tried, because they never actually cared about interesting conversationalists in the first place, it's always been nothing but a fig leaf.
> Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool.
Then make it random, if that's the goal - have an actual fair lottery between everyone who meets the standard. But again, it was never about being random.
Language isn’t culturally agnostic. If classes where taught in Malagasy being well read would refer to a different set of books.
> Then make it random, if that's the goal
That’s not the goal, the point is any system that can be gamed will be gamed. You can’t game random, but you can easily have someone else write a kids collage admission essay which becomes more likely the more you weight it and the higher bar you set.
> we'd figure out a way to test it.
In many ways that’s why the SAT is preferred over the ACT. Having a large vocabulary, being able to express yourself, being able to think logically are all reasonable proxies. It also explains why the math section excludes calculus questions as transcripts already show if someone took calculus so they can focus on something else.
The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?
Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.
You are making a lot of assumptions here. People don’t find others interesting conversationalists if they have the same background. Maybe if all you focus on is skin color, you may be right, but does somebody in Ukraine have the same background as somebody who grew up in South Florida? Does somebody who grew up in the San Francisco have the same background as somebody who grew up in Marin?
If all you look at is race, you might say yes, but these are very different life experiences. Also, there is such a thing as somebody being so different that it’s not possible for others to relate to them. Likability is not unimportant when it comes to working in a team.
Laptop professionals are remarkably similar wherever in the world you find them these days. London, New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, etc. have all been converging on a similar set of tastes, fashions, beliefs, and consuming habits. So it's possible to have great geographic diversity, without introducing much diversity in terms of culture, class, political and religious beliefs, etc.
And conversely great diversity without geographic diversity or racial diversity. Diversity is oversimplified and measured incorrectly from the DEI perspective.
This is quite similar to the strongest argument for legacy admissions, even if the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful don't have the best test scores they contribute significantly to the value of going to that institution for other students by virtue of offering them access to those who are going to inherit wealth and power.
I don't think you actually learned what their product is. It enables an e-bike owner to much more easily replace their batteries with newer batteries (the issue of mix-and-match seems like a problem with this however). They aren't trying to sell you a single battery that lasts forever. Instead it is an enclosure that enables you to much more easily service your battery / replace batteries.
Well, article title implies single battery (and not parts of it being replaced regularly) that lasts lifetime. With current technology the only way to achieve that it it to make it explode rather violently. In all seriousness, the issue with that battery's approach is only if it can fit any specific bike, otherwise idea is good since 18650 batteries are highy standardized. except new chemistry right around corner, and new chemistry means different voltages etc
A battery is just a group of cells. You have to replace one or more of the cells eventually, but it is technically a battery that lasts forever. kind of a ship of theseus situation
CVS is explicitly about tabular data. JSON (including JSON5) is much more flexible. Flexibility can be great but also can be annoying. If you want tabular data, then a system that enables nesting isn't great.
You would write JSON arrays without names for tabular data. I don’t know if there is a standard way to do the header, but array of names would work. Or JSON Schema record.
Rather than highlighting flexibility as the differentiator, I would say: CSV is for dense data, JSON is for sparse data. They are flexible in different ways. For example, CSV is very flexible when renaming a column title.
Most materials contract when they cool down. For example, differential contraction between metal contacts and semiconductor materials can cause them to detach or break, disrupting electrical connections. Also extremely low temperatures can lead to changes in semiconductor properties such as carrier mobility, which affects how efficiently electronic signals are processed.
Couldn't all connectors be made with some kind of expansion joint, like how infrastructure (bridges etc) are made? Given how they use older nodes, this may perhaps even be possible for transistors (Assuming they also have such expansions)?
Normally materials in chips are selected so that they have similar thermal expansion coefficients - otherwise they would fall apart just from reaching normal work temperatures.
There's another problem here: below a certain temperature semiconductors become insulators. You're running the risk of your chip shutting down in a disorderly manner.
Of course you can do all sorts of things to make the electronics able to survive, but ultimately that supposedly just wasn't part of the initial design requirements they settled on.
It's good to remember that the total lifetime budget of this lander is only $121.5 million, and that includes all the staff still receiving data. It was always intended to be a technology demonstrator, not an ongoing science lab.
"A house divided aginst itself cannot stand," part of a speech by Abe and thus credited to him, is also from the Bible: Mark 3:25. I'va a hunch he was religious.
This recommendation was in the form of a report by the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) in the White House. I would suspect it had more thought to it than you're suggesting.
I think this quote from the article is quite useful:
"Recent studies from Microsoft and Google have found that about 70 percent of all security vulnerabilities are caused by memory safety issues." Which the article cites [1] [2]
There is validity to their argument on the source of security vulnerabilities.
For books, if it's a client reader software frustration, then you should still buy the digital version and then you can pirate the PDF book and use as desired within the constraints of copyright law (e.g. don't go sharing the PDF). That way you get the client you want but you still paid the content creator. But to use the argument, "oh, I don't like their client so I'm going to not pay them" is BS.
For UFC, your complaint is you don't like their pricing. The whole point of copyright is to give someone the monopoly to control pricing so they can use that pricing power to incentivize them to create the product in the first place. Similarly to patents. Thus, complain about the format things are delivered in all you want (like the client) but pricing is inherent to copyright or patents for good reason. You are now just arguing that you as a consumer should be able to pirate if you don't agree with pricing. And that's ludicrous.
In that case, just read a news article about the event. Copyright doesn't cover facts, only creative expression. So a news article covering the facts of the UFC fight is able to be published without the consent of the copyright holder. Think of the digital video of the fight almost like buying a ticket to the fight. You're saying you should just be able to sneak into the fight and watch it for free without any justification for you're doing so.
Finally, you can also watch other people's videos of the fight that THEY recorded on social media as other sources of the fight information. But if you want the recording with all the right angles, coverage, etc, it clearly has value to you over written recaps or social media coverage. And you are just arguing over price, which they are the copyright holder have the right to set the price.
The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change. I have thought about this long and hard, but ultimately the only way Spotify came about was because nobody bought the terrible DRM’d music the labels wanted to foist on us. We need to inflict the same pain for books.
Personally, I think it would be preferable to donate the same amount to the Books Trust or your local library.
> The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change.
Then don't consume it and don't buy it. If you stop paying the abusive publisher, they'll be forced to change their policies.
The fact that you don't want to fund what is admittedly a rather abusive industry does not magically make it right to consume other peoples' work for free. That's theft-adjacent. You're not entitled to any piece of entertainment without paying for it.
They used a difference-in-differences[1] to control for such longitudinal/temporal effects. Since ChatGPT isn't readily available in China or Russia, but StackOverflow is, they can compare how SO changed pre and post ChatGPT in countries where it is widely available and compare that to the pre and post in countries where it isn't available (basically as the control).
Wow, I can't believe a startup would willingly take that risk. Violating US sanctions law is no joke for a US company!
Did you intentionally not tell them you were in Iran and instead just said you wanted to be paid in bitcoin without explanation? I'm extremely curious.
They knew I was in Iran. None of us knew it's illegal to hire contractors we just thought it's some banking access issue. Also it was a small amount and not a systemic thing I was the only one.
While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions.
There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.