Doesn't... look meaningfully different from AWS lambdas or CF workers or other things along those lines. Just with way fewer features. What am I missing?

"Test" dominates in primary and secondary school, "exam" becoming more common in post-secondary education and for professional certifications et c., but both occur in both contexts.

Looks like it's some kind of authorization proxy.

People in the SV/fintech sphere tend to have a really skewed idea of what typical salaries are for people "working in tech". What they really mean is "FAANG(-alike) and fintech", not "tech". They're in the third hump of the trimodal distribution of developer salaries, and may have some inaccurate ideas about the rest of the market, as a result.

(BLS gives me a median of ~$97k in 2021, if you're wondering if there's a big difference between the average and the median)

As far as I can tell, this is the result of people reading lawyers announcing that they are lawyers and posting such a disclaimer, and other posters specifying "I am not a lawyer" purely out of consideration for the reader, not out of legal obligation, and getting the two all mixed up together, while deciding that both are necessary (I'm quite sure one is not, and I'm pretty sure the other one isn't exactly necessary, either).

Consider how many published pieces and TV news programs feature people who are and are not lawyers, providing opinions about the law, typically with none of these disclaimers. It's evidently not a problem. I think lawyers only bother to do it in forums because there's some remote chance that someone might be able to argue they were mislead by the conversational and two-sided nature of the medium into thinking the lawyer had taken them as a client or was offering advice in an official capacity (I'm skeptical such a case would get very far, in any event, though).

Yep, absolutely, and that part of their ability to select their students is a major factor in the "look, private schools can educate kids for less than public schools spend, with similar or better outcomes!" sort of stats that get passed around.

... which doesn't necessarily mean preferring a better school that's only better due to selection bias (and knock-on effects from being able to remove very-disruptive or low performing students) is a bad way to go, at the individual level, if one has that option. The observation's more relevant to policy-making, than to the relative merits of those options to any given family.

In fact, lots of distros now warn when a user attempts certain sudo actions, for similar reasons—mistakes were being made, and adding a little or the right kind of friction could prevent them.

The ~$15k ones tend to be Catholic or otherwise religious, and quality varies from "worse than the local public schools, actually" up to "notably better than the local public schools, though not as good as a really good private school".

Some cheap secular schools are only a little more expensive than the bottom end of the religious ones, but they don't tend to be much better than average public-school quality (nb. that may still be a lot better than some particular public school district)

> without extensive human adjustment and editing

Current AI tools are a bit helpful if you're using them for "good". They're immensely helpful if you're using them for "ill" (spamming, scamming, astroturfing, et c.)

AI (at present) doesn't know what "meaning" even is. Generating mountains of output with it is cheap. Analyzing it is a trap—there's no other to try to understand and appreciate. It's an accident that happens to resemble something with intent behind it.

I think that's part of why people react so poorly to it, and especially to trying to pass its output off as human-generated.

(Spoilers for Watts' Blindsight)

In Blindsight, the (intelligent but non-conscious) aliens think human communication is some kind of adversarial gibberish intended to mimic meaning in order to tie up opponents' resources with nonsense. Just chaff, basically. They're not able to understand the not-directly-and-strictly-business output of a consciousness as anything else, because they're used to a universe of intelligent but non-conscious actors.

Today, that's what our AI tools actually do, as far as what they're capable of doing without extensive human adjustment and editing. They are, by far, at their most-efficient when used to generate noise. That noise may be useful for some purpose, but it's not any good purpose, because it's only useful at that kind of scale in cases where truth and meaning aren't valuable.

[EDIT] For comparison, look at other forms of communication where humans go out of their way to avoid meaning. It's pretty much all reviled: marketing-speak, lawyer-speak, politician-speak, HR-speak, et c.

Cleopatra was part of the Macedonian/Greek dynasty in Egypt, which comes basically at the tail end of what one might consider "ancient Egypt". The time span we lump together as "ancient Egypt" (specifically, dynastic ancient Egypt—"pre-dynastic" stretches back many centuries before that) is so long that stuff from the first third or so of it is farther, time-wise, from Cleopatra than the moon landings were.

Wikipedia:

> All [the three big pyramids at Giza] were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, between 2600 and 2500 BC.

Cleopatra is tied up with Julius Caesar and Antony (as in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra) and all that happens just before the BC/AD transition, and these numbers are large and fuzzy enough we can just call her time 0. ~2500 years after the pyramids, ~1970 before the moon landings. Plus or minus a few years, but it doesn't make much difference.

Safari practically never does that shit, which is one of the reasons I prefer it on platforms where it's available. IDK why modern Firefox is so damn eager to interrupt me. Just open a window with my last session or my default tab and shut up. I don't care if you just updated. I don't care if you're weirdly-enthusiastic about introducing me to a feature that hasn't been novel in a browser in at least a couple decades (color themes—LOL, that was just embarrassing). I certainly don't want an actual advertisement. And for god's sake, no, I still don't care about Pocket, and I never will.

For less-technical users, this stuff isn't just annoying, it can disrupt their entire browsing session. "Wait... where's my email? Is it gone? Is this the right program?" Firefox (and other teams that do crap like this, in their products) should knock it off. It is not OK.

It... definitely helps me understand what I'm seeing on here better, yes.