To agree with you: I've worked with several really brilliant undergrads doing and publishing great research. But all of them were rightfully undergrads. Even if they were actually capable of doing great research, they benefited from the breadth.
If you have bright enough undergrads, you change the curriculum for them within their field of expertise, so that they still get the breadth of things outside it while not wasting time with things they know. You let them not take as many classes, take graduate courses, do more research, take more courses from other departments in related areas but with different perspectives, and so on.
When I was an undergrad, in physics, there was a professor in the department who had done his undergrad there and was legendary, as was quietly mentioned in awe, for not taking any undergraduate physics courses while there; the department had let him skip all of them, and instead take graduate courses and do research.
The point here seems to have been to obtain degrees as quickly as possible, without concern for actually learning. I'd also note that depending on where you're located and how far you're willing to go, there are often many other options, and high school can, I think, often be skipped entirely.
But even for students who do care about and enjoy classes, the idea of finding routes around parts of the process that are not beneficial can be useful. I didn't find secondary schools to be enjoyable or conducive to learning, and knew that I enjoyed community college classes much more; I found that in California I could simply test out of high school, and did so after seventh grade, instead going the guaranteed-admission route through community college. Then, at a university, knowing the system well, I aggressively avoided taking classes where I felt I would not learn much, mostly within my major's requirements: if I felt an upper division class with an equivalent graduate class would be boring, for example, I would swap them; when I felt I already knew anything I'd learn in the basic programming class required for physics majors, I successfully petitioned the department to have my research units, where I was programming extensively, cover the programming requirement. In part, this was not to finish faster, but so that I could take fewer, more rewarding classes and focus on them more intently, while also doing research.
I would say that I think guaranteed admission programs work very well in a wide variety of circumstances, and the stigma around them, and community colleges, seems quite unjustified. For students, they guarantee admission into often very strong universities with a process that is much more stable and reliable than standardized tests and arbitrary admissions decisions. They mean that the student takes lower-division classes that are much smaller and more personal than they would be at a major university, and takes them in a significantly more flexible setting where they often have fewer stresses. They can then transfer to a good university, going straight into mostly upper-division classes that will also be more personal, and where the benefit of the university's faculty will be more pronounced. And if they don't perform very well at the community college, they still have the ability to transition to getting an associate's degree, or to go to a lower-tier university. For universities interested in admitting students who will do well, it also seems beneficial: strong performance at a community college, an academic setting much closer to a university than to a high school, is likely a much stronger indicator of whether they will flourish in a university setting, and some pressure is taken off of large lower-division classes.
And for students who don't enjoy high school, I think that community colleges offer a compelling alternative: with their lower level courses, they essentially offer high-school-level material in the academic format of a university, with much more flexibility, less but more focused class time, less imposed work, and more reliance on students studying and learning in they ways they find best, or failing, with that failure being seen as the fault of the student rather than the instructor, meaning the instructor does not need to focus on forcing students to study. Despite the perception the author had of the route being for mediocre students, almost everyone I know who went through them were very good students, and chose that option either for its clear benefits or because they were in unusual circumstances: it was the process of choice for young undergraduates in California, for example, at least when I was a student.
I did always feel it odd that some relatives of mine looked down on the route, however. As a physicist, I'm not sure how many people even know or care where my bachelor's is from, much less where I started it.
I was going to respond with my usual point that money paid to the Mozilla Foundation cannot legally be used to support Firefox, but it turns out you're right: MDN and several other products are actually part of the Mozilla Corporation. The exception seems to be Thunderbird, which is MZLA Technologies Corporation.
>Also the proprietary license on multiboard is absolutely insane.
Licensing in the 3D printing community tends to be a mess, with licenses that are often absurd, and selectively and sometimes dramatically enforced and unenforced. Multiboard is one of the most absurd I've seen, and is so utterly toxic I feel like touching anything involved with it would be risky: I'd really encourage people to read it [1] (and not the misleading summary they give). I suppose by even writing this I'm making myself ineligible for the license, as the license would not allow me to act in any way contrary to the interests of the company behind Multiboard, or even encourage any third part to act contrary to those interests. If the terms aren't absurd enough, there's a clause for the company to terminate the already limited ability to make and use derivative works if they feel you are taking advantage of the license terms.
Yet at the same time, go to any 3D printing model website, and you'll see numerous obvious copyright and trademark violations of Multiboard, often under completely incompatible licenses. Not only are these not removed (I have reported them before), but the owners of Multiboard will even officially comment on the sites praising the designs.
It's bizarre, but despite things at times going dramatically wrong, like with Benchy's license suddenly being enforced after many years of encouraging violations, people in the community largely seem to ignore the problem.
thanks for this one. I've just printed my first two stacks of Multiboard for the office after only reading the license summary.
The way they play with "Designed Works" and "commercial use" is really pretty weird. I kinda understand the aim - it's just one guy who's probably trying to make a startup out of this and is kinda hedging his bases against someone coming up with an injection moulded copy on Aliexpress. But the way "commercial use" is left vague is pretty sketchy. Is e.g. "background of an office in a youtube video" considered "commercial use"?
That being said, I guess I'll still finish at least one wall with it. I've used a few pegboards over the years and in my experience, these things don't die on licensing. They die on the fact that the manufacturer stops making them / switches to a different size / type. Here I can at least save the STLs and reprint the stuff as needed.
> Here I can at least save the STLs and reprint the stuff as needed.
Until the license is revoked, changed, or you ever do some for profit work from the space where the multiboard exists. Multiboard legally owns the objects you printed on your printer with filament you paid for, so you will still be a pirate!
Multiboard is supposedly HSW compatible though so consider only printing HSW parts so you are not locked into their doomed ecosystem.
>Fairphones consistently doesn't support a quarter of what graphene os requires
I expect it's not just a matter of feature support: Fairphone in general seems rather horrible on security, doing things like using test keys for production signatures [1].
>Republic of Ireland refers to the soccer team and nothing else, FYI.
'The Republic of Ireland' is the official descriptive term for the country named 'Ireland' in English, per the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. I have certainly heard 'Republic of Ireland' used in Ireland, or just 'the Republic', but almost always in cases where the descriptive distinction is important. I'd agree that outside of those cases, using 'Republic of Ireland' by default can be a problem.
>Because the country of Czechia has asked the English-speaking world to refer to it that way.
Unlike the political complexities around 'Republic of Ireland', 'The Czech Republic' actually is the official long name of the country in English, with 'Czechia' the official short name; the country's government promotes 'Czechia', but I don't think there is a suggestion that 'Czech Republic' is no longer acceptable. I have also never actually heard anyone in the country refer to it as Czechia in English.
> The Republic of Ireland' is the official descriptive term for the country named 'Ireland' in English, per the Republic of Ireland Act 1948.
The context is important. The Act revoked dominion status and role of the British Crown in the Irish executive branch, thus making Ireland a republic, and so deserving of a new description (the previous having been the Irish Free State).
Czechia is the only way I've heard the country referred to (in the news as it rarely comes up in person).
> * Made the donations go directly to funding the browser development. Right now I don't know if it even possible to donate purely just to browser development
The problem goes beyond them making it impossible to donate purely to browser development: they have arranged their structure such that you cannot donate to browser development at all. The Mozilla Corporation develops Firefox; it is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and donations to the foundation can't be used for the for-profit browser development subsidiary at all.
They've built their entire legal structure around reliance on Google's payments.
Yeah it’s super frustrating. I donate $50/mo to Ladybird development and would do the same for Firefox tomorrow if they gave me any way to actually do it. I have no interest in funding their foundation initiatives.
>On the server, however, NixOS is an incredibly good choice, and it's what I'm currently using to build my VPS on
NixOS is also often a terrible choice for servers. I once had the misfortune to be part of a multi-user server running on NixOS. The idea made sense: users could all have their own versions of software installed. In practice, it was a disaster: NixOS seems to fundamentally assume that all users have root access.
Many ordinary processes ended up involving administrator involvement. Want to change your shell? Contact the administrator. Password? Contact the administrator. Add or remove an SSH key? Contact the administrator; hopefully you don’t do anything like use per-device keys. Run a user service? Contact the administrator, who might also need to do all the configuration for you. Numerous options that would be user-configurable in other distributions ended up in configuration.nix. And looking or asking for help online was an exercise in frustration: the idea that I wasn’t able to use sudo or edit configuration.nix seemed completely foreign.
Fortunately, we were able to switch everything over to Debian. This had the advantage of both actually working for normal user accounts, and still letting people use Nix, arguably with fewer problems.
I do expect someone may reply with some poorly (or un-) documented approach to handling these problems, perhaps using unstable and experimental features, but that tendency in itself was a considerable frustration in using Nix.
>I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act
It's not clear whether this is even using a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency arrangement (assuming that would actually be private). What this appears to be presenting is a system where users will be pay, and be paid, to violate copyright, in a way that may well be easily traceable and linkable to real identities, and, for US users, likely even needs to be reported on tax returns even when just paying. The 'cup of coffee' statement entirely misses the point: the nature of the process changes when payments are involved.
Added to that are statements saying that they have systems to remove watermarks and protect the identity of users. If they're envisioning this being something researchers and students contribute to, that watermark removal system is likely to fail on many occasions, and people are potentially going to get themselves severely hurt.
I often feel like academic publishing and paper availability is somewhat of a cold war between researchers and publishers, where researchers practically need to violate copyright to research effectively, while publishers can't pursue those violations too severely, or they risk researchers ostracizing them, so we end up with unspoken understandings of acceptable violations. But a system like goes entirely outside of acceptable boundaries.
If a publisher came to a university and said, hey, this researcher put up the final copy of their own paper on their personal website in violation of copyright, the university might tell the researcher to replace the copy with a manuscript one. If a publisher comes to a university (or the police) and says they can show concrete evidence that one of their students is being paid through a foreign criminal organization to knowingly violate the terms of the university's subscriptions and likely criminally violate copyright, it seems like it could have a very different outcome.
> publishers can't pursue those violations too severely
A decade ago the publishing system harassed a researcher because he was downloading too many papers, going after him for millions in copyright "damages," only stopping proceedings after he ended his own life.
Yes, and we still talk about him and that one case today, a decade later. It was also a case where circumstances around it (the 'breaking' into an unlocked cabinet, the 'hidden' laptop, the different university, the manifesto, and so on) all allowed the case to be presented as particularly bad by publishers and the government.
And that's the risk here, in part: this system allows the practice to be presented as a paid criminal enterprise, and allows individual users to be presented as criminal participants.
>Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.
To be somewhat more specific: while I travel extensively and am in the US often, I am often outside of it for more than a month at a time, and it appears that Google will shut off data outside the US if you use data outside the US for too long. If you are using a different SIM for the primary data connection, it appears that they won't even if you have it enabled as a backup.
My comparison here is actually that I've never had it shut off. I'm not quite sure what the criteria are. I do have a friend who had it cut off after a few months of using it for all his data in the EU.
If you have bright enough undergrads, you change the curriculum for them within their field of expertise, so that they still get the breadth of things outside it while not wasting time with things they know. You let them not take as many classes, take graduate courses, do more research, take more courses from other departments in related areas but with different perspectives, and so on.
When I was an undergrad, in physics, there was a professor in the department who had done his undergrad there and was legendary, as was quietly mentioned in awe, for not taking any undergraduate physics courses while there; the department had let him skip all of them, and instead take graduate courses and do research.