There's a huge difference between things people are forced to learn and stuff they want to learn. Life does tend to make you learn a few things by force, but that can also kill off one's taste for a subject.

Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...

As a math teacher myself I want to say... A parent taking an interest and spending some quality time with their child over a subject can have a huge impact on their motivation to learn. Props to your mom.

She was an elementary school teacher herself.

There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it.

I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.

I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.

[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(

Thing about it is the students should be given an explanations about why each topic is important for them to learn to be able to learn more advanced topics.

Maybe briefly show how that adavanced topic will be taught and let them realize they can not possible even start to understand advanced topic because they are missing the more elementary pieces.

Similarly why they can't got further without doing their homework. How mastering the homework exercises let's you solve more problems.

I know that is not easy, the teacher may not quite understand how topics relate, why each of them is needed in a specific order, if they have not thought about that much.

Yes, to all of this.

The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles.

(This is why many teachers - I was among them - aren't immediately good at teaching concepts or subjects that come easily to them as they may be at teaching things they struggled a bit to learn. If you've had to break something down for yourself then you're ahead of the game when it comes to breaking it down for others.)

For a while I taught an "Improv For Teachers" workshop (I have a theatre background), which was really about listening to your class and being ready to adapt your lesson plan to where they are in their course of work, or even to their mood on the day. It was mostly elementary school teachers, and some of them really resisted that idea. I'm convinced, though, that that's an important skill: the most memorable and successful classes I've taught have happened when I've been able to take advantage of a student question or a student interest and run with it - sometimes not even knowing where it'll go - with the confidence that I'll somehow be able to pivot back to the curriculum. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable, and embrace a bit of fear, and risk a bit of failure to do it, hence why the Improv experience is so helpful.

Do you have teaching experience?

Not much. I worked for an E-Learning company some years back when it was the trendy thing. So I started thinking are the courses we provide really helping students to learn? But turns out the business-model was mostly to provide compliance courses so that companies could prove yes they did train their employees in compliance so they could not be sued. The courses were made kinda easy to begin with because what was important was that employees could pass them without wasting too much paid work-time.

I also gave some presentations in IT-related conferences. People in conferences often get tired. So once as I entered the lectern I turned on a piece of music I had on my thumb-drive. It was the loudest hardest Rock'n'Roll I had. The audtorium had good loud-speakers. I think it woke the audience up. But soon I saw them nodding again. :-)

One of my favorite teachers that I ever had was my Calc 2 teacher in high school.

He always made a very special point to explain the "why" of everything. Not just "how is this used?", but he would also derive a lot of the formulas for us instead of having us just memorize forms. I think it makes you better at math in general; the whole point if mathematics education, in my mind, is to teach you the how and the why of things, not just to get to an answer.

I already loved math by the time I got into that class, but I attribute him as the reason that I love formal math so much.

I can recall that one motivation that helped to drive me when I was very young (K-2 at least) was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do. Like there was this ladder I could climb to in a sense help to advance to a more sophisticated peer group; even in relation to academic concerns like reading and math.

So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)

> was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do.

That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over.

When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already a fairly typical "beginners language", and my dad actually already had a book on learning Python.

Wanna know why I started with C++ instead? Because one of my classmates told me that it was too hard and that I wasn't smart enough to do it and only professional software engineers can.

I wasn't about to let some kid tell me I wasn't smart enough to do something that I knew I was capable of, so that afternoon I begged my parents to take me to a nearby used-books store and buy me a "Learn to Program in C++" book, and started on that. Eventually I also found a copy of the Sams "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" book that I read through online.

I still kind of have that mentality; I learned how to use Isabelle because I felt that that's what the "grown up" computer scientists use. I learned how to write Haskell because that's what the "smart" software engineers use. I learned how to use Vim as a teenager because that's what the "good" coders used.

It's probably not the best way to motivate yourself, but it seems to have worked out ok for me.

My agent would like to copy your agent.

The problem with capitalism is that it gives people what it wants, and some people want bad things, or are at least indifferent to getting what they want despite bad externalities.

The hard part is that I'm not sure any other system really fixes this flaw. Sure, you can be less democratic and give fewer people what they want, but for some reason few people want to live in autocracies of any stripe.

And it's not always clear that there is a solution when the things people want are too diametrically opposed, either. I'm not sure many people would be happy with any of the solutions from "Three Worlds Collide" for example (a short story you can go read online if you don't get the reference).

Not me! I didn't have a TI, I had a Casio calculator and wrote games on that during math class.

This kind of thing made me imagine the creation of "digital towns" the other day.

Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join.

This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.

> I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency."

The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.

A “call for help” button is customer service. The ability to say “this is the police, drop everything and attend to this car” button would be helpful.

I've never actually tried it, but I would expect customer service to be able to move the car out of the way or push it to someone who can remotely pilot it.

Again, the main issue is that these things can cause problems with nobody is in the car. It shouldn't even be a debate. Emergency services should have a key that unlocks them and allows them to be commandeered. Everyone inside is being filmed all the time, so anyone going for a joyride is being watched, the car could be shut down remotely, and the person could trivially charged with a number of felonies, and then that access key could be removed.

If Waymo can't play well with emergency services, then they've got long term sustainability problems.

At least in SF, there’s both a phone number and a QR code on a sticker on the driver-side window, and per what’s linked from https://waymo.com/firstresponders/ it seems like that’s a dedicated phone line.

I wonder quite what the priority matrix looks like for support requests; I’d expect something like:

1. First responders 2. Human-initiated in-vehicle 3. Autonomous-initiated vehicle

But I of course don’t know.

Buttons are something that seem inherently obviously (both internal and external), but I’m also never sure quite how useful they’d be: a lot of the things that have gathered press have involved vehicles driving when it was unsafe to do so, and then any external button is of minimal use.

I also expect they have some level of concern about anything external having an abuse potential? (e.g., deliberately walk in front of an AV just to stop it in the road)

Something like “give first responders some mobile app which provides some level of direct control” feels like it should be doable (authentication there seems unlikely to be harder than the various “educational” authentication gates that Alphabet has in many products) — though of course that doesn’t scale with more AV operators, and thus maybe this just falls into the category of “this should be standardised” (by whatever SDO).

And some can clearly just leverage existing datasets — many jurisdictions have ways to publish things like “this road is closed from X to Y”, and you can imagine a slightly broader case of “close a radius of Z from point A” being something you might want, especially in the AV case (imagine a “police incident” closing an intersection, such as the one a Waymo drove through a few months ago — you probably want to close a bit beyond the interaction itself in all directions!).

And sure, to some extent things can be handled by AVs getting better at understanding their surroundings, but we’ll always have the question of whether they’re good enough, especially when they fail in non-human like ways.

Interesting, I can't say I've seen that sticker, but I've never looked for one there, either, as you're not supposed to use the driver's seat and it's always buckled up.

Maybe, but in MN, they just decided as a matter of the state constitution that this basically isn't allowable.

You see, the cops had a murder in a remote place. They got a warrant, and the warrant showed 12 people in and out of a small area near the murder, of which one phone went there many times.

They got another warrant, for that one phone, and traced it back to someone who is obviously the murderer. The courts decided to suppress this, never mind the cops got warrants at both steps, and their investigation was as minimally invasive as one could imagine for this sort of thing.

So it's not unreasonable to wonder just what we're protecting sometimes, as I understand that while the decision here doesn't technically ban all geofence warrants, it makes them nearly impossible as a practical matter.

One can read the decision here:

https://mncourts.gov/_media/migration/appellate/supreme-cour...

Exactly, and to make sure that never happens again why not just arrest all 12 of those people until they prove their innocence? With enough constant surveillance we can be positive that no bad person ever gets away with anything.

Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?

> Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?

I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.

My sympathies for your loss. That sucks badly.

But look at how many people have been unjustly/incorrectly imprisoned for many years in the US, often based on poverty or racism. Would you be willing to jail 5 people for life-without-parole if you're 100% sure ONE of them was the murderer of your family member? What about two people?

I've never seen someone get sent to prison just because their phone was too close to a crime scene, there's always more to corroborate it because it's not much on its own, even if the MN case comes pretty close with only one person in a remote area with the dead body over and over who also coincidentally had motive, etc. Most of the famous cases of what you mention rely on humans identifying a person and DNA later exonerating them.

So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.

That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.

That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.

I think in much the same way that your life has been touched by a murderer and it has influenced your opinion, if you were wrongly accused of a crime it would likewise have influence.

That being said, I'm sympathetic to your point here and I'm not advocating for eye witness testimony becoming the only source of truth. If I could somehow know for sure that this would ONLY be used for the worst of violent crimes it would soften my opinion, but I am very sure that the more normalized this sort of dragnet investigation becomes the standard of what "requires" it's use will get lower and lower.

If policing were entirely focused on violent and property crimes many of my opinions might change, but realistically I think we can agree that whatever investigative technique we are talking about will primarily end up being used to prosecute drug crimes, because that is much safer and more profitable for the police. Do you really want to be on a suspect list everytime someone thinks they saw a drug deal somewhere and you happened to be near?

> It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.

I've heard it suggested that acetaminophen just come with a small dose of NAC alongside it to make it safer. I guess this would require a lot of regulatory work to approve, but given that 500 people a year OD, it seems like a thing we should at least consider.

Meanwhile, it's funny that it seems like acetaminophen should safer in more scenarios, but the other has a lot of overdoses with typical use, I guess that's why there's a gap between the two, because ODs are apparently a lot more common or at least more legible than problems caused by the other drug.

> I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clauses and such a failure in building semantically-sensible ones. These LLM sentences are junk food, high in caloric word count and devoid of the nutrition of meaning.

I suspect that's because human language is selected for meaningful phrases due to being part of a process that's related to predicting future states of the world. Though it might be interesting to compare domains of thought with less precision to those like engineering where making accurate predictions is necessary.