Readit NewsAt least in the UK graduates from prestigious universities can get good jobs. Where I'm from (Italy) even that is seen as crazy
caldarons commented on Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark theprivacydad.com/final-d... · Posted by u/kawsper
Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy.
The amount of incompetence is beyond reason.
My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard.
Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class.
I will honestly prefer to just ban all tech from schools.
As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea.
In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.
Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.
Now, some of these issues (like bad professors, smart kids getting bored because of slow pace of lessons) have always been present in every school all over the world but I do think that having tech in the classroom just makes things worse, as now even those who would have normally followed the lesson are tempted to just turn on their computer and pretend to take notes when really they are playing Candy crush. It's bad enough being a teenager and being bombarded with stimuli from your phone and social media, having that kind of distraction at school just makes things even worse.
So yeah, I think tech in school is one of those things that sounds great but usually just back-fires in spectacular ways (imho).
Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions.
I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper.
You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the business, the consumer ultimately pays for it in higher prices. Heck, people pay transaction fees on payments they make the to government because the government won’t take cash.
Do we really need to make not paying invisible fees in everything illegal? Seems crazy.
maybe we should start thinking of payment infrastructure as a core public service if we move away from cash? Just like there is an official entity that can "print" cash, we should start doing the same with digital payments (I believe the EU is doing somethig similar). That way you don't have a duopoly taking a cut of every transaction.
caldarons commented on Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
Kagi and DuckDuckGo are viable search engines! Often as good as google, sometimes better given all the SEO spam!
I would also add Brave search. It returns decent results and has a very nice way of displaying reddit posts relevant to the search (saves you from having to type reddit at the end of the query :) )
caldarons commented on When gradient descent is a kernel method cgad.ski/blog/when-gradie... · Posted by u/cgadski
What is a kernel method? I know what an operating system kernel is. I know what the kernel of a homomorphism is. I have taken courses in computational statistics and neural networks. Yet I’ve never encountered this use of the word kernel, which the article unhelpfully does not define (yet is critically based on). Googling for kernel didn’t help either, because the term is extremely overloaded.
Can someone help?
My parents grew up in small villages that are adjacent to one of these ancient roads (via Tiburtina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Tiburtina) and the road basically still exists as a modern road.
I remember driving near Pescara with my parents in the 1990s--they had not been back to Italy in 35+ years and they were trying to find their way back to their home towns.
We stopped the car on the side of a main road and asked a woman who was walking, "Dov'e' la Tiburtina?" (where is the Tiburtina?).
The woman responded... "QUEST'E' la Tiburtina!" (This is the Tiburtina).