Perhaps explains why Indian accent is the way it is - most of the time it's a literal phonetic translation. Words like "champagne" are source of joke for any English learner, but even a simple word like "nature" has a phonetic translation of "Na two rae".
As a Bollywood superstar famously quotes: English is a funny language.
It's that plus the fact that half of spoken Hindi is actually English words cobbled into the language similar to how English was latinized due to the normans and french
> the assignments could simply be worth 0% [..] that the proctored, for-credit exams would demand that they write similar essays.
We run university programs at my company, and arrived at this bit of insight as well. That said, some of your points are incorrect or incomplete:
- You can't build systems assuming responsible individuals. These systems are guaranteed to fail. Instead, assume individuals are mould-able, and build a system which nurtures discipline towards goals. This works.
- There are still issues with cheating, but it's more of an older way of thinking, that we developed methods to reset.
- Advanced students need to be given more challenging assignments - quantum of assignments should be the same no matter the capability of students. This solution was unworkable until GenAI came about.
Looked from a pure individual skill-building perspective your ideas are alluring, but if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%), then one understands why physical cohort-led education system can work.
Happy to chat with anyone who'd like to delve deeper on this.
if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%)
As someone with a 96+% 'failure' rate on Udemy/Coursera I honestly don't see the relevance of this statistic. Most people going to University are there primarily because they want/need the degree. That piece of paper is really valuable, perhaps even more so than the knowledge gained. The piece of 'paper' offered by Coursera/Udemy etc. has basically zero value, so the people taking those courses are doing it almost exclusively for the knowledge they offer. Once you've learned what you wanted to learn from the course there is very little incentive to go the extra mile and go for the 'completion'.
The piece of paper is valuable because it represents a sustained effort of learning over an extended period of time.
I understand how from an individual's pov what you said makes sense. Similarly I hope you understand why from the system's perspective: it's the effort that's mandated and not just the proficiency.
Employers and others (higher education orgs, etc) care a lot about sustained effort, alongside proficiency. Only proficiency-focused systems (like Udemy/Coursera/Youtube) are not respected as credentials, since they do not showcase this.
It's not like juniors roles will go away. More and more - it's looking like there's a higher bar for high compensation that was the norm. It seems like juniors SWEs will have to toil more to reach higher level of skills, become valuable to their teams, before they "make" it. I'm seeing this trend across the engg leaders I speak with.
Of course engineers will be paid, just that entry level pay has come down. (Pay at entry level has fallen at least 40% in the mid-size product sector).
This is the most common mistake engineers make. Code is not worth anything. Solving a user's problem, which they're willing to pay for (not just any problem), is what can be converted to wealth. The intersection of these 2 is very small, and very dense - since all engineers aim for it.
If you venture out of that region and try to discover and solve problems (and if needed use code/automation/tech), you have a surer chance of generating wealth.
Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
I feel like the barrier for self hosting could be so much lower. The resources required to host a static site are tiny and even a dynamic one with comments accessed by all the people I actually know could easily run on a cheap router.
I think self-hosting is a distraction. You can make your own site using Astro and deploy it for free to Netlify and still get 99% of what we're talking about here.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
> But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
Self-hosting for mobiles doesn't even reliably work for torrents. I frequently can't seed torrents from my phone.
If, theoretically, there would be a way to resolve domain name to a specific phone, I can see self-hosting site apps getting popular.
Nowdays there are a few solutions (phone hosts a site, shows QR-code with its current IP and a port, and you can actually open the site in browser), but it is mostly for "right there right now" solutions. Site will go down the moment this phone changes the tower.
The best example of mobile hosting I have found, comes from AmnesiaVPN team. You have to rent a server, but then you just feed server IP and password to an app, and from there the app controls the server.
I imagine a future where big VPS companies started to make apps that made buying domain name, renting a servere, hosting and backuping a basic website/forum easy.
It's an unlikely future, but a fun one
Hi Akshay, it isn't clear from above writeup - is this open for self-hosting (I have an education usecase)? Couldn't find anything on this in the repo.
Thanks. marimo is cool, but spinning up N backends for scale would not be tenable cost wise.
Currently looks like there's this very cool full-frontend notebook tool: https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook , which can be tied to a small backend to save/load python scripts from. This is working well for edu usecases potentially with support for both js and python.
I barely use email any more, not just due to blatant spam, but also due to companies that I need to receive one notification email each time I do a transaction, or to verify an account, as an excuse to send me daily or weekly emails.
I can't necessarily block them because I might need them for a password reset or a future transaction. I spent a while trying to set up filters that work, but eventually got tired of trying to fight it.
Now I mostly just avoid email for anything other than these things, and have just given up on it otherwise.
Spam won. Email lost.
And social media services are losing in similar ways. Rather than showing me things from people I subscribe to, they're pushing all kinds of automated "content for you" that I don't want and can't opt out of. So I'm pulling away from them as well.
The internet is filling with slop and distraction, both AI generated and not, and we haven't "solved" it, it's constantly getting worse.
