Exactly. It's hard to get excited about a technology that in theory could provide huge benefits for all, but because of our economic system there is a good chance that the majority of the benefits go to a few and many people will actually be losers.
I am believing more that with advances in AI and then also robotics the capitalist system as we know it will break. The question is what comes next.
One of the more disappointing gaming experiences I've had in my life was realizing that the core loop in this game basically boiled down to the proportion of zones to each other.
Everything else, all of the other settings, all of the other proportions like schools or police or whatever, doesn't matter. All window dressing. Bummer.
Technically you must balance the population and jobs numbers rather than the number of zoned tiles, but that is only one step away. Most of the challenge becomes maintaining the balance as the density of your zones changes over time.
Cities: Skylines has a much more interesting simulation, but if you examine the CPU requirements you can easily imagine why Maxis didn’t take the same approach until 2013.
Ah, nostalgia. I was a LORD man myself. One of my good friends from the BBS scene in my hometown (412/724) had a Telnet/SSH instance of LORD that ran for a good decade plus.
Same here, I played a lot of LORD! Only a little bit of BRE. Incidentally the author of LORD Seth Robinson continues making games long after LORD. I think he’s semiretired now but he has been working on an ai-coded photoshop clone https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy
Alright, I’m going to try to weigh in on this subject in good faith. Wish me luck!
I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and attended a very good public school. I had friends who lived only ten or fifteen minutes away but attended schools that were substantially worse by nearly every measurable standard. How should a university compare our applications on an apples-to-apples basis?
Some people would say, “Just use standardized test scores.” And sure, those can be part of the equation. But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education. The list goes on. How exactly should those advantages be measured? Is it a university’s job to account for them?
Others may disagree, but if I were on a university admissions team, I would say that it is...at least to some extent. I wouldn’t want a completely homogeneous student body. I would want every admitted student to clear a reasonable academic floor, but beyond that, I would value diversity in backgrounds, opinions, interests, intended majors, and life experiences.
In my opinion, the issue is much more complicated than people often make it out to be, and I don’t personally believe there is some vast liberal boogeyman behind it. I don’t think the process is perfectly fair to everyone, nor do I think perfect fairness is possible in the first place. But I also don’t automatically agree that it is wrong for universities to try -- however imperfectly or ham-fistedly they might do it -- to understand the broader context in which an application was submitted.
> But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education...Is it a university’s job to account for [my advantages]?
I would argue: no. There are always applicants with even more advantages than you, and those with fewer.
Standardized tests level the playing field IMO. Money can only help you so much. Talent and hard work become the dominant factors.
Mommy and daddy can't pay for expensive hobbies, finagle unpaid internships at prestigious non-profits, or anything else. Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding. Think Leetcode: how much does coaching help a SWE vs just being good at coding and solving 2000 problems?
Now you may say: under-privileged students often have less stable home environments. So they have less time to grind problems. This is true. But it's also true for admissions as they're done today. They have less time, money, and opportunities for hobbies, volunteer work, sports, and internships. They can't hire essay coaches or admissions consultants.
Thrusting students into a more challenging academic environment than their current demonstrated abilities merit doesn't help anyone. On the other hand if poorer students can demonstrate merit without spending much money, just by writing a single test, this is as egalitarian as possible.
> Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding...
Eh, not so sure. My son got a 32 on the ACT the first time he took it, and after 4 months of private tutoring got a 35, with 36 on math. Could he have grinded himself and got there? Possibly, but I doubt it. Having someone who knows what they're doing and holding him accountable was invaluable.
You know your son well enough to say he wouldn't have done the grind by himself. But that's not the same as proving that coaching is always superior to grinding. Or that a motivated grinder can't beat a less motivated tutored student.
Why does it matter? How deep do you want to go to hunt for advantages? Are there no other places than Ivy League schools where one not so advantaged can get an education? Do you want the doctor saving the life of your loved one be the most qualified or one who ticked the disadvantaged boxes?
I suppose I just disagree that someone from a less affluent or privileged than me with got a 1400 SAT is less qualified than me (1510) simply because one number is larger than the other. These numbers don't exist in a vacuum.
Unfortunately as much as we love the idea of rewarding merit, it isn't actually "fair" in the truest sense of the word. Because everyone is born into different conditions, no one ever has the same opportunities, so you may be more capable than someone else through no fault of your own. Choosing the worse educated out of identically scoring students is one of the few times we decide to tip the scales. Unfortunately again good employment opportunities feel like a zero sum game right now.
OK but what would your goal there be? What do you think an existing admissions team's goal is in various different universities? What if some desire to build an elite club but can't say it on record? And is that such a bad thing?
I have a lot of deep ambivalence here. On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.
On the other hand, the "the ends justifies the means" justification of the near constant erosion of civil liberties and due process is really, really concerning. And I do not trust, at all, the Rand-lite tech bro sociopaths or anyone in the Trump administration to do the right thing.
Our country is less safe because the people behind these technology companies have brought us to a place where NATO allies do not trust us, and we are implicated in war crimes facilitated by these technology companies.
Interesting claims in this article that direcly conflict with Palantir publicly calling for universal conscription. If AI and robotics are going to keep people off the front lines, why would we need the draft?
> On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.
To what extent does waging war contribute to increasing the safety of Americans? Every war the United States has started since WWII against another country has not been a defensive war, but an invasion by the U.S. itself. The United States has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. It has also become clear that even the world’s best military is no match for a large-scale psychological operation.
Be careful with dreams of superiority, those tend to make the other guy convinced you'll attack as soon as the gap gets wide enough and make them spend even more to "catch up".
A few rounds of this and eventually both sides have worked themselves into a frenzy to motivate buying excessive amounts of weapons, and then finally something trivial makes someone important "that's it, that was the thing we got the guns for" and a few billion dollars in weapons go up in smoke along with some hundreds of human lives (if everything goes well).
The question on is whether what’s happening right now is actually keeping Americans safe. I feel we are moving more and more towards accepting normalizing using military power by powerful nations. I am sure China is watching closely what’s going on and may feel encouraged to move on Taiwan. Once that happens, things will get really interesting.
Do you think there is an acceptable third option between "the globalists winning" and "it is OK for a single media outlet to wage a war on the grieving parents of the victims of a mass murder"?
My comment was just a silly joke, reusing some of Jones phrasing. I never fully grasped who "the globalists" were in his mind, and why they were seemingly behind everything he dislikes, but I always found if funny. I'm just happy he lost his platform, and I find the Onion's piece rather amusing.
I thought I could add to it with this dumb joke but I forgot about the fact that Jones still has a sizeable following, and it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is just kidding or an insane lunatic. I'm in the former camp (I hope).
I agree with this, but it's also true that Tesler was a difficult, argumentative blocker and dinosaur at Yahoo! in the mid-2000s. The upper management there blew such massive opportunities, over and over and over again.
Simple, functional design. Obviously not...quite the intended use of the HTML table elements, but ah well, that era was fun. Tables and image maps and transparent GIFs!
No, no, no. Having to navigate back to look at the next section of relatively short text (i.e. browsing through the MIR modules) was a painful gimmick. It broke your flow and was generally annoying.
An image map at the top with paragraphs for each section below, and an in-line text link back to the image map would have sufficed. People were still figuring this stuff out at the time.
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