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Semantic wars are unhelpful distractions. Focus on the issues.

No, he's right. The general public has no idea what "sideloading" even means, but they sure as shit would want to be able to load their own apps if they were asked about it. The terminology is meant to obfuscate the issue.

He's not right at all. It is not "part of the problem" to use a term that a poster here doesn't think accurately captures the issue. The only part of the problem is the corporations who are trying to take our rights away.

Also, I think you'll be quite disappointed in what the general public does or does not care about. The iPhone has always been even more locked down than Android and it sells like hotcakes. Even on Android only a tiny minority of users make use of the option to install third-party apps. I think the general public should care about this topic, but all evidence is to the contrary.


No, it's bikeshedding at it's worst. I almost think it's a deliberate psyop.

Most people don't know what sideloading is because most don't sideload and don't have a need for it.


Yes they are. Unhelpful distractions that are workshopped and focus grouped. Stop adopting the bizarre terminology of the enemy, and their goofy neologisms, and just talk about the issue in straightforward English.

We didn't need a different word for not being able to install an application on your phone without the permission of the company that made it. We needed a different word for the thing that was new, which is the company that makes the thing that you own refusing you permission to use it as you see fit.


I have a SAE level 2 car. Those features DO help!

Framing is crucial. Example, why was the Autonomous Emergency Braking configured to brake violently to a full stop? Lets consider two scenarios, in both cases we're not paying enough attention to the outside world and are about to strike a child on a bicycle but the AEB policy varies.

1. AEB brakes violently to a full stop. We experience shock and dismay. What happened? Oh, a kid on a bike I didn't see. I nearly fucked up bad, good job AEB

2. AEB smoothly slows the vehicle to prevent striking the bicycle, we gradually become aware of the bike and believe we had always known it was there and our decision eliminated risk, why even bother with stupid computer systems?

Humans are really bad at accepting that they fucked up, if you give them an opportunity to re-frame their experience as "I'm great, nothing could have gone wrong" that's what they prefer, so, to deliver the effective safety improvements you need to be firm about what happened and why it worked out OK.


Same. Not having to worry about keeping the car between the lines allows me to keep my focus on the other cars around me more. Offloading the cognitive load of fine tuning allows more dedication to the bigger picture.

This makes no sense to me. Driving involves all senses, not just vision - if you're not feeling what the car is doing because you're not engaged with the steering wheel what good is it to see what's around you? I also don't understand how one has trouble staying between the lines with minimal cognitive input after more than a few months of driving.

Oh! And also, moving within the lane is sometimes important for getting a better look at what's up ahead or behind you or expressing car "body language" that allows others to know you're probably going to change lanes soon.


I drive a VW with lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking. It won't change lanes for me, but aside from the requirements that I have my hands on the wheel, could otherwise drive itself on the highway.

I commute mainly on the highway about 45-1hr each way every day and it makes a big difference for driver fatigue. I was honestly a bit surprised. Even though, I'm steering, it requires less effort. I don't have my foot on the gas and I'm not having to adjust my speed constantly.

Critically, though, I do have to pay attention to my surroundings. It's not taking so much out of my driving that I can't stay engaged to what's happening around me.


I don't have personal experience but friends with personal experience have sort of shifted my thinking on the topic. They'll note they do need to stay engaged but that it is genuinely useful on long drives in particular. The control handover is definitely an issue but so is manual driving in general. Their consensus is that the current state of the art is by no means perfect but it is improved and it's not like there aren't problems with existing manual driving even with some assistive systems.

My car requires hands on the wheel to continue to operate. So I do feel it moving.

> I also don't understand how one has trouble staying between the lines with minimal cognitive input after more than a few months of driving.

Once you have something assist you with that, you'll notice how much "effort" you are actually putting towards it.


Texas is a big state. It’s lazy journalism to generalize the state as droughty, which is implied by that sentence.

Lake Texoma has been hovering by the “full” mark pretty consistently for over 55 years. Recently, its water level has significantly declined to—wait for it—100% full!

If you monitor water maps, the east half of Texas’s water supplies don’t often get far outside of “full”.

More data: https://www.waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/individual/texo...


Also the water doesn’t disappear from the universe. It either evaporates or is pumped back out. People who lose their minds over water have been saying for 50 years we were about to enter a desert world

Clean water does disappear. Not from universe bit from places you need it most. That there's plenty of it in the air or sea or Saturn rings, is little consolation.

These fabs don’t evaporate the water though, they use it as process water, and then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system.

Assuming the municipality recycles their wastewater, which they would do in any drought prone region, this water will become clean water again.

It’s essentially a closed system.


> then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system.

Are there PFAS chemicals in the semiconductor photoresist and then in the water?

Do municipal wastewater standards require removal of PFAS?

Similarly, they're all okay with dumping water used to wash out coal plants into the rivers: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+10%25+coal+plant+wash+...


> It’s essentially a closed system.

Source? Especially the claim that they are using external municipal wastewater treatment seems highly implausible, they are using nasty chemicals.


I read they either dump it into a local river while monitoring it or back to water treatment plant. Some datacenters have started reusing water but for some reason using it more than once is not appealing. Definitely the biggest problem is it’s not always a closed system and dumping it into a river potentially damages the river and makes the area lose their water. A percentage of the water is also lost via evaporation.

Source: https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/


Datacenters and fabs are different things.

It’s definitely not a closed system unless the water from the waste water treatment plant is pumped back upstream of the source of the municipal water which is not how most of these work.

guy has never seen 'Waterworld'

You should definitely bring this attitude into the housing affordability discussion - remind people that they indeed can find cheap housing in rural Africa.

The Aral Sea says otherwise.

Do you really think that that's what the authors were thinking? You can't accuse people of not using their brains when you haven't engaged yours.

Also you seem to be unaware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting


Would you believe both Dull Men's Club groups were created by Americans?

No kidding.

The one with the registered-trademark symbol--a Nebraskan who moved to the UK.

The other one--a Texan.


I cannot think of anything better than a 99% dull feed.

Part of the point of DMC content is a solace from everyday stressors. That's a factor in why divisive topics--politics, religion, etc.--are discouraged when "main points" of a post.


Some of these are _pages_ that post content stolen from "dull" groups or from other groups that are thematically not far off, like Aldi fan groups. As your view includes pages that are just mass-theft operations seeking Facebook payouts, you have selection bias.


> Personally I see the name as more a jokey play on the stereotype of boring middle aged men who find such things interesting.

#nailedit


There are two Dull Men's Clubs on Facebook. This article covers both.

Both have around 1.8M members. The smaller one features Andrew McKean, the main topic of that article. The other one--with the registered trademark symbol in the name on FB--appears to be more of a commercial enterprise, run by the Grover Click character.

I learned that the article is wrong on a point. All contemporary Dull Men's Clubs are copycats. The original is from 1980 and no longer exists.


If the test is good, then “teaching to the test” is desirable.


The problem with standardized testing in education is the following question: standardized for who?[0]

The ultimate "sin", if you will, is that they tied test outcomes to funding and in practice is used to hold teachers to an arbitrary standard, not to help understand and guide the learning for students.

For example, what could be done with standardized tests is that schools could use them at regular intervals to understand where each student is at, and adjust their learning resources accordingly to help students that aren't at grade level reach appropriate grade level academically, like if a student tests poorly in Math but not English Comprehension, it would make sense to adjust their schedule to give them more time to learn what they're struggling with and assigning resources appropriately, be it an extra half hour of math learning time with a tutor. That would actually make them useful.

Instead, they're used to bludgeon teachers and school districts, and really the student outcomes are at best secondary to the whole operation, and since so much critical funding comes from sources tied to these outcomes, both good and bad outcomes mind you, hence the reason for the deliberate bell curve. Thats the real issue.

In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes

[0]: Not to mention that the pace of learning and aptitudes is varied by individual, some students will excel in X but not Y. This is a related, but for the purpose of this discussion, separate issue. Not to mention how much environment plays a role (a good home vs bad home situation for example).


>In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes

I.e. exactly what those pesky naysayers decades ago said would happen eventually.


This nuance becomes reasonable in high school / college. For elementary schoolers, it's actually a great binary. Can you do two-digit addition or not is a pretty straightforwards question? Same with... can you identify grammar errors in this English sentence? Binary questions.

The assessments to guide student learning are not the standardize tests meant to measure school performance and do state-level planning


Have we found an exception to Goodhart's Law?

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is good."


I don't think so. You can still teach to a good test badly. For example: reading a variety of books and letting people do more on their own would be would be better overall than reading just things on the level of the test, asking just the test style questions and spending time learning the answering style to get 100%.

It's kind of like those articles about young kids passing IT certifications. Those tests are reasonably good, but those kids just memorised lots of material and never actually worked as, for example, a networking engineer.

Or like in IELTS style language test you can easily score higher (even than a native English speaker) if you learn the format enough.


… so if the test is good …

Reading is such a basic skill it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to come up with a decent test.


"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is something basic, like teaching reading"?

Has the last twenty years of teaching to the test proven that out?


'Teaching to the test' has not caused the drop in literacy. Rather, it's teaching reading using bizarre methods, like whole word recognition instead of phonics. This has nothing to do with 'teaching to the test', since phonics would teach more to the test than whole word anything. A phonetically competent adult would be able to make out almost any English word. A whole word one would not.


"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, unless the teacher is poor"?


This 'truth' is not always true. For binary questions, teaching to measure makes sense


Unfortunately, "is someone literate" is not a binary question. There's a whole range of possible answers there.


Is there a way to teach reading, which increases reading test scores, that is bad? I’m having a hard time imagining what that would look like. Just because someone comes up with a pithy saying that some people call a “law” doesn’t make it a universal truth.


you trying to establish some sort of measure for Goodhart's law?


The test is never that good.


In education, nothing is ever good enough.


This is my take: the real issue with education in the US goes back to trying to square two ideals.

One is the meritocracy[0]. I believe that No Child Left Behind Act was sold to the public as a way to promote meritocracy in education and having some reasonably unbiased[1] way of doing so. The foundation of which is a way for parents to hold institutions responsible much more easily[2][3]

The other is social and political stratification. This isn't merit based. Good examples of this would be the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the formerly legal practice of segregation by race, the drawing school district lines that keep students of wealthy parents away from folks who come from less economically advantaged backgrounds and enforcing this with district based school eligibility and funding.

These two don't exactly square very well. Which is why the top level idea sold to the public - meritocracy - is used to sell these policies, but in practice they are using it to pull levers to further political and social stratification.

[0]: Americans generally have a positive view of the term. I personally believe that most people don't have a proper understanding of the term to begin with, nor conceive what issues it could have in practice if they were given it.

[1]: Leaving out the other half of the narrative, which is how much macro and micro levels of a students environment will influence how well they learn.

[2]: Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.

[3]: Not to mention, it completely ignores micro and macro issues that students can have, be it poverty, domestic issues, systemic issues and a whole host of other things.


> Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.

in practice, republicans are perfectly happy with public schools when the schools are are "good enough" for their kids. so this caricature seems incorrect. there's a lot wrong with USA public schools, so something must be done. some very not-for-profit voucher schools have been doing excellent work where the public school systens have utterly failed, for example green dot animo in inglewood, or, dramatically, green dot locke in watts.

what is not a caricature: the vast majority of policymakers who want to keep status quo in the public school system send their kids to private schools.


> Republicans

Short hand for 'elected officials of the republican party', which have been systematically targeting public education for decades


you can make an evidenced argument that elected officials of the Democratic party have been systematically destroying public education for decades (for example cancelling algebra in California, repeat child abusers not let go in LAUSD, see "mark berndt" for an example of a multidecade offender that bounced between schools)

really, Republicans arent helping, but they arent necessary to destroy American schools thats happening just fine in ~one-party democrat states like California and hawaii.


Republicans are not perfectly happy when public schools are good enough ... they seek to defund them and vilify them anyway. Their complains have very little to do with reality of those schools and a lot to do with the project of privatization. Plus, you see conservatives who send their kids to private schools or home school to attack libraries in public schools.


No, that's simply not true. You can very easily overfit even good metrics.


that's a downright ponderous conditional at the beginning of this comment


Phony. He’s just clinging to power.


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