I have been running Postfix for 22 years, from a big corporate installation to my own on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It just does its job.

Downside: there is no backlight. Others claim that the screen updates are too slow to make typing practical, but I personally don't think that. I installed termux and I think it's fine. Screen updates are no worse than SSH over a cellphone connection. I have not really found a good RSS reader for it yet, though...

Ultimately, the company "did fine" but "doing fine" mostly meant that the older folks retired sooner than they had planned and were replaced with younger people who were more eager to cut their teeth doing design on a computer.

The main problem with Python is that, if you’re not doing your work in highly optimized numeric libraries (which are usually written in C), then you’re paying terrible overheads to use the Python interpreter. Type checking doesn’t help with this because Python is dynamically typed but static types could in principle. Is that what you mean?

> Not sure what your point is.

Well, you said

> All universities are for the elites.

And then I countered that, actually, many are not selective. I am asking you to reconsider your statement. In reality, many college programs confer _skills_, not _status_. This narrative that colleges are for the elites is demonstrably untrue, runs counter to the founding mission of many of them, and strikes me as sour grapes. I know because I was one of the kids who struggled to afford college, went to a public one where I learned _skills_, which I then leveraged into a satisfying career.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...

Competitive universities are competitive. Sometimes that competiton is justified and sometimes it is unjustifiably based on pedigree. The program I attended before getting my PhD at a public university was at a well-known private university. But in terms of research productivity and impact, the public university was a MUCH better place to go to school. The PhD program was exceptionally competitive but its undergrad program was not. As a result, many undergrads who wandered through our lab door got a first-class research experience.

I’m not going to pretend that pedigree doesn’t matter (to some people), but it is emphatically not the same thing as “a good preparation.” I took a couple math classes one summer at a low-tier state college. They were just as good as any math classes I took at any of the other places I went to school, public or private.

Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “provide the inhabitants of this state with the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts.” There’s nothing about being elite in there at all. This is an institution that serves the public.

I’m no stranger to long hours to achieve high status—I’m a professor. But I also started my journey at a public school and a public undergraduate institution. Many of my friends—all good and smart people but in many cases decidedly NOT elite-have leveraged their public education into satisfying careers. I, and my friends, would not have had our opportunities otherwise. I simply could not afford top private school.

I don’t know what to think about this change exactly, but it’s worth pointing out that MIT has had this policy for first year students since 1968. MIT! Seems like UM can make this work if they are thoughtful about it.

The best teachers seem to combine deep thinking about how to teach with intuition and charisma. The ingredients are hard to replicate.

I do think that this is a nut that we will eventually crack, but it is proving to be a very tough nut.

But I did not learn everything I wanted to know. And I can’t afford to take a time-out to go to grad school again for a second PhD. On the other hand, an LLM, in some sense, has access to the world’s knowledge. With some patience and persistence, you can mine almost-expert-level instruction from one.

When ChatGPT 3.5 came out, I excitedly tried this for a topic that I WAS an expert in. The results were discouraging. The model’s answers seemed to reflect the general misunderstandings that people had about the topic. More recently though, I had to review a paper in the same area, and I used a late-model ChatGPT to help check my work. It was an eye-opening experience because it was no longer confused. And it found longstanding misunderstandings I had, buttressing its answers against my skepticism with citations to original work. I came away very impressed. This kind of AI “rubber duck programming” is my preferred style of use now. I used it just today to help me learn an area of statistics I have always been fuzzy about. This approach definitely requires some careful prompting, but I am optimistic that AI tutors will one day be a real thing. My only worry is that people lose the ability to understand what makes an answer a good one and why we should care about good answers.