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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

    Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.





  • I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.


  • Yes. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. Former cop. Alleged to have perpetrated massacres against the public killing dozens of people and burning down hundreds of homes. As a leader of G9 he publicly threatened genocide unless the prime minister of Haiti stepped down.

    This is all information I got from Wikipedia. I don’t know the veracity of any of it. I don’t live in Haiti and don’t really follow the situation there. Whoever Jimmy is, he doesn’t have very good PR. That’s all I can say for sure about him!









  • I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).


  • I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

    Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).


  • I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.

    But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.

    The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.