I tried asking for a song in the style of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (maybe my favorite songwriter) and oof were the results bad. Just one cliche after another ("with the fire in my soul and the wind at my back"), no real character development, and a trite story.
It actually did a good job of explaining the characteristics of a John Darnielle song, but what it produced completely failed to match those characteristics.
When I asked for a Bob Dylan song, I got basically the same story - a guy talking about how he wanders around talking to people and seeing heartbreak but he'll rise above it all.
It's about 110 miles between DC and Wilmington DE. Biden was a Senator for 36 years. the Senate is in session an average of 164 days a year (this is 2001-2021, which only overlaps with Biden's tenure for 5 years).[1]
110 * 2 * 164 * 36 ~ 1.3 million miles.
My hypothesis is that an Amtrak conductor gave Biden this calculation, but his brain associated the story with a different, more colorful conductor.
I went to talks by Walter Bender, Nicholas Negroponte, and others involved with OLPC at the time. At the same time I was working part-time teaching technology afterschool in the Boston Public Schools. It was pretty clear that the constructionist vision of education that the OLPC folks were promoting made sense for SOME kids, who were bright and self-motivated, but it wasn't where most kids were. A few of the kids I was working with loved working on their own projects and discovering new things. But for most kids, just giving them tools and letting them play wasn't really going to result in the kind of learning and creative expression that Papert and his colleagues were promising. We had a lot of trouble getting kids to even go to afterschool technology programs. The non-profit I was working for was even paying kids $500 to do the program.
I would imagine that if you're an education ministry with a limited budget you probably want to focus on efforts that are going to make measurable improvements for the average kids. I don't think "we deployed 1000 laptops, most of them are now paperweights or video game machines, but 10 kids are doing super creative things of their own initiative" is all that compelling to an education ministry.
One interesting aspect of the OLPC project is what it didn't attempt to do: to apply the theory of its design to first world countries that also have broad public education problems (I'm thinking specifically of the U.S.) I chalk it up to the idea that the revolution in education that the constructionists of the 60s and 70s thought would happen simultaneously along with the adoption of computing never came to pass. I can't stress enough how this vision of computing was supposed to go hand in hand with a more general transformation of education, rather than computing being its cause. I'm not sure, then, how that fit at all with the idea of pushing the technology (and none of the social or pedagogical changes) onto the third world.
> It was pretty clear that the constructionist vision of education that the OLPC folks were promoting made sense for SOME kids, who were bright and self-motivated, but it wasn't where most kids were.
Maybe the problem was that most of the kids' natural love of learning and creativity had already been extinguished by compulsory school. Or as Papert put it, "Children seem to be such remarkable learners on their own, but then they enter school."
> A few of the kids I was working with loved working on their own projects and discovering new things. But for most kids, just giving them tools and letting them play wasn't really going to result in the kind of learning and creative expression that Papert and his colleagues were promising
That’s the Media Lab in a nutshell. It attracts builders from all over the world. And it naturally selects for people that are self-learners.
If your goal is average kids, then sure, you need to focus on average kids. But I'd say the smart self-motivated kids are always the biggest bang for the buck in education. Sometimes I get a sense that people (not necessarily here) consider disproportionate success among geeks to imply a program is "backfiring".
What does "bang for the buck" in education mean specifically?
If we are thinking in terms of democratic societies here, then certainly the (utilitarian) point of education should be to raise the bar especially for the "average kids," shouldn't it? Don't we want a better average in a society that we all operate together? That's to say nothing of the richness in life that education can provide...
I mean that the smart kids will show the most results for the same budget.
The utilitarian metric could also show that the average moves the most, and society benefits most, when those with the most potential can realize it. It's an interesting question. Either way though, I think it should be a basic constraint for an education system. Basically it's the same as saying classes should never be too slow for their students.
Creating the next generation of tech workers and founders and just generally tech-savvy generation has value. I wouldn’t want to only import tech from the US.
What exactly is there to sue over? Let's say the NFT is an image. Let's say that someone displays that image without your permission. Nothing in the NFT itself gives you copyright over the image (although there are some NFTs that do confer copyright), so you can't sue over that.
In 2020 I was working for a consumer electronics company and went to some presentations on how our supply chain and operations teams were dealing with the pandemic. I'm far from an expert on this, but this is what I heard from people who were working on this.
First, you had a massive lockdown in China in January 2020, which shut factories temporarily. Then when those factories came back online, the production lines had to be reconfigured so that stations were 2 meters apart. At the same time, a lot of the collaboration that typically happens by people from a company flying out to China to meet with the supplier face-to-face were shifting to video, which frequently met that at least one side of the call was early in the morning or late at night. And as all of that was happening, there were also large shifts in demand as some products saw spikes in orders. That pattern then repeated itself across the world - a company might move production from China to, say, Indonesia, only to see the new factory have to temporarily shut down.
I can imagine that two years of this would create major backlogs and disruptions.
Is there a serial number printed on the device? Presumably Apple has a database that ties the serial number to an iCloud account and if the police had physical access to the device they could subpoena that data.
On a much smaller scale, I once worked for a wireless ISP. We had a customer who called in late September saying her service had been out for a few weeks. I went to her house and discovered that she was in a wheelchair and couldn't reach the controls for her air conditioner, so she was turning it on and off using the on/off switch on a power strip that was sitting on a desk. Her router was plugged into the same power strip. So as soon as the weather got cool enough to not need the AC, she lost her internet.
A user with a disability books an Uber. They are unable to get to the Uber within the allotted time. The driver leaves. The customer then books another Uber, and this time successfully makes the trip. The customer calls Uber to refund the cancellation fee, which Uber does. Uber is then out the time the first driver took to reach the destination, the driving time, and the cost of the customer service contact (which can be quite expensive). They also have to deal with reputational and regulatory risk. This isn't an invented scenario - I've seen this happen.
Wouldn't it be less costly for Uber for the driver to just wait an extra 5 minutes?
> How should a person with disabilities indicate that they have a disability requiring extra time in a fraud proof manner?
There are already systems for allowing people with disabilities to qualify for reduced fares or paratransit - typically involving having your doctor send a letter to the local transit agency. Uber could either replicate such a system, or they could accept documentation from a local transit agency or they could allow people to self-designate and eat the cost of fraud (my guess is that stigma and lack of awareness of the program will prevent a lot of people from fraudulently using it).
> Should all disabilities be treated equally?
> Who decides how much time should be granter per?
Ideally you'd make a decision based on an individual's needs, but if I was a product manager for Uber I'd just just set a high limit for everyone who qualified for the program initially and then figure out later if something more complex is needed based on how much time drivers are actually waiting. If this program helps Uber reduce the number of cancellation/re-bookings/1-star reviews
> Should this same policy apply to people with ephemeral injuries?
Yes, temporary disabilities are disabilities.
> Should Uber compensate the driver for this extra time to ensure the driver is still incentivized to pick up people with disabilities?
Yes, for exactly the reason you mentioned
> Why, ethically, should this cost fall on Uber instead of the driver? Either way an inefficient market is being created here because the government is stepping in and saying that a transaction made between two rational actors is unfair even if those parties agree to the terms of the transaction (unless Uber is a monopoly). If the driver is not compensated fairly for their time, why is this sacrifice ethically permissible?
First, I'm not convinced that Uber having to pay for extra waiting time is against UBER's best interest - see the scenario above. But even if it were on balance a net cost to Uber, society has an interest in ensuring that everyone is able to travel and do all the things that travel enables (any kind of in-person commerce, healthcare, etc).
My girlfriend has a visual impairment. When it's dark outside, it can take awhile for her to locate the Uber and get to it. A number of times she's been unable to locate the Uber and the driver has just left. I'll have to look and see if she's been charged wait fees.
There was another incident which was caused by a very poor UI decision by Uber (or maybe just a bug). She scheduled a ride in advance from her work to a doctor's office. Then when she went to get a ride home (this time in real time, not scheduling in advance), the origin was set by default to the last place she scheduled a ride from - her workplace, NOT her current location at the doctor's office. She didn't realize that Uber wasn't doing its usual thing of setting the origin to your current location, so the driver showed up at her workplace. She ended up paying the driver cash to come to the doctor's office and pick her up from there.
It actually did a good job of explaining the characteristics of a John Darnielle song, but what it produced completely failed to match those characteristics.
When I asked for a Bob Dylan song, I got basically the same story - a guy talking about how he wanders around talking to people and seeing heartbreak but he'll rise above it all.