> Do you think if children were going to be harmed in The USA then maybe the federal government should introduce a ban of that kind of shit federally?
I'm not sure the federal government can. There are powers reserved for states that the federal government can't circumvent. They have supremacy, but the jurisdiction of that supremacy is restricted.
This is a fun article because while it discusses a real issue, it has just enough outdated views to distract people from the main point and focus on those.
Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era.
Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying.
Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures.
All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.
Perhaps it has to do with the reason people go to university, and the pressures they're under.
I remember being a poor student burning through my savings. I had no patience for humanities and anything that didn't directly help me get gainful employment.
Years later, I love those things, mostly because I am free to pursue them at my own pace, without worrying about maintaining a high GPA, courting companies that offer internships, building up my portfolio, and learning the things that are actually related to my job. That's on top of working my way through school, trying to make friends in a new city, and pursuing happiness.
I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury
I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.
Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me
In the university I optimized for exam. The degree was the only thing that mattered. Like you now that I’m older and wealthier I can lean for learning sake at my pleasure and deep dive things I care about.
For me it was extracting the most value for the money, which meant getting the best possible education within the boundaries of the degree. This involved taking graduate courses and substituting them for undergrad to get more of a challenge, taking more math courses both undergrad and graduate (I was a CS major), etc. Yes ultimately I was paying for a piece of paper, but when you're paying $15k/yr I wanted to be damn sure it was money well spent, and to this day I still feel shortchanged.
I felt shortchanged my senior year at my fairly well-regarded university when I was dealing with depression and doing what I saw as the bare minimum academically. I still got straight A’s despite putting in minimal effort.
> I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
This was definitely the case for me.
However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.
Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.
If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.
Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.
Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.
You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.
I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.
> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding
It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.
For a take-home exam or assignment, I’m sure this is the case.
The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.
I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.
As someone who teaches in humanities many students are really bad at reading and writing, use ai way too much and it hurts them, and rarely pay attention in class.
I’ve sat in other classes which were indeed boring but I don’t think this is the common denominator. Undergrads are just high schoolers with a different title.
The students from our schools foreign branch that come here for a semester or so are leagues beyond local students.
>it has just enough outdated views to distract people
Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's great this guy wrote a textbook, but perhaps he should have authored a series of documentaries.
Perhaps reading dense texts isn't actually the best way to make an impression on a students mind, but that's just all we had up until about 20 years ago.
I think Khan Academy is really great because of the video content.
Hah, I think there’s two things that stand out in my memory.
- They need 3 Boeing 737’s to ship an EUV machine.
- We talked with one guy who’s responsibility it was to design one of the calibration points the machine uses to find it’s zero position. This left me amazed that they’re able to ship a machine halfway across the world, re-assemble it and calibrate it again to such accuracy. And! On top of that, make it reproducible over different machines!
Oh, I've actually seen that in videos! If you Google it, there's tons of pics showing the loading/unloading. They're not one-offs either. TSMC may order 80 at a time.
Hadn't thought about calibration afterwards. Crazy.
As a DevOps’er in the EU, how would I capitalize on this?
I’ve only ever done bare metal and have been lucky all of my employers hated the idea of AWS/Azure/GCP. So I feel like I’m quite well positioned to start helping companies move to bare metal alternatives.
Do I start freelancing, or do I try for an AWS alternative?
> In fact the user should generate his private key by himself and just provide the public key to the sysadmin to inject it in the system to grant access.
I always found this such an annoying step to implement. We've switched to certificate based authentication on SSH - no more moving around public keys. Really simplified the whole process!
Certificates have a private key and a public key, and you keep the private key secret and move the public key around, so ... how is that different, technically and organizationally?
There is only one public key that installed on the servers. That key is the same everywhere. You have a self-serve system that generates short-lived certs to users.
What public key is installed where on the servers? What self-serve system where generating certs how and in what form do users get them and what do they do with them?
And how is the user authenticating to the self-serve system - username/password? And why can't they just do that to the SSH server?
The company certificate is put on the server. Manually, the sysadmin generates the user key signed by certificate and sends it to them. Or the self-serve system generates it and they download it.
The user uses the SSH key as normal. The server checks that if key is signed.
The self-serve system uses the single-sign-on system for the company. The SSH server can't do SSO, maybe can do LDAP, but it is giant annoyance to set it up. A lot SSH use assumes that using key and doesn't support username/password.
What do you expect about the new solution that will be better?
Genuine question, btw. While I see how kubernetes can feel overcomplicated, it has always felt as a consequence of how complicated it is to run such a large number of workloads in a scalable and robust manner.
Would people really be willing to use this to expose their services to the internet?
Given it’s small and focused on home users, I’d be afraid of any potential security issues. I’d much rather use tools that get a lot more frequent security scanning (like nginx)
I've cobbled together my own assortment of services that achieves a similar suite of functionality Zoraxy appears to offer. Everything is hosted and accessible (ACLs permitting) via my Tailscale network – nothing gets exposed publicly.
This looks very cool and if it's able to integrate with Tailscale I'd try it in a heartbeat!
Nginx is written in C. It's not the worst offender of the species, but there's been enough RCE-level CVEs over the years that I would assume some remain in its current version.
Something written in e.g. Go at least gives you a fighting chance.
I follow this best practice, there’s a few reasons why I do this. It doesn’t have to do with using a guessed primary ID for some sort of privilege escalation, though. It has more to do with not leaking any company information.
When I worked for an e-commerce company, one of our biggest competitors used an auto-incrementing integer as primary key on their “orders” table. Yeah… You can figure out how this was used. Not very smart by them, extremely useful for my employer. Neither of these will allow security holes or leak customer info/payment info, but you’d still rather not leak this.
I've been in these shoes before, and finding this information doesn't help you as an executive or leader make any better decisions than you could have before you had the data. No important decision is going to be swayed by something like this, and any decision that is probably wasn't important.
Knowing how many orders is placed isn't so useful without average order value or items per cart, and the same is true for many other kinds of data gleamed from this method.
That’s not correct. Not every market is the same in it’s dynamics.
Yes, most of the time that information was purely insightful and was simply monitored. However, at some moments it definitely drove important decisions.
What's going to change how a team develops (physical) products? What's a merchandiser or buyer going to learn that influences how they spend millions of dollars or deal with X weeks-on-hand of existing inventory? What's an operations manager going to learn that improves their ability to warehouse and ship product? How's marketing going to change their strategy around segmentation or channel distribution? What's a CEO going to learn that changes what departments or activities they want to invest in?
At best you get a few little tidbits of data you can include in presentations or board decks, but nothing that's going to influence critical decisions on how money is getting spent to get the job done or how time is getting allocated to projects. Worst case you have a inexperienced CEO that's chasing rather than leading, and just end up copying superficial aspects of your competitors without the context or understanding of why they did what they did.
I've called up execs at competitors and had friendly chats that revealed more about their business in 30 minutes than you could possibly find out through this "method".
