walledstance (u/walledstance)

walledstance commented on How to write in Cuneiform openculture.com/2025/09/h... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

DecoPerson · 2 months ago

Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be:

    How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World

The added word being: KNOWN

You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards.

I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which one, unfortunately), and the author wrote a preface that said something along the lines of "Everything in this book is based on the published information I could discover during my research period of April to September 1999. I have chosen to write in absolutes--stating many things as certain and clear--but in reality there is still much we do not know about this time period. No history author should say their writing is fact and any good historian will make it clear that their work is composed of assumptions layered on assumptions. Please read these works with this in mind."

If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!

walledstance · 2 months ago

This is a good hill to die on. I’m a middle school teacher and explain this concept often to my class. I explain that what I say now is what we know, yet these ideas can and do change, so keep this in mind as you continue your education.

walledstance commented on FCC Chair Brendan Carr is letting ISPs merge–as long as they end DEI programs arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/rntn

wkat4242 · 7 months ago

We don't do any of that. Our DEI program is just about training for hiring managers to recognise bias.

Also, DEI is about giving people with special needs the things they require to function. And providing managers insights into the things they might struggle with. We do information packs about LGBT, different religions etc just so managers understand and can accommodate. We have resource networks for managers (and really, all employees) that have questions about such things. We organise awareness events about LGBT and minority topics so employees can learn from each other and create a better understanding. And it works. It's not just about hiring but also creating better awareness for existing employees.

We do look at numbers to guage how we're doing but nobody is being penalised. If we have very few minorities compared to the local demographics it just means our trainings are not getting heard properly and we need to improve them.

I would go as far as to say that a company that has strict quotas doesn't really care about DEI. They just want a quick fix. This is not how these things work. You're working with people, not numbers.

What bothers me the most is that the Trump administration is even trying to force foreign companies like my employer to abandon DEI programs. It's none of their business what we do in the EU. We like what we do and we're not going to change. They cherrypick a few bad examples and pretend everyone works like that.

walledstance · 7 months ago

Thank you for your perspective. Sometimes I think, in our data filled world, we overestimate numbers even when disparaging something. Refocusing on the people is an important reminder that numbers matter a little less than we think.

walledstance commented on Google’s two-year frenzy to catch up with OpenAI wired.com/story/google-op... · Posted by u/totaldude87

mmasu · 9 months ago

I have a question for you - is it their choice not to have social media, or yours? Neither is bad - I’m father to a young girl (not school age yet) and am starting to think about how I should approach this as a parent

walledstance · 9 months ago

I’m interested in this answer as well, since I have a little who isn’t school aged either. I’m trying to compile perspectives to make this same decision.

walledstance commented on Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete autodidacts.io/troublesho... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

sjsdaiuasgdia · 10 months ago

I think you may be leaning too far in the other direction.

I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. Every job I've had across 3 decades, regardless of my actual title or formal responsibilities, I'm the firefighter. People call me when they can't figure something out. People call me when something big breaks and needs to be fixed urgently. Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering and not making any progress because they can't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag.

I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. When I nearly left a prior employer because much of the work wasn't aligned with what I wanted to do, management created a new role with better aligned work and higher pay to convince me to stay. In my current role, I'm very happy with my salary, working environment, management, and team.

I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills. I wouldn't need to help out nearly as many people because they could handle their own crises.

walledstance · 10 months ago

Wonderful description. Thank you for capturing a snap shot that conveys the power of troubleshooting.

walledstance commented on I am starting an AI+Education company twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bilsbie

elliotbnvl · a year ago

Learning stuff is secondary? Found your problem.

School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function as daycare...

School should be (and used to be) about learning to learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely abandoned.

walledstance · a year ago

“It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society.”

Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.

You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the weirdos, etc.

What are our political parties other than massive cliches?

Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly any other place you go.

Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.

Popular kids you need look no further than influencers, movie stares, etc.

The weirdos are anyone that doesn’t fit into our cliches.

Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society is also an artificial environment.

The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool, highschool never left us.

walledstance commented on I am starting an AI+Education company twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bilsbie

moffers · a year ago

I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive technologies. Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. If this approach to education works, would we be able to have every teacher in every school in America adopt it? I have to imagine the resources needed to train the teachers, distribute the technology, acclimate the parents, and then do this all on a scale such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb.

I think a lot of the real issues with solving problems in education is that they have trouble applying to the larger picture of compulsory education.

walledstance · a year ago

Whew! Yes. Education is allergic to disruption because education shouldn’t be treated like a business.

Educational goals are to educate people not make money. Education requires countless failures. Business models are composed to be failure averse or reduce risk.

Education has and will likely continue to be a money and time sink because it is an area that requires constant failure from its participants to grow in knowledge.

Thank you for setting this.

walledstance commented on I am starting an AI+Education company twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bilsbie

walledstance · a year ago

Anecdotal, yet lived experience collected from 150+ people across my district and state while at different training and seminar events. I am a teacher with 10 years in elementary, middle school and college classrooms. I have teacher friends from across the district and state I live in who resonate these ideas displayed below. 1. Behavior is a major obstacle for any classroom 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments

1. Behavior:

From my experiences and in speaking to others, teaching any subject varies not because of the material, but the behavior. When behavior is a problem no teaching, no matter who or what is doing it will get done. Behaviors can range from sleeping in class because dad made you work at his out of home construction company till 2 or 3 am to get a project complete, or it could be your mom is tired of you going to school and instead wants you to “go hit up them streets because that’s where the real motion (money) at.” These two might sound like isolated cases, but they aren’t. There are many kids who live out of cars, sell themselves to get buy and other atrocious life circumstances. Learning usually can’t happen when you’re preoccupied with keeping yourself alive or afloat. Combining AI into the educational landscape can’t and won’t fix this disinterest in learning. You will have to fix home life first. The problems arise because behaviors, in the classroom, work on a spectrum. They are better some days and others not at all. This is because behavior follows home life. It is usually modeled from home and then is acted out away from home. When Nathan (name changed) see his brother and brothers friends carrying around guns, drugs, insert something other activity not safe for most students, he will naturally mirror the act. When these behaviors present in class, a good teacher can maneuver a class back into an educational focus. But being a good teacher requires many exhausting abilities such as knowing the current generations lingo, figuring out who is a natural leader in class, who are the other kids afraid of or respect, knowing their material and presenting it to the students in a way that fits their life circumstances. Being good at teaching is a multi-headed venture across multiple disciplines. This makes managing behaviors in class a challenging and exhaustive time sink, which tends to be the main issue with teaching being interrupted or difficult in a class. One child from a difficult place can make learning a challenge for a class full of goody-two-shoes. Teachers are unnecessarily pulled away because we have no other recourse but to handle and teach children who need more support than what can be offered in a class. Behavior is one of the main issues that many people overlook.

2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want:

When I sign into my Microsoft portal I am presented with more 3rd party teaching tools than I could ever want. I use none of them because they are yet another tool to learn and be trained on, they help mostly in presenting educational material, but have nothing to do with the flow and behavior management of class, they have their own technical problems that I don’t have time to deal with because behind my back Timothy has begun passing his shoe around the room for others to sniff, and the applications are gamified learning that trivializes or simplifies the educational materials. There are many more reasons I and most of the teachers I know and have met don’t use these systems. Work with teachers to learn how much teaching environments vary and how we can implement tech tools into that classroom in a way that prioritizes education. But know many teacher’s priorities will not be for VC attention, but because we want to educate student into society. Listening to us gives you the opportunity to hear and see what educating people is actually like rather than the inert surveys and data points collected on students that are disconnected from their lives experiences. Listening to the people with boots on the classroom means possibly making a system that actually does something for classes than just become another novelty the principal and the district can feel good about.

3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments:

Diane Ravitch, a leading thinker in the education realm, writes about all the changes she has been a part of and seen occur. In the end, her response to these failed reforms in school is that much of what happens in communities controls what occurs in schools. If you have a society that is splintered into social groups then that will typically be reflected in the classroom. First we must adjust society standards which will then alleviate the malignant issues in our schools. But as many teachers have said to principles and school officials, “Hey, what do I know, I’m just a teacher.”

walledstance commented on Nobody knows what's going on raptitude.com/2024/06/nob... · Posted by u/herbertl

randomdata · 2 years ago

Keep in mind that people don't talk about that which they believe they completely understand. When someone reaches a satisfiable conclusion in understanding, they lose interest in the subject and move on to something else.

The political discourse around polarizing topics isn't disastrous. It takes place exactly because people realize that they are complex issues not fully understood, and are talking about it in hopes that more information will come to light to help them reach a greater understanding. This is why the more complex the issue, the more it will keep coming up over and over.

walledstance · 2 years ago

Thank you. This is a refreshing take on much of human interaction.

As a teacher in middle school I see this demonstrated throughout my classes. I have even started collecting data points on how many times a week a topic or topic adjacent to another topic crops up as discussions in my class. There are almost always heated discussions, but in the end we typically come to an understanding about facts or how we can’t truly know fully situations. There are of course some holds outs, but for the majority we find understanding or compromise.

walledstance commented on The Dawn of Cultural Schizophrenia (2023) jdemeta.net/p/the-dawn-of... · Posted by u/kkoncevicius

StreetChief · 2 years ago

"Leading masses of conversations to become little more than titbits of information and data flung in solely as signifiers of knowledge and meaning, yet never actually adhereing to any form of practice or purpose," seems pretty accurate to me.

I am curious as to what purpose you went to your uni library for. Medical research? Curiosity? What writings did you find? Why is it a problem that people use schizophrenia in conversation and writing? Not all discussion is medical research, and is certainly not held to those standards.

walledstance · 2 years ago

I’ll agree with this. Study language and lingual theory. Much of language is metaphor we apply to different lens. Language is mainly a process of trial and error. We continue saying something, refining that saying through different word usage until we come up with a term that fits our lens correctly. Words don’t have rules. Humanity makes those rules and then applies them.

The commenter below, mentioning “truth-seeking” would need to define what they mean by truth. Is this capital T truth that applies to everyone or lowercase truth that applies to the specific and differing lenses we use?

walledstance commented on Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do? · Posted by u/welfare

fn-mote · 2 years ago

Understand that you're not going to finish what you start. Do things that are fun. Keep a notebook of ideas. Talk about plans and what you want do. Spend time with him. Even if almost none if it ever makes it into code, the imagination part will be going wild.

Look at what he's really doing. He doesn't want to CODE. He wants to make a game. Like every kid. Emphasize the creative part just like he wants. Do things on paper, just like he is doing.

Let me get this one point across: YOUR SON DOES NOT WANT TO LEARN TO CODE (right now). HE WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU and explore ideas at the speed of his imagination.

Enjoy it.

Talk about the game while you go for evening walks or drive to/from school.

He will enjoy every minute of it even if nothing is ever produced.

walledstance · 2 years ago

Absolutely this. As a middle school teacher of many years I feel like I have some knowledge on this subject. Almost all children want to spend time with an adult. In my classroom the activity we do together doesn’t matter to my students, besides the attention I give them during the activity. For kids, adults are treasure troves of attention, and they want that attention. Give it to them in positive ways and you will see the relationship grow. Don’t worry about whether or not you produce something in the end, it was the relationship that mattered to the child from the get go. Really only adults, through social conditioning, are worried about producing something. Kids just want to feel important and feel part of a healthy, positive relationship.