his is because i’m mildly certain that most of these TAs aren’t hired as TAs, because nobody really pays them. All PhD students, definitely all at Kampus Ochota, have a requirement to take a certain number of teaching internship hours, which is about 40-60 per year depending on field.

Depends on the course, but most TAs are PhD students, however some of the labs are also done by M.Sc. students hired on a contract (I was one!). PhD students don’t get paid explicitly for teaching hours, it’s part of their duties, but

but these grants are supposed to go for research, not for teaching

one of the main uses of grants is to hire PhD students! So having funds from research directly impacts the quantity and, perhaps more importantly, quality of PhDs, since ERC grants are very prestigious.

The tragic state of PhD students being on starvation salaries is a fact, but it’s a wide systemic problem with the entire country’s education. That being said, even with this “cheap labour source” you still can’t run courses for thousands of people!

I parsed “right” there as “much less correct than he’s made out to be” and was like, ye, probably, he’s like 0 correct so any amount he’s made out to be is too much.

the distribution of genetic traits associated with intelligence is non-zero

This doesn’t even make sense. What the fuck is a zero distribution? A probability distribution cannot be “zero” in any sensible meaning of the word. Did you mean uniform?

Also obv citation needed you sack of spuds.

I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.

So I guess it’s now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old “dog picking a food bowl” method of deciding championships.

how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy

@AcausalRobotGod frantically taking notes

Why would other humans being miserable make me happy, I’m not Peter Thiel.

The reason Lambda School’s hiring rates dropped should be obvious to anyone who spends time around bootcamps, or education in general. Lambda School tried to scale up. Staff warned about a downward trajectory back in 2018, in an internal memo that said, “Placement to date has been manual and one-off, which isn’t possible to scale.” That was back when they were training a few hundred students a year, and at their peak, they trained 2,700 students.

This is hubris beyond my comprehension.

I completed my BSc. (3y programme) and MSc. (2y programme) in Computer Science at University of Warsaw. It’s a really good programme, by far the best CS programme in all of Poland, university in the capital (largest city as well). Publicly funded, but very successful in research, so our staff has many ERC grants which pay out a lot, so it’s probably one of the better funded ones as well. Population of Poland is about that of California.

Yearly, less than 200 students are enrolled for the BSc at UW. On MSc. this is about 100. So you give lectures to around 150 students in the biggest courses. A single class or lab is led by a TA for 15-20 students. In person.

I’m not saying any of this to be elitist or some shit, but just comprehend the scale we’re talking about here. This is the cohort size that is manageable by institutions that know how to do this, have experience, staff, and funding. The bottleneck in this system is staff - you simply cannot have more students without hiring more than the couple dozen professors already there.

When you say “they scaled up” I though we’re talking they were enrolling dozens and scaled to a couple hundred. 2700 students per year is the scale of the absolute largest universities in Europe, backed by both public funds and institutional investors. How the fuck do you expect to give anyone any education at that scale with online classes and no TAs? That’s insanity. Like, “I’m going to build a spaceship in my garage with a box of nails and $100” level of insanity. What do those people think education even looks like?

FML I just caught it on the screenshot of the “iOS Development” course offered by Lambda

BLOCKCHAIN! Those bozos had to squeeze 4yrs of CS education into 6-12 months but they found ample room to teach about BLOCKCHAIN! There’s literally nothing in that curricullum about datrabases, but they somehow fit BLOCKCHAIN.

Also “Hash Tables and Blockchain” is like having a physics module called “Gravity and Juiceros”

I started reading the part with students wondering how to afford a lawyer and I was like, wait, isn’t that specifically what a class-action is supposed to allieviate?

Because students signed away their rights to a class action lawsuit as part of their enrollment agreement…

HOW THE FUCK IS THIS LEGAL. HOW IS THE USA A REAL PLACE WHERE PEOPLE LIVE. WHAT THE FUCK.

When he isn’t promoting the company and attacking critics, he shares his love of capitalism, free markets, and his favorite billionaire.

This is before the “favourite billionaire” is mentioned by name, and

1. You immediatelly know who that is. I could’ve bet my life-savings on the name coming up.
2. If you have such a thing as a “favourite billionaire” you have erred in your ways and need to rethink your life.

First they came for the Nazis, and I screamed and screamed because I totes wasn’t a Nazi, nu-uh, just a Free Thinker™

this is sneerclub, not careful count of the exact percentage of racists and racist talks to avoid hurting feelings club

Also the only acceptable number percentage of racists in an organisation is 0%.

The post article doesn’t even count Scott Alexander as “racist”

Jesus fucking christ. “You’re full of bad apples, even if we don’t count the ones only half rotten.”

Well I’m 100% covered because I have the worst hayfever in existence.

Like no kidding, I am allergic to every. single. thing that they had on what they call the “tree panel” and the “grass panel”. I need to be on antihistamines for 75% of the year or I cannot function.

So I’m allowed to use the slur as I’m from the community. Contact me if you want the “g-word pass” I guess.

What does “incorrect” even mean in a marketing context???

Effective Altruism Is Flawed. Here’s Why It’s Bad News for Joe Biden.

whatever the opposite of a metaverse is

Grass. It’s grass.

I left the field, as did most of my smarter friends, and my salary continued to rise a reasonable rate and sustainably as I learned the wisdom of our ancient forebearers. You can hear it too, on freezing nights under the pale moon, when the fire burns low and the trees loom like hands of sinister ghosts all around you - when the wind cuts through the howling of what you hope is a wolf and hair stands on end, you can strain your ears and barely make out: “Just Use Postgres, You Nerd. You Dweeb.”

How do I hire this person, this is something I’d like embroiled in gold letters over my desk. And on the tombstone.

To engage with the content:

That doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.

I see this is becoming their version of “too the moon”, and it’s even dumber.

To engage with the form:

wisdom woodchipper

Amazing, 10/10 no notes.

Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties

Ye, I know.

Not that one.

Oh.

Not that one either.

Jesus christ, how many of them are there??