Don't they have to go through a Google approval process for (official) Android? I'm not sure I see this as a big win unless they are strictly supporting GrapheneOS and other de-Googled Androids.
they do, but it's on fdroid too - at that point the play store is simply a nice to have. if google does anything they don't like they can just say okay and keep publishing on fdroid, they have not lost whatever efforts they have invested into android. apple has absolutely no way to just publish an app and let people install it, which at least to my mind delegitimises them as a viable platform. I'm pretty sure if I made open source mobile apps they would be android only, people would be free to take the source and release an ios version under different branding.
It's notoriously not on f-droid. The way FUTO licenses and/or builds its thing is made deliberately incompatible with f-droid's main repository.
You can add the futo repository to the f-droid client, but when people talk about f-droid they really mean the main repository, not the extra hoops to add less trusted third parties.
sad, I didn't realise that because their website has an "install from f-droid" link. it does reinforce my point that android is a proper platform with a viable distribution mechanism though, if they can self host a third party repository.
Why is a lossy testing filter better than just failing out those who can't make it? Maybe allow for larger freshmen classes and smaller latter classes or adopt community colleges and have all students start there and advance into the UC system sophomore year on. Instead they bring back what is basically an IQ test for admission.
I personally strongly disagree. I think it's much better to be given the opportunity to do the actual work, rather than to be required to do the pre-assessment song and dance. And if there are actual prerequisites that a person hasn't previously passed, they should be allowed to be tested on these specifically.
It depends on a lot of things. If they've also applied to another college that's better suited to their ability, admitting then to a school where they'll likely fail is not really doing them a favor.
Agreed. I've seen some interesting data that kids who could've been successful premeds or engineers at their state flagship but instead eke their way into Harvard or Princeton (sports scholarship, legacy etc) will instead graduate with a flaky studies major because they couldn't cut it in their intended major and the switching costs of transferring were too high.
There are downsides if you end up a small fish in a big pond.
Is the actual premed or engineering coursework at Harvard or Princeton really that much more rigorous than that at a flagship state school? I'm doubtful.
I'm no expert on that particular situation, but I compared my syllabi and projects from a state flagship (not Georgia Tech, Berkeley, or UIUC) with my brother's from Carnegie Mellon, and the expectations of first/second year CS majors were extremely different. Sometimes we used the same textbook but CMU covered more chapters and their projects were more involved. Some courses that typically waited until senior year at the state flagship were common to take spring sophomore year at CMU. There were a lot of courses that were numbered as undergraduate at CMU but covered content that was only covered in graduate courses at the state flagship.
Longer answer - in the other reply to your doubtfulness.
This is true across the entire US system, some state flagship universities curricula are so deficient that graduate level at better schools wont even consider the bachelor level diplomas from those schools as eligible unless the applicant is top n% of the graduating class, where n is a low single digit.
The admissions committee may never publish or say it directly, but for MANY state flagship universities the B.S. level maths and science courses are simply insufficient fo higher level studies at leading schools.
Thus, companies with hiring and leadership that is aware of these conditions will also simply pass over applicants with degrees from flagship state universities, much the same as they do with online diploma mill "Graduates."
My take on this situation is that as primary education outcomes worsened in the US, state universities modulated the coursework to match the readiness of incoming students in order to keep enrollment 'available' to everyone and extract revenue from the student loans system.
The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.
> The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.
It's easy to find recent reporting on claimed grade inflation, reductions in rigor, and students who seem unprepared or unwilling to do the work at Harvard and Princeton too.
They "were" differently motivated and the slide that began much longer ago in the other schools (and was always present for the 'legacy' students at Ivy-Leagues) has now reached the general student body.
Hopefully this trend will become more visible in hiring practices, will lead to an erosion of the preference for named schools, and employers will adopt a more disciplined path from internship-to-mentorship-to-full_team_membership to compensate for the general loss of capability and readiness from graduates everywhere.
I say, hopefully. I don't see any inclination toward that path from any of the major employment sectors.
Maybe the Ivy-Leagues and top ranked schools will collectively reinforce student performance requirements, encourage educational rigour, accept lower admission numbers for only high performing applicants, use their endowment funds to establish bridge institutions which remediate the shortfalls of public school education and offer trade-school training programs for the masses of students not capable of the high standards.
But, as Mal says, "I'd like to be the king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat."
So, we're both right. The Ivy League did mean better education, AND it may not be better for much longer due to the incoming student body.
Speaking as a professor: the filter is really helpful. Having students struggle for two years in a program they're going to fail out of is terrible. I've seen it happen - and I saw more of it happen for the years CMU also stopped requiring the SAT.
The SAT is a very imperfect measure but it turns out a lot of the others are even worse.
>Having students struggle for two years in a program they're going to fail out of is terrible.
Putting a body every a seat for those profitable 500-person lectures taught by an adjunct and graded by TAs who are all paid peanuts and then having them wash out before those expensive 50-person high level classes and esoteric electives taught by tenured profs and accompanied by lots of expensive lab time is great for the university's bottom line though.
Good point, and that was for me the promise of the original MOOCs 15 years ago - for students to be able to take on these MIT/Stanford courses, with the exact same workload and see if they could handle them, without any additional cost to the school and without the student having to upend their life yet. And if they proved to themselves that they could and are willing to, then enroll, and use that as proof.
There are still some online courses that try to do this sort of thing, with a particular example being the University of Helsinky's Full Stack Open [0] which offers post-hoc university credits for those who complete the course, but it seems that the dream didn't quite materialize.
Honest question: why is it terrible? I would assume that if someone is capable enough to struggle for 2 years, they stand a real chance to struggle for 4 years and graduate. And seeing how the job market rewards a mediocre diploma from a good college significantly more than a good diploma from a mediocre college, it seems like a very rational decision from the student's side. And if they do fail out, they should still be able to enroll in another program, and presumably get a decent grade there, no?
If you completely ignore costs, and the negative affects of having 50+% of a class be unprepared and taking time from the other students, sure, that would work great. Seems like a bad alternative to standardized tests considering students will then have to pass tests once in college...
My wife has a civil engineering degree. There were a number of courses where partial credit was not permitted and the final exam was 2 questions. It was common for students to take those courses 3 or 4 times before passing. Giving a failing grade to only 1/3 of the class might get a professor investigated for making the class too easy.
Unless, somehow this is part of an advanced certification process? I really can’t imagine professionals not knowing how to study for an exam like this. Medical school shows what motivated people can do.
In America, dude. Pick your favorite engineering school and read syllabi for core classes such as statics. Read department policies on number of tries you get on core classes before you’re kicked out of the civil engineering program. They take certain things very seriously.
The incentives change when the school becomes a mechanism to sell a chance to increase probability of immigration rights at tens of thousands of dollars per year, especially when the pool of domestic kids is shrinking.
Failing 1/3 of a class if that cohort is genuinely deemed not qualified enough to pass shouldn't be a problem by itself.
But then it raises questions like "are they really unqualified or is the testing methodology inadequate?" and "why was the system unable to provide the necessary growth to such a high slice of the class?". And then the easy way out is to just cherry-pick which students enter the system at all.
> High graduation rates are an important metric to administrators. If a professor gave a failing grade to 1/3 of the class they would be in hot water.
I remember practically every single instructor/professor on the first day of class during my freshman year of my undergraduate study said something along the lines of "I have no curves. Your grades depend on you and nobody else. If the whole class does well, everyone can get an A. If nobody does well, everybody can fail."
So I guess this was more motivational to get us to study rather than stating facts?
It really depends on what kind of class it is, but at most schools:
* If 1/3 of calculus physics for engineers fail, they take it next semester.
* If 1/3 of gen-ed physics for poets fail, the professor better have a good explanation for the provost.
* If 1/3 of physics for pre-meds fail, the professor better have a pretty good home security system and might want to think about having the family stay in a hotel for a few weeks.
I remember a first lecture when I started my CS studies, where the professor said something like "look at the people to your left and to your right, it's likely that at least one of you will drop out by the end of this year; it's ok, this is not for everyone; if you truly believe this is for you, put in the effort and you'll make it"
1/3 isn't that bad in the late 80s/early 90s at the UT Austin CS department. Only ~30% graduated at the time. The orientation was literally "look to your left and looked to your right only one of you will graduate." They weren't joking!
That depends. Some schools actually cap the number of students permitted to continue. They fail a certain fixed number or percentage of students below a threshold, even if the raw score is good.
Disagree. Hiring and firing is better than a bad interview process. The reason we don't have that is due to regulations and litigiousness (and the laws that facilitate it).
IMO failing to get the opportunity is worse than getting the opportunity and failing at it.
How is it an step-up from markdown? Markdown (w/o any embedded html) is a simple text formatting that lets you read it as a plain text file with some minor formatting when rendered. Typst source files are not human readable in the same way and would be terrible at it. Typst is great when you need typesetting, but if you just want plain text, readable files it isn't it. E.g. markdown for notes, typst for papers.
Anything is a step-up for Markdown, unless you include HTML in your Markdown. The base features of AsciiDoc (or Org-mode) are alike to Markdown in terms of simplicity (no typesetting).
This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
Or maybe just have your R&D teams focused on doing R&D with zero corporate interference. Staff it with personal assistants whose only job is to ensure the researchers have whatever they need and are never bothered with meetings or other corporate shenanigans. The assistants could then be the proxies to management to provide feedback to management, but only on best effort and still staying the fuck out of the way of the researchers.
Easey peasy was said with a wink, although technically speaking it would be easy -- if they didn't have their heads up their ass.
A dear friend of mine was doing R&D at a startup where management poured on a bunch of low-level management work that took him away from his joy, which was developing new tools and approaches to solving customer problems. He left, and went to another gig that promised him complete freedom to invent and discover. That job is at a Fortune 500 company that is slowly starting to pull its head out of its ass.
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