Saturday, September 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 September 2024

Apple Pie And Mice Cream Edition

Top Story

  • College grades have become a charade.  It's time to abolish them.  (MSN)

    The colleges?  Sounds good to me.
    If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves and to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.
    All true, if somewhat less daring than I had hoped.

    The proposal is that every course be reduced to pass/fail.  Which is better than the current situation, but doesn't actually fix the problem.

    I like my plan better.


Tech News

  • Threads is full of exactly the sort of tiresome idiots you mute on Twitter.  (Werd)

    Full of them.

    Thank you for your service, Facebook.  You truly took one for the team.


  • Cisco has warned that there is a backdoor admin account in its own license managing tool.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The tool Cisco provides to manage your software licenses for the hardware you bought from Cisco also allows anyone nearby to break into your network.  If you're dumb enough to leave the license manager open to the internet, you're toast.

    (And there are lots of people who are exactly that dumb.  They post on Threads.)


  • Godot - an open source library for game developers - desperately hoped that Unity wouldn't commit suicide.  (Game Developer)

    As we covered at the time, Unity did indeed commit suicide, implementing a new payment structure that could easily cost more than 100% of a game's revenue.

    Godot is one of Unity's main competitors, but it is a less polished library built by a smaller team, so taking on all those developers fleeing Unity was going to be a struggle, and they knew it.

    Makes me like the Godot team all the more.

    (Also, it's officially pronounced however you want.)


  • Lenovo's latest Thinkpad Carbon X1 (Gen 13) is almost a good laptop.  (Liliputing)

    Well, it is a good laptop (though not a cheap one).  Intel's latest Lunar Lake CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 14" 2880x1800 OLED display.  Those screens are great.

    And it has the Four Essential Keys.  Not in my preferred arrangement, but they are all there.

    And it weighs less than 1kg.

    What's not to like?

    Two things: First, pricing starts at $1999.  This is not in the same ZIP code as cheap.

    Second, Lunar Lake.  Apart from the fact that you cannot upgrade the RAM, ever, it is not all that fast.  We haven't seen the numbers yet, but with just four P cores and four E cores, and no hyper-threading, even if its single-core performance is extraordinary it is unlikely to outperform a four year old Ryzen 5800U for multi-threaded tasks.

    And I already have a four year old Ryzen 5800U.  Well, the very slightly updated 7730U, but it's the same silicon.


  • Google is now facing another antitrust case, this time in the online advertising market.  (The Verge)

    This is the gold standard of "let's you and him fight".


  • An AI company's misconfigured server exposed 5TB of patient mental health records.  (HackRead)

    This includes full patient identification - names, addresses, drivers licenses, insurance information; medical records including health conditions, family histories, and traumatic experiences; test results and prescription medications; and audio and video recordings of therapy sessions.

    All sitting on a server connected directly to the internet without a password.

    This is the worst security fuckup I have ever seen.  Whether the data was stolen is unknown - it was discovered by a security researcher - and will not be known unless or until the data starts circulating on the Dark Web.


  • Sony's $100 million woke flop Concord is now deceased, having failed to reach 1000 players in the entire world in the ten days since release.

    Meanwhile Valve's competing game Deadlock, which you cannot buy, has had zero advertising, and has not even been announced yet, has over 170,000 players.  (Tweaktown)

    All you need to do is not actively hate your customers.



Disclaimer: Or even put up a good pretense.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:42 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 729 words, total size 7 kb.

1 I'm really salty about the "Let's get rid of grades" talk. 

Critical theory and applied mathematics have been in a quiet feud over theory in the office politics of many universities for a while.  The critical theorists say that math is racist, and keep on giving the math faculty 'suggestions' of how to 'improve' their teaching.  The math people know that the homeworks are kinda useful for them, and that the critical theorists may be disparately influencing women and blacks out of the math programs. 

'Grades are racist' has been pushed a while.  It is crap. 

The utility of engineering degrees is already potentially ready to crash, simply from all the fucking around the critical theorists and the behavioralists have been doing.  Pass/fail grading could simply make visible an already fundamentally broken situation. 

Shutting down the tertiary schools might be correct.

I'm somewhat in favor of simply dismembering all the universities, and making all fields have their own separate isolated schools, to succeed or fail only on the merits of that field. 

The Feds also need to stop issuing student loans. 

What's the positive?   The vast wealth of information available almost makes is possible to just self study for the first engineering degree.

When I am irritated and insomniac, the only question I have in school reform is exactly how many people do we hang.

When I am saner, and chill I have more specific policy deck chair shuffling to propose. 

Kamala Harris is not that obviously deficient compared to some of the idiots who think they have done a great job in the strategic management of universities. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 07 2024 08:45 PM (rcPLc)

2 Mental health - if any of those therapy sessions involved the same stuff a gal I was secondhand acquainted with, then they will be appearing on some porn sites.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, September 07 2024 08:55 PM (+i6Xr)

3 "AI healthcare firm Confident Health"
I would pray that the Lord will save us, but it seems we're already in hell.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 08 2024 09:01 AM (bg2DR)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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