I saw a lot of articles making a big deal about the enrollment dip in CS at Berkeley. All of them came to the conclusion that it was a demand side issue. But this article actually looked at the data and calls out something I haven't seen anywhere else:
That Berkeley cut the number of people they are admitting to the CS major significantly, mostly due to $80/hr rate negotiated by the TAs.
Applications to the CS program are at an all time high. I thought it was an interesting counterpoint to the doom and gloom about AI making people not want to study computer science anymore.
(And I don't fault the TAs for negotiating that rate -- here in the Bay Area it's pretty much necessary to afford housing, and still less than they would get working outside the University)
This is very old. Since then, the two authors of the blog post have started a company using the principles of their research to create an open source library and commercial product that brings reliability to all software, especially AI agents:
Stories like this are what make people not want to use Linux. We have a printer, and it just works with our Macs. It's been about 10 years since "printers don't work" has applied in my house. The only hard part is remembering the magic buttons in iOS, but that's more of a UX problem than a printer problem.
My stance encompasses more than software issues. Ink, jams, and software issues are my gripes. We find we only print about once a quarter so it’s not worth the hassle. I can run into FedEx and be out in less than 5 minutes. If we found a need of more frequent printing, maybe when my kid is older/doing homework, then I may adjust my opinion for that time span.
I probably accept about 50% of its suggestions for improvements.
Sometimes it finds "misspellings" where I wrote a correctly spelled word but not the one I intended, because it understands context. Sometimes it legitimately makes the sentence clearer.
And sometimes its suggestion turns the message from a warm and friendly email into a cold strictly-business email. Those are the ones I usually ignore.
Security 101 when changing the email of an account for any reason: email the old account and let it know the change happened.
The weird thing is I know the Instagram security team, and they are top notch. I have a feeling this was vibe coded by someone outside of security and security wasn't looped in.
Someone high up said something along the lines that they want to see some progress and someone down below looking for a promotion pushed this. This has always been happening but I think before it was more difficult to justify something like this as one would have needed to show the results of an algorithm, now it's easier to convince someone higher up that AI will solve it no worries
The security team at any organization is always considered an enemy to product and innovation. It wouldn't be surprising if management made it impossible for them to put in place the monitoring necessary to know this was happening. Especially at somewhere whose motto is "move fast and break things".
Important tech people on HN seem to be surrounded by technical excellence while the user data leaks and other sociological externalities happen to trail all the nearby paths.
When you search for a service you get the current status and you get the option to report a problem.
The minimal you expect from such a service is to keep track of how many % of users are searching also reports an error. There might of course still be errors but that alone surely can't be it. But please correct me if I'm wrong.
That test was totally inaccurate for me. It got the download right but upload was only 1/12 of my rated speed and 1/12 of what all the other tests (and my actual experience) tell me.
Fast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it.
Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
Fast is a Netflix product so the fact that you've even heard of it is in direct relation to the weight of the brand that launched it.
speedtest.net has been the first search result on Google for "speed test" for decades. Partly the boost of domain SEO and partly the boost of it being an effective exit node for searches for that term for that long.
(Nobody searches "ookla" and nobody is going to search your tier-3 .com)
I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Especially the way he talks about Los Angeles.
"Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States."
" First and foremost, cultural substance. But don’t forget that there’s a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don’t have this factory in the Bronx. You don’t have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamor of Hollywood, that’s what I don’t mean. But serious art — all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It’s a place where you consume culture, New York. It’s generated, in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays — not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians. Also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it’s grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already, and it’s going to be big. You see, I’m the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it, nobody notices it, and it’s wonderful to articulate it now."
> Fifty-four tightly clustered, slanted oil wells — the last of the Salt Lake Oil Field — sit snuggly between Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and San Vicente Boulevard. In fact, the Beverly Center’s odd, curved footprint is designed to accommodate the drilling site, which is hidden by a wall along the street. The wells are almost completely invisible, dwarfed by the mammoth mall and the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across the street — the hospital where I was born and where I later dropped my friend off to meet his wife for an ultrasound appointment.
I always enjoy hearing from him because he’s so unorthodox and I never have any idea the approach he’s going to take when giving an interview or answering a question.
And I always feel the need to point out that Grizzly Man was a truly good movie. I’d heard about it for years and based on the premise expected to have a low brow appeal, something for dumb people to feel superior to someone. But no, it was a respectful and in-depth character study (with some downright poetic narration) and probably Herzog’s best movie.
something for dumb people to feel superior to someone.
Herzog has some common themes that he likes to talk about in interviews. One is that "the poet must not avert his eyes". One meaning he gives to this statement is that he takes tv programs like "here comes honey booboo" or "the Anna Nicole Smith show" seriously, because it is a product of our society, even if it seems exploitative in some way.
What I'm getting at is, if he takes exploitative reality TV in good faith, of course he makes his films in good faith with relation to his subject.
If you want to see the extent of his respectfulness and depth, with his courage for self-analysis added on top, My Best Fiend would be my choice. It's a documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, who was a pretty unhinged actor. It's fascinating to watch Herzog hold his own with Kinski, and to observe the strange mental space Herzog is in, somewhere between crystal-clear vision and complete madness.
Watched it. It reads interesting indeed. Makes me suspect that, at least during the Fitzcarraldo period, Herzog might’ve thought misery was valuable or even necessary to good filmmaking - misery in the form of stunts and geographic setting, and misery in the form of lead actor’s personality.
Best part of My Best Fiend was Herzog’s own thoughts (soliloquy?) on nature and the jungle itself. Those bits were some pure solid gold Herzog.
That Berkeley cut the number of people they are admitting to the CS major significantly, mostly due to $80/hr rate negotiated by the TAs.
Applications to the CS program are at an all time high. I thought it was an interesting counterpoint to the doom and gloom about AI making people not want to study computer science anymore.
(And I don't fault the TAs for negotiating that rate -- here in the Bay Area it's pretty much necessary to afford housing, and still less than they would get working outside the University)
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