BeetleB

Weird comment, given that it was, not long ago, a common name for a male.

I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.

I went to such a school.

> They now have different classmates they don't have a connection with, they enter the new class having as their identity "the person who failed the previous year", and they'll probably have to sit bored in the classes of other subjects they did pass.

Which is why they, and their parents, work really hard not to fail.

I'm good friends with someone who was left behind on, of all things, history. I spoke to him recently about the experience. Having to be with kids younger than him was really bad for a while. But overall, the experience forced him to work hard. He didn't become a top student, but he's doing well in life and he credits it as part of the reason.

Keep in mind - there is usually a "make-up" exam if they're at risk of being left behind. In my school, they'd know they failed in early June. And the makeup exams were in late August or early September. They had a whole summer to get their act together and pass the makeup.

They did have exceptions: Failing on the languages and some other humanities was somewhat OK.

> They don't see a representative sample.

Indeed. I forgot his name, but there was a Russian professor in the US who emigrated after the Soviet Union collapsed. His blog was full of complaints about the quality of students and education here.

But in one post, he actually said the US system serves the country better. In Russia, you needed a pretty high level of mathematical competence to get a basic engineering degree. Here you don't, and the reality is they still over-educate you in the US for what is actually needed on the job.

Having worked with East Europeans (Romanians, Polish and Russian) in math heavy domains, the answer I can give is: Culture.

Over here it's acceptable not to know basic things like how to do long division as an adult. In many countries (not just East European), that makes you a "moron". My mother, who hated academics, was never a good student, and refused to go to college, can do all the basic arithmetic on paper. Not because she liked it (she hates math). But because she didn't want to be perceived as a "moron".

Now when you get to Russia, etc - if you want to go into an engineering field, knowing arithmetic on paper is not sufficient. So the bar is raised a lot higher. Even if your career is not going to involve calculus, if you can't integrate by parts simply expressions, you are a "moron" in the tech circle.

They also have "mathematics circles". Kind of like a math club. You get a core set of people (probably less than 10), who meet regularly and work on different math problems. People at differing skill levels in one circle. They learn from one another. The focus is on improving problem solving skills (and fun).

That's why the Russians I worked with in the US were really, really concerned about their kids' education. All they saw were "morons" graduating high school. So the (physical) bulletin board at work often had math tutoring services targeting Russian kids.

I'm guessing that's why the "Russian School of Mathematics" exists in the US.

There are, of course, downsides to being perceived as a moron if you can't do long division or basic differentiation. At the same time, I think it does speak ill of American society that there's simply no bar when it comes to academic knowledge and skills. I wouldn't advocate that you should be considered a moron if you can't do long division. I do think there should be some baseline in society, though.

Right now, it's OK to:

- Not know the difference between cents and dollars. Verizon Math opened my eyes to this, and now I see it everywhere. And people around me don't see the problem - not in the sense of "Why are you making a fuss about this?" but "I don't understand what you're talking about: 0.5c is half a dollar!" I don't bring it up any more lest I be viewed as elitist (by people with advanced engineering degrees).

- Not knowing the number of days in a year or the number of days in a month.

- Not knowing if there is gravity on the moon.

The list goes on and on.

Of course they don't owe them anything. Ubuntu's reputation is built primarily on people who use it (or used to) for free. They are/were Ubuntu's advocates and what made it popular.

So just as they made it popular, they can make it unpopular. People like me will simply post on our blogs and social media that they should not install Ubuntu. A typical Ubuntu user is not that high on the tech scale, and they listen to people like me for suggestions on which distro.

Cut the pipeline that feeds into it.

I would say in the old days (2001-2002) it was more like a "minimax". It was maximal minimalist. It had really fancy visuals that worked on fairly slow hardware. I was blown away.

Wow. You gathered so much from two words.

I was speaking only of the cost to build. There's the cost to run/maintain it (salaries, etc).

Keep in mind Intel is losing almost $2B per quarter on their foundry business. It's not easy to make the economics work out.

If you think the promise is there, then are you willing to invest all your money in a company chasing this? I'm not.

If I'm worth $10M, it doesn't mean I'll invest $200K in something I'm fairly confident will lose money. If they're not investing in building more capacity, it's because they're being appropriately cautious.

The reality is no one wants to be left holding the bag if the industry collapses. It costs $8-15B to build a fab for DRAM. If we rush to increase capacity, and the demand drops N-fold, everyone who rushed in will lose their shirt.

Also, fabs are easily the most complex manufacturing on the planet. You don't want to rush stuff like that.

> You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand.

Intel was at best breaking even and likely making a loss on each ARC card. They released them to stay in the space, but manufacturing more would increase their losses.

Are you in India? I somehow doubt Indians in India are deficient. The rationale is that when you're closer to the equator, you need less sun exposure to produce the appropriate amount of Vitamin D, so people from that region have inefficient production.

It's when those people go to northern latitudes that the inefficiency starts to matter.

Do what?

> Link between Vitamin D and depression has been known for a long time. It is not a new finding.

The link has been disputed for as long.

> Again, there is extensive literature on this, you just have to read it instead of speculating.

There you go:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4008710/

"Although low vitamin D levels have been observationally associated with depression and depressive symptoms, the effect of vitamin D supplementation as an antidepressant remains uncertain."

I'm not saying you should stop taking it. If it works for you - great. But don't get annoyed at people who point out that the link is tenuous at best.

(Incidentally, it did nothing to improve my mood - but I continue to take it for its other health benefits. I was in the severe depletion zone, and brought it up to mid-normal.)

They were crazy overvalued. In August 2025, they were trading below $20 (which was crazy undervalued). When things were going great for them in the past, they were in the mid 60's.

Trump strong armed some companies to make deals with Intel, and the market went crazy - taking it all the way up to $120. But performancewise, all their gains have been incremental. I know many who work there, and nothing has changed from a year ago - other than the infusion of cash from the deals. The products are still behind AMD and Nvidia. The fab is losing money at almost the same rate that caused their stock to drop from $50 to 25 some years ago ($8B loss then - likely still over $7B this year).

To give you an idea, they had reduced their ESPP offering to no lookback period - to save money. Employees get a fixed 15% discount - that's it. Their LLM budget is about $10/day ($200/month) per employee. The layoffs started by Lip-Bu Tan never ended. It's just become continual. They are trying to find any possible way to save money. That hasn't changed.

Their current price at $64 is, at best, a fair price, and likely still a bit overvalued.

> Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?

Isn't that partly the goal with the ban? Fewer distractions.

Depending on what you need, you can build a custom harness via pi really fast. I tried OpenClaw for weeks, and it took me a lot less time building my harness than trying to figure OpenClaw out.

I said the same for years after smartphones came around.

In my book, if you use a Smartphone that's either Android or iPhone, I can't take seriously the claim that you value your privacy.

Privacy is a continuum.

I'm sorry, but: Post-hoc justification.

> There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

I never understood why people are so willing to advertise their lack of imagination.

Having both is just plain terrible, although I suspect the latter dominated before the former really had an impact.

And to think he was filming Picard just a few years ago.

I have no idea how much I pay for public broadcasting, but I'd give up all my streaming services before I give that up.

Yes, but the city then gets to dictate the quality of the service.

(And no, I don't want the city involved in food/grocery delivery).

No. Freaking. Way.

I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.

(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).

For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.

> From my perspective K1s, RSUs, & ESPPs are as simple as a W2 with state tax withholding and I think that is why I am struggling with so many of the comments on this post - I simply can't relate.

Well, you are an accountant :-)

With my K1, the issue was that it was for a real estate investment, and you have to be careful about things like bonus depreciation/cost segregation etc. One tax accountant I used was not carrying over the loss (or perhaps not applying the prior year's loss, or something like that). Another accountant was deducting that loss from my W-2 income, which I can't do as I'm not a real estate professional.

When I finally brought these points up and got all these corrected, I studied the final result and then continued doing them myself. But it was a pain getting the online tax SW (TurboTax, TaxAct, etc) to mimic what they did. I had to be really careful what things I said "Yes" to and what I didn't. I would never have figured it out on my own by reading the relevant tax publications (which I did peruse).

And then later, I formed a partnership with a friend so we could both invest in something. Now I also have to issue K-1s! Not fun! RSUs are much easier.

In his defense, he did say "... for most people".

And that's true if all you do is have W-2 income, and RSUs/ESPPs. ESPPs were the most complex thing I had to deal with until I stupidly decided to do things and get K-1s.

> Won't others get all the credit and recognition if I do this?

He dismisses this, but I've experienced this. In my first job, I wrote a lot of automation that improved the turnaround time to process units. In the annual review, it was made clear to me that I need to distinguish myself from the others, and so if I made everyone go faster, that didn't count.

My advice: If you're in such a job, leave.

My obligatory comment about my experience with tax accountants:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...

The same way you'd verify a textbook's solution.

(Assuming it's a proof or something - if it's just a number - oh well).

I see a perfectly good, non-AI submission. Open the comments, and the top comment is about AI.

Can we not do this? I understand your sentiment, but ... can we not do this?

I've always told people: You can be a power Emacs user without learning elisp.

I myself used Emacs heavily for 9 years before learning elisp (clicked on my 3rd attempt).

IMO, the included Elisp guide is not good for beginners. My recommendation:

Separate the language from the ecosystem. First focus on simply learning the basics. How do you set a variable? How do you write a loop? How do you write a function? These things are as easy in Elisp as they are in other languages. Perhaps use Exercism to practice.

Of course, also learn the related keybindings (C-M-x to evaluate, C-x C-e, etc).

Only then start understanding some of the basics of integrating with the rest of Emacs (unwind-protect, save-excursion, save-restriction, etc).