a_lieb (u/a_lieb) - Readit News

a_lieb commented on I started taking English classes at the age of 46 mxgrn.com/blog/english-cl... · Posted by u/homakov

mxgrn · 3 years ago

> either “I started” or “I am starting” not “I start.”

... And suddenly it seems so obvious! Thanks, fixed!

a_lieb · 3 years ago

To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."

a_lieb commented on BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff techcrunch.com/2022/12/01... · Posted by u/lxm

austenallred · 3 years ago

I love the idea of CIRR but it is largely a failed institution. Their measures have changed dramatically over the years (the last CIRR event anyone at BloomTech attended resulted in the notion that anyone who adds anything new on LinkedIn could be considered "hired," even if it was a portfolio project or self-employment), and are used very differently from school to school, resulting in every major school I know of stopping to work with them.

For example, we used them for our first outcomes report and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report, but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we sent them.

I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it falling apart.

The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their business model is selling leads to the schools, so the incentive isn't for objectivity there either.

Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask them about their experience.

a_lieb · 3 years ago

Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)

The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.

a_lieb commented on BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff techcrunch.com/2022/12/01... · Posted by u/lxm

MivLives · 3 years ago

I do not have this knowledge. There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?

My general advice is to get some one to try https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.

a_lieb · 3 years ago

> There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?

I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.

CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).

A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.

[1] https://cirr.org/

[2] https://www.coursereport.com/

a_lieb commented on David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR lithub.com/adventures-in-... · Posted by u/thnaks

Animats · 4 years ago

Oh, another philosopher discovers VR. I asked the people who moderate r/metaverse to create a tag, "MYFIRSTMETAVERSEARTICLE", for this sort of thing, and they did. I've read about a hundred such articles in the last three months. They're rather similar.

For a view from the other direction, "How to be a God", by Battle. This is a game dev who became an academic and spent too much time thinking about philosophy.

If you want some good metaverse questions to think about, here are a few, based on experience with mature systems such as Second Life.

* Games, like most forms of entertainment, must be interesting. So they have a much higher frequency of interesting events than people usually experience in real life. Much effort is expended in game design to make that happen. User-built virtual worlds, where the world itself is mostly passive, are more like real life. The frequency and density of interesting events is comparable to real life. That indicates the virtual world is doing a good job of simulating the real one. But it can be boring. It results in the standard Second Life new user question, "What do I do now?". The answer is "What do you want to do", which may lead to them being directed to an area where something that fits their interest is happening. But the world itself is indifferent to the players and does not try to engage them.

* How do we govern this thing? Almost everybody seems to assume the existence of some unchallengable authority. That is not only obnoxious, but has scaling problems. Second Life uses property rights to allow property owners to control much of what visitors can do on an owned parcel. This reduces the need for "moderators", who, in practice, are minimum wage workers in some outsourced call center. It's disappointing that democracy is out of fashion. The crypto people's idea of democracy is "one dollar, one vote". That lacks something.

* How "safe" does the virtual world have to be? Roblox takes a very hard line on this. Facebook claims to but has trouble delivering. Decentraland is too empty for it to matter. Second Life takes the position that they don't get involved with disputes between residents, and "safety", if desired, is the problem of the property owner.

* Are you your avatar, or are you puppeteering your avatar? This is a big issue in game design. If someone annoys your avatar, are they annoying you?

* What are we going to do about identity in virtual worlds? "Real Names"? Cross-system identities? Face recognition? Crypto wallets?

* How much of the user do we want to project into the virtual world? Typing only? Voice? Facial feature tracking? Full body tracking? All of those are available.

a_lieb · 4 years ago

To Chalmers' credit, he's been writing about this stuff at least back to 2003, when he had a paper called "The Matrix as Metaphysics" defending the idea that the claim that we're living in a simulation is not a skeptical hypothesis, and that such a world would be just as real, just one layer "in." (Probably not as wild of an idea now as it was back then.) Also a couple of other papers on VR since then and many on AI going back to 1990 [1].

[1] http://consc.net/ai-and-computation/

a_lieb commented on Lambda School lays off 65 employees lambdaschool.com/the-comm... · Posted by u/caust1c

rightsizing · 4 years ago

Never heard of a right-sizing before. The linguistic hurdles of execs will never cease to amaze me!

a_lieb · 4 years ago

"Rightsizing" is a weird one, because it's occasionally used for benign stuff like reducing the rate of hiring. Much like "enhanced interrogation techniques," the broader meaning provides shelter for what it's really used for most of the time.

a_lieb commented on Why Lichess will always be free lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQA... · Posted by u/hydroxideOH-

a_lieb · 4 years ago

Here's a business model for successful open-source projects—one that's already in use, but I think is rarely seen as a business model per se. I'd be interested to see if there's a blog post or the like about this already.

If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good demo work to show potential employers, etc.—then give a cut to cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance work.

There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra money from the project; say you've reached the point where the project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor.

If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people, consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing is a way to make an overall profit and still feel like you're giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built.

Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a good job and then continued to work in their spare time to maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen it described as an actual business model, where you can feel great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out ahead overall.

a_lieb commented on Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python mvanga.com/blog/basic-mus... · Posted by u/mvanga

codeulike · 4 years ago

This is great but if we could go back in time and influence the naming conventions so that the 12 semitones were called A-L or just numbered 1 to 12, and if the intervals were named after the actual semitone distance (a 'fifth' is actually seven semitones) the whole thing would be soooo much less jargonny. With all that bumf removed, the patterns of the 'scales' and 'chords' would be foregrounded and thats the actually interesting bit IMHO (the bit defined as 'formulas = {..}' in the article)

a_lieb · 4 years ago

Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no

There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1].

Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats.

It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc.

At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning.

[1] http://musicnotation.org/

a_lieb commented on Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blo... · Posted by u/azhenley

lysium · 5 years ago

While true, it would be reasonable to expect to have one single documentation that is sufficient, and not to have to resort to searching aka googling.

a_lieb · 5 years ago

For me it's simply a matter of convenience of searching; even pages with great and comprehensive docs can be hard to search. And the average is so poor that I often don't even bother to check if a particular project actually has a good search feature. If my search takes me to the actual doc page, (and it's good) then all the better!