l1silver (u/l1silver)

l1silver commented on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

gklitz · 10 months ago

Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation. It was always a cost saving measure because allocating 30min face to face time with each individual student for each class is such a gigantic cost for the institution that they cannot even imagine doing it. Think about that the next time you look at your student debt, it couldn’t even buy you 30min time per class individually with the teacher to evaluate your performance. Instead you had to waste more time on a written assignment so they could offload grading to a minimum wage assistent.

l1silver · 10 months ago

> Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation.

Could not disagree more. Researching, formulating arguments, can give a student a complete view of the subject that studying for tests misses. But, similarly to tests, it probably depends on the skill of the teacher in creating the right kind of written assignments.

l1silver commented on Meta plans to lay off 10k employees about.fb.com/news/2023/03... · Posted by u/darnfish

hylaride · 2 years ago

Free advice to future managers:

You don't need to write a novel with these. Also, writing an email about how you're going to can a bunch of people over the coming year and then droning on about how the results of that are going to be so much better (and insinuate that the current setup, which is 100% a management failure, was a poor setup) is insulting.

Also, this is a 2nd round barely 6 months after the first and it's going to happen over months. This will be great for morale and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably still very much in demand) to look elsewhere.

l1silver · 2 years ago

What if your A players are tired of carrying the load for the B and C players and cherish this news?

l1silver commented on Ask HN: Whatever Happened To Freelancing? · Posted by u/tHrOwAwAyXXX900

BigglesZX · 3 years ago

UK web dev freelancer here. I think it very much depends on the kind of organisations you want to work for. I went solo in 2016 as a self-employed person and never had any trouble accessing clients, who in my case are typically a mix of small digital agencies and small non-technical businesses with no in-house technical resource. I incorporated a company last year in order to firewall my work from my personal affairs, and you may find some companies that will only work with limited companies, but I haven't had that problem so far. If you want to work for big corporations I expect you will run into such issues or the problem you describe yourself. However it's definitely worth approaching different shapes/sizes of business. As another commenter mentioned, you should definitely be aware of the ramifications of the IR35 regulation as this will probably shape the sort of work available to you. Some people work with "umbrella companies" in order to be able to fit better within the constraints of IR35.

All told I've never looked back after ~7 years of doing this, and while job security can obviously be an issue, the comparative flexibility and freedom over your work/life balance etc more than makes up for it. Good luck!

l1silver · 3 years ago

Can I ask, what was your first step into freelance exactly? Was it working with a past client, or something else entirely?

l1silver commented on Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you mcsweeneys.net/articles/m... · Posted by u/rkachowski

sjducb · 3 years ago

The time between contracts is amazing. I spend loads of time with my kids and go on adventures.

I need to do about 4 months of work to cover my family's living expenses, then another 2 to make sure I've saved adequately for retirement, then ideally I take 6 months off.

l1silver · 3 years ago

Seriously? Do you live off grid or something?

l1silver commented on Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you mcsweeneys.net/articles/m... · Posted by u/rkachowski

gavinmckenzie · 3 years ago

Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where I spent 5 years, my overall feeling was “meh, I knew the end was nigh”. Since then I’ve been a contractor, and I couldn’t be happier. The relationship between me and my client is simple: I work, and they pay me. Sure there’s no stock option perks, but on the other hand I never have to deal with HR processes, submit quarterly objectives, etc. I work, I get paid. I know when the contract will end, and either the client renews the contract or I go somewhere else. It’s all fine.

For me, reducing my work life down to such a simple transactional level has been incredibly freeing and stress reducing, and allowed me to focus even more clearly on the work.

l1silver · 3 years ago

But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?

l1silver commented on Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go obsidian.md/mobile... · Posted by u/ericax

adkadskhj · 4 years ago

For anyone who follows Obsidian, have they approached the idea of spaced repetition or perhaps plugins for spaced repetition?

A big thing i want in a note taking tool is Spaced Repetition, but not _just_ that, more like a way to manage how much information i'm going to try and keep sync'd with my actual brain.

I'd love this system to monitor how much time i'm dedicating to it, and how much knowledge i'm able to retain in my brain based on available quiz time and retention rates (which would vary, i suppose).

I've often debated writing it myself but so many of these note taking tools achieve 90% of what i want, but miss the retention phase. I want to pour my knowledge into Obsidian, i just want some additional tools to help keep some subset in sync with my brain.

l1silver · 4 years ago

I know that there's a plugin for anki and youtube tutorial on setting it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXyv6pnVGhA . Haven't tried it myself but will probably give it a shot