What's bonkers to me is that people are alway complaining about ads and they're not putting "delete web ads from your life" front and center of their value proposition. Go to firefox.com and look at the the "why Firefox" copy. It's could be about basically any modern browser. It's like selling a car with "it has wheels!".
I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.
It's not that arcane, it's referenced to a sound pressure level of 1 pascal. Which, yes, is still arbitrary in that it all ends up back at the arbitrary values of things like metres, seconds, kilograms, etc.
Volts per pascal might make sense in some contexts (like your input buffer power supply), but log volts per pascal makes sense in others, particularly for audio applications where you stack gains and attenuations onto an already-logarithmic domain.
dB SPL is referenced to 20 µPa, not 1 Pa. You might be confused by the fact that the 94 dB SPL (1 Pa) is the default for microphone calibrators and specifying microphone sensitivity.
I was referring to the latter, which is why volts are involved at all. But I suppose if they'd chosen to follow the SPL zero point for the voltage-pressure scale as well as the absolute pressure scale that's would be equally arbitrary in its own way, even if more consistent in another.
> forever beholden to Microsoft Windows, Office, AWS, X, iOS, Google Play,
There is one country that is very much not as beholden as everyone else. Even if everyone calls it a "PPT", it's quite often going to come from WPS.
Though the state of Linux support for things like WeChat/Com is... Not great. But there been a uptick in inquiries about Linux support for a system in the last 2 months so something's lit a fire under some posteriors recently.
The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.
The suckers who actually want to learn will get even more badly screwed in such a system unless the assessment is balanced to favour actual knowledge. And not only at final assessment but from start to end because if you get screwed in the short term because your low marks while you get to grips with the subject gets you penalised, it takes a lot of foresight and fortitude not to buckle and just spam for points. Doing it "right" requires more teacher engagement, more parental engagement and generally more autonomy, effort and money all round. And even then you have the ever present problem of which group do you spend each marginal unit if effort on: the stronger or weaker students?
> The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.
That's not a misalignment. That's your "ambitious student" is being unwise and stupid. To this day, I have gaps in my knowledge and skills that I regret because I avoided things that I, in my childishness, did not consider "important" or "interesting." AI is going to make that far worse.
Maybe, but you can also get into some very lucrative careers by grinding points, cheating, colluding and generally gaming the system. I know of lots of people who got top-class STEM degrees and yet had barely any actual skills in the subject beyond what they needed to pass exams. They don't give a fuck they didn't really understand thermocouples or river formation or whatever. They answered the formulaic exam questions by rote and checked every marking criteria of the list for their coursework.
If AI makes their kids miscalculate and end up failing in a revamped AI-resistant educational system that actually requires learning to pass, I'll laugh.
> you can also get into some very lucrative careers by grinding points, cheating, colluding and generally gaming the system
Or, more likely, you're going to fail because you can't do the things you need to do to be successful in said careers. Or, at least, you're going to struggle because you're not very good at it.
I've met plenty of bad engineers, and let me tell you, their job seems a lot more stressful than mine. I'll pass.
Unwise and stupid people sometimes "get into some very lucrative careers?" Film at 11. "The problem currently exists in a less severe level" is not any justification for making that problem worse.
A very large percentage aren't there to uphold some notion of academic integrity. They're there to hand over wads of cash and do whatever else they need to do to get the credentials that they need to get some particular job (or rather, any white-collar job these day). Many of them don't care about the subject - only a small subset of students actually end up in the fields they study - even in STEM, many will go to finance if they can. The ones at the higher levels looking for that golden job stand to lose lifetime millions in earning (and for some, a green card) if they don't do well. The ones just looking for any job just need to scrape through. They don't come from the academic system, they won't stay there, they don't respect it or even want to be there and have no relationship with the institution or its staff other than a begrudging financial one and an adversarial educational one.
Universities for their part were handed a poisoned chalice by governments demanding Shiny Modern Economy things like "50% of people should have degrees". Comply, and make scads of cash by gradually selling off credibility over decades. Refuse and be crushed into obscurity by those who take the deal (and by the way, all these vocational schools are universities now).
I work in higher education and they aren't even bothering to read it. A colleague of mine who is a professor mentions that they will just be copying and pasting the assignments into the bot and then blindly copying and pasting the responses into their homework.
He's now trying to incorporate AI into the assignments to try and help the students think more critically about it, one of the assignments even requires having them show their work on how they designed and iterated through the prompt. This is a CS programming class
> They also had difficulty using power point for basic slides.
To be fair the best lessons and then lectures where you actually learned were always the ones when the lecturer used the black/whiteboards. The ones where they just read though prepared PowerPoints were deathly dull and completely lacking in engagement.
I am extremely grateful that I managed to get through the primary/secondary school system before PowerPoint, digital projectors and "smart whiteboards" took education by the throat, and that it hadn't completely subsumed higher education either (but it was beginning to go that way).
Of course, you can be a dreadful teacher and be unable to use PowerPoint or any other teaching method, but you could also plausibly be one of world's best educators and have never touched PowerPoint.
depends... I remember seeing my professor painstakingly write formulas on the blackboard - it was such a waste of time. I'd normally have the textbook open on the page with the same formulas and I'd entertain myself by trying to find any mistakes professor might have made.
You can have dull professors with either blackboard or with projector. But professors who care can do significantly more with computer vs blackboard, especially with disciplines where videos might be useful.
I'd be surprised if any port would easily permit such a ship to come or go under sail power. Sailing a ship into port is risky at the best of times. Yachts may do it into a marina when the wind and tide are just right for fun it as a little bit of a flex. But ports have work to do and having out-of-control sailing ships three sheets to the wind, so to speak, having misjudged the tide or whatever, is just dangerous.
Also, having your ship stuck in port for days waiting for wind and tide to be suitable for leaving would have been commonplace before engines, as would bring becalmed for weeks on end and being unable to evade dangerous storms. None are probably high on the list of things these ships really want to be doing today.
The port expects yachts to safely operate their vessels, and it's up to the captains to execute. That could mean sailing in / out of port, or it could mean under engine power.
The trouble I'm having is if they were leaving under engine power alone, with such fast current, why was the ground tackle not ready to be deployed?
We ran a much (much) smaller vessel with an unreliable engine and often pre-prepared our anchor before getting into port
I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.