He just wants to make sure something like January 6 does not happen; i.e., there's no possibility of a reverse Uno when he actually _does_ try to steal the election this November. He knows fully well that he's going to lose the House, and possibly the Senate this November. And MF hates to lose, he's got such an ego.
I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.
It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.
My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).
To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.
Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge.
Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.
I have been using LLMs for coding for the past few months.
After initial hesitation and fighting the the LLMs, I slowly changed my mode from adversarial to "it's a useful tool". And now I find that I spend less time thinking about the low-level stuff (shared pointers, move semantics, etc. etc.) and more time thinking about the higher-level details. It's been a bit liberating, to be honest.
I like it now. It is a tool, use it like a tool. Don't think of "super intelligence", blah blah. Just use it as a tool.
My experience using LLMs is similar to my experience working with a team of junior developers. And LLMs are valuable in a similar way.
There are many problems where the solution would take me a few hours to derive from scratch myself, but looking at a solution and deciding “this is correct” or “this is incorrect” takes a few minutes or seconds.
So I don’t expect the junior or the LLM to produce a correct result every time, but it’s quick to verify the solution and provide feedback, thus I have saved time to think about more challenging problems where my experience and domain knowledge is more valuable.
I've read other people's code for 25 years for a living. I'm pretty good at it.
So when I get a piece of code or an algorithm, I can read it check if it looks like something I'd allow in a pull review.
We also have this thing called "unit tests", which are pretty good at detecting erroneus code. Some people even write them first and then adjust their code to match.
I read that as needing funding. Somebody has to pay for the research. In order to get it funded, you have to show your research has a basis. My interpretation anyway.
What does the firmware do, practically? Can I use the firmware on my Wyze cameras as a drop-in replacement? Will the cameras still talk to the Wyze app?
I guess my question is: from a practical viewpoint, what do I get with this firmware (other than that it is open and all that, which I totally appreciate).
Thingino is a replacement of the stock firmware. But you obviously lose the ability to use vendor's cloud. Because if you still want to use the subscription service, why would you need to replace the stock firmware?
It's your server. You're free to do whatever you want. You can serve different versions of the page depending on the UserAgent (has been done many times before).
You can put up a paywall depending on UserAgent or OS (has been done).
In short, it's a 2-way street: the client on the other end of the TCP pipe makes a request, and your server fulfills the request as it sees fit.
> Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree.
Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
I see your point, but undergraduate degrees should provide a wide foundation, with little specialization. As you progress to a masters degree, you become more specialized. A doctorate is as specialized as it gets.
It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. Even to such a degree that they can write a doctorate on it.
But I don't think that's a good excuse to make them forego other curriculum, especially if it is required for other students to take. Schools have a responsibility to educate people to a certain standard, and give them some general breadth.
The woman is not being "made" to do anything. She's already world-class at math and wants to maximize the impact of her specialized talents, so she's going straight to PhD.
I don't think we need to nanny people who break the mold with extraordinary talents to conform to some generic correct educational sequence. They've proven they know how to make something of themselves and their own ideas should count for more.
Imagine if every AI researcher out there was allowed to skip even the most fundamental philosophy class(es).
I don’t know about you, but exposing these prodigies to some shared classes is not all that bad. Personally I think every student should be forced to take a class on ethics.
I'm not sure higher ed's educational philosophy is serving students all that well. The breadth of education is a shallow survey at best that is quickly forgotten exactly one semester later.
Thankfully the workforce has common sense and will happily snap her up into employment.
> The breadth of education is a shallow survey at best that is quickly forgotten exactly one semester later.
Your own experience isn't generally applicable. Although it was a couple decades ago, I still use various things I learned from my non-major classes pretty much daily.
Although the end goal of a PhD is a specialized thesis, the first couple of years generally involves courses with a wide coverage of analysis and algebra at the graduate level.
Given her achievements, I'd be very surprised if Cairo hasn't already covered the material in an undergrad degree
I've not studied this, but my guess is that the liberal arts education as the foundation is necessary to allow young people a chance to figure out who they are. I certainly found this to be true for me and would guess for my closest college friends.
If a young person is exceptional, do we force them into a liberal arts box? Surely there is value in literature and history. But this one young woman had found her passion. I have to believe that is she found out about something else, she would take that on.
In my teens I worked with the statistics department at UTMB. That had a cast of characters there; many profs in the 70s and 80s, who'd gotten their degrees before WW2. A number of them had schooling of the form:
Start school at 9-10, do 5 years of public school, got to a 1 year prep, do a year or two of college, do a two year PhD. Most of them had their PhD's by 22.
I think the biggest flaw with higher education today is that we're pushing people into doing undergraduate degrees who are already well beyond coming out of self learning from high school or other experiences.
The number of high schoolers who might be ready to go into postgrad programs is very small.
There is no way this could be the “biggest flaw” in higher education today because the number of people possibly impacted is so tiny.
Although I think you’re striking at something that is a real problem with undergraduate degrees today: Many universities have become so watered down and softened that students spend the first 1-2 years doing what they should have been learning in high school.
My friends who still teach at university constantly complain about students arriving for undergrad with very poor writing, communication, and listening skills.
Very few people are too “advanced” to be challenged by a sufficiently difficult undergraduate degree, ridiculous thing to say imho, I went to a UK university this decade and I can give you a laundry list of issues more significant than “exceptional students being slowed down”.
This woman is undoubtedly exceptional. But we don't know how exceptional, because she's an outlier, educated using different methods.
We have no idea how many other people would achieve something similar with a similar background. Personally I'd bet almost anything it's a larger number than most people expect.
I'd also be surprised if she doesn't already have a pretty solid background in undergrad-level math.
The irony is she's actually more typical than not. Universities in the past were open to giving unusual talents special treatment.
Historically, the idea that everyone must follow the same path on the same timetable is unusual.
Australia's debt is in the form of HECS/HELP. It's indexed to inflation, and integrated into the tax system such that it's only repaid on income over a minimum threshold. The first threshold is 1% of income above $56k. The last threshold is 10% of income above $166k.
My understanding is that US student loans accrue interest at rates above inflation. They do have repayment plans based on income, but because the interest rate is higher than wage growth, the debt just keeps growing if you're on these plans. They also don't have progressive thresholds like we do and the repayments tend to be higher.
Australia has a similar but less severe problem. Inflation and wage growth are closer together but they aren't the same. Still, the situation in the US seems worse.
I think research and higher education does have value for the most part. It's undergrad that's really worthless and something people only do for the experience.
Undergrads who care about learning and research will take the most challenging classes, do research with professors, and surround themselves with other strong students who will push them.
Even at top universities, very very few freshmen are capable of doing high-quality research immediately. They'd be better served learning the foundations inside and out with a cohort of similarly strong students to challenge them.
To agree with you: I've worked with several really brilliant undergrads doing and publishing great research. But all of them were rightfully undergrads. Even if they were actually capable of doing great research, they benefited from the breadth.
If you have bright enough undergrads, you change the curriculum for them within their field of expertise, so that they still get the breadth of things outside it while not wasting time with things they know. You let them not take as many classes, take graduate courses, do more research, take more courses from other departments in related areas but with different perspectives, and so on.
When I was an undergrad, in physics, there was a professor in the department who had done his undergrad there and was legendary, as was quietly mentioned in awe, for not taking any undergraduate physics courses while there; the department had let him skip all of them, and instead take graduate courses and do research.
I'm not sure that's a simple argument and can't imagine many would agree.
Undergrads who do research generally aren't very good at research yet. A major reason is they either lack or don't fully understand the pre-reqs, which they progressively and cumulatively learn during undergrad. A student can be incredibly smart, but acquiring a strong rigorous math background will still take years.
About pre-reqs: third and fourth year PureMath classes at UofWaterloo consisted of math I already took in HighSchool in Romania: group theory, ring theory. Plus some calculus I already read in high school out of curiosity: measure theory and the Lebesgue integral. Another Romanian guy at UofW was auditing 4th year classes while in his first year (he is now a math professor at an American university)
I can see a committed and gifted student being able to get most of the pre-reqs for doctoral studies in America or Canada while in high school.
If you don't know the foundations well, you don't belong in a postgrad program. That's the reality and how it currently works. Undergrad teaches you those foundations.
Anyone can try doing research, even undergrads who half-know the foundations. However, trying research doesn't mean you have the background to do great research or to succeed in a postgrad program.
Indeed. I've long felt that most undergrad students would be better served by a typical college minus the formal classes. Basically dorms and all the other amenities found in a typical college campus, where you mainly gain life skills and mingle with other people your age. Because most people I met at an average 4-year school were there because it's a societal expectation among certain classes, it's less scary than just getting a job and figuring out life completely on your own, and it is 10x-100x easier to make friends at college than just "out in the world." Not on the list: to learn from college classes, which at an average school teach you less than you'd get from a $200 a year subscription to Great Courses Plus or Brilliant. Or free from Khan Academy.
I know a few very special schools give undergrads access to brilliant minds in their field, but I also have been told that undergrads at those schools are mostly taught by grad students, so I'm not sure that Ivies provide a lot either, beyond the opportunity to hobnob with the legacies that will be running Goldman Sachs in 20 years.
Of course she was, but that's not what this is about. Letting her in proves that the bureaucratic credentials offered by schools are meaningless. The university system in its present form in the US is entirely predicated on the fiction that those credentials actually mean something and are worth paying six figures for.
> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it.
I’m not suggesting this person is doing anything fraudulent as she seems quite impressive.
However, educational institutions get constant requests from parents who want their children to skip far ahead before they’re ready. It’s a competitive world and they know that being able to claim a child skipped several grades or even skipped undergrad entirely is a unique and very impressive achievement for the resume. It also theoretically provides a few additional years of earning potential by giving a career head start.
The first problem is that many of these parents (again, no accusations for this specific case) see this and want to make it happen for their child at any cost. There are some wild stories about parents trying to cheat their kids forward or falsifying their accomplishments to try to skip grades.
The secondary problem is that it can be hard on kids to be thrust forward so far past their peers. I had several friends who skipped a grade in middle school and most of them didn’t have a great experience for social reasons. Skipping undergrad altogether would thrust someone into a foreign world with a lot of baseline expectations and norms that they hadn’t yet learned, combined with no peers their age to discuss it with.
It creates a high chance for burnout or failure, which could leave them worse off than when they started.
That’s why the recommendation is generally to do undergrad at a challenging institution that allows students some upward mobility in specific areas where they’re ahead. No reasonable undergrad program is going to have this person taking Algebra 101, but there are a lot of opportunities for them to jump right into advanced programs and go deep and broad.
IIRC Erik Demaine was also homeschooled, skipped college, got a very early PhD, and joined the MIT math faculty as a teenager (he is a full professor there now). Johnny von Neumann OTOH went through a "normal" secondary education partly because his parents wanted him to have traditional social exposure to kids his age while he was growing up. His math training was very accelerated though, and he had professional level research publications at 17.
> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
The purpose of a PhD is not writing a dissertation. It is a research school, and I'm sure she could still learn a thing or two about research (and teaching).
Conversely: if that's all it takes, there is no point in going to University just to get a piece of paper that says "you did the thing you already did".
University (for folks serious about continuing in academia after) is (obviously) about making sure you have the same base knowledge as everyone else, but also for you to come to terms with how academia actually works, who the bad players are, who the good players are, and who you need to know to get shit to happen for you. So in that sense, most Universities going "no" is literally the most accurate reflection of what life's going to be like on a continuous basis on the inside.
I don't see why it would matter. she could quit math now and still be ahead of the majority of mathematician in terms of contributions. The rest is just formalities. I can see her breezing through the undergrad, quals, etc . It would just be a small delay.
To add slightly more detail:
Most research math programs in the US are 5(ish) year 'combined' masters+phd programs. The first couple years are basically course work, seminars, finding your area and advisor, and then the rest is the actual research work. It's not uncommon to leave after the first couple years with a Master's degree.
> Normally you have a master of science as well. And for that you require a bachelors.
Many Master’s programs require Bachelor’s as a prerequisite for admission, and some of the others include a Bachelor’s at some point, but not all do. (The same is true of the Ph.D. and the stereotypically preceding degrees, and also of some professional degrees and Bachelor’s degrees.)
I have a Master’s and never got a Bachelor’s. Universities can admit people more or less as they please, subject only to the very forgiving scrutiny of accreditation agencies or whatever government department officially supervises them.
There is a story about when Stephen Wolfram applied for a job at AT&T. The HR person asked him where had gone to college. Wolfram confessed that he had never gone to college. Well ok, did you graduate high school? Um no, I'm afraid not. GED? Nope. What about primary school? Wolfram looks more and more more embarrassed, and admits that he didn't even finish primary school. HR person by now is quite uncomfortable when Wolfram manages to think of something. He says "I do happen to have a Ph.D. Does that help?"
Thinking about my GE requirements at undergrad, I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her. She has but one lifetime, and can contribute much to her field.
The subjects such as English composition, she should be allowed to test out of if she is already a good writer.
> I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her.
This is a common STEM view, but it is inherently wrong. IMHO it dates back to the unfortunate divide between science and the liberal arts, whereas both were once considered a single field, now days there is disdain and mistrust between the two sides.
The point of history classes isn't to memorize the dates of wars, is it to understand the motivations of humans, it is to understand how the world we lived in has been shaped throughout time, and it is to learn how to do, and understand, research about the history of a place.
The point of English classes isn't just to get good at writing, it is to get good at various types of writing, it is to learn how to read different forms of literature, and it is to have a guided tour through a chosen selection of literature to hopefully develop one's character and thoughtfulness.
One of the most valuable classes I ever took at University was the Art Of Listening To Music. We started off around 500ad or so and went forward through time up until about 1920. We learned the vocabulary of music, how to sit down and listen to a piece of music and describe what we were hearing. After I was done with the class I went from appreciating a handfuls of genres of music to appreciating music itself no matter the genre. It was a 3 credit guaranteed A class that had enriched my life by an enormous amount.
If you really love your major, then the point of going to university was NOT your major, odds are you would've studied that field with or without the school. (Barring fields that require large capital investments, chemistry, physics, playing with an entire orchestra, building airplanes, etc) The point is everything else.
But that isn't how it works in reality, at least in the US. In reality, outside of their major (and sometimes inside it too), students usually pick the absolute easiest classes that satisfy the requirements. The ones that are known that the teacher doesn't take attendance are heavily desired. And the university is happy to oblige. Departments are funded based on a formula of how many students are in their classes, and they know that if they gain a reputation for being hard, students won't take their classes for GE requirements. It's a race to the bottom. So most departments offer enormous 1 level classes with 200 students taught with minimal rigor, and where you really only have to study a few days before the final to collect your A. And on top of that the frats all keep collections of graded tests from every class for years past, so basically anyone who wants to cheat is able to do so easily. This isn't education. This isn't worth six figures.
> In reality, outside of their major (and sometimes inside it too), students usually pick the absolute easiest classes that satisfy the requirements.
In reality, no one eats healthy food, everyone eats fast food hamburgers all day. Just look at the sales numbers of fast food / junk food VS organic lunch salad bars!
Except, that isn't true. Some people eat junk food all day, and some people choose to eat healthy. Obviously in America we have a bit of a bias, but just looking at averages doesn't give a complete picture.
> The ones that are known that the teacher doesn't take attendance are heavily desired.
Almost none of my university classes took attendance. Why would they? We were paying to be there, if we wanted to waste our money, it wasn't the university's problem.
> So most departments offer enormous 1 level classes with 200 students taught with minimal rigor
Reading books and writing essay's doesn't require rigor, the learning is in the doing. I put in honest work to learn and I got honest feedback from my 100 and 200 level professors, which was all I expected.
> And on top of that the frats all keep collections of graded tests from every class for years past
Almost none of my GE classes used multiple choice tests. They were typically essay tests, written in class.
I should note I did my GE requirements at a local community college, where class sizes averaged ~20-30 students, professors had office hours, and I think I only saw a TA once.
> This isn't education. This isn't worth six figures.
The price is too high yes, but a university is place to go where you can dedicate yourself fully to learning, hopefully w/o other outside worries (sky high tuition ruins that...). What a person chooses to do with that time is up to them.
Now one can argue that the worth of a degree is lessened by students who didn't actually learn all that much also being in possession of one. That is a closely related, but separate topic.
That said, the poster I was originally replying to was indirectly advocating for not caring about one's GE classes, and I was replying that one should indeed care, because those classes are incredibly important!
>One of the most valuable classes I ever took at University was the Art Of Listening To Music.
I also benefited tremendously from such a class. I would recommend it to anyone interested in music, or not interested in music and trying to figure out why others are interested in music.
Perhaps the term "canalization" fits? Coined by C.H. Waddington, describing the process of forming a chreode in a homeorhetic system. But it doesn't really encompass the "everything becomes overly generalized" concept you mentioned. Rather, it's more about robustness against perturbation of a trajectory in a conceptual space. Christopher Alexander called them 'paths in configuration space'.
