I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
Yes, I have an 8 year old pair of boots that have been through all sorts of conditions, all over the world. And I don't even do anything to maintain them. You can get very good boots for $200.
My association was a bit later, mid to late 2010s. I recognize some of the names as well, including one of the top folks that probably onboarded both of us.
That said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted when I left.
"This aeron offered through a liquidation sale by a company that once resold furniture from defunct dot-com startups, but is now itself going bankrupt"
My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms.
My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.
One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.
Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)
These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.
My best history teacher was the gym teacher who was really hired as loophole because they couldn't hire a basketball coach which is what he really was.
Anyway, he didn't give a crap about teaching to the curriculum and he taught us how to think critically and read between the lines of history.
I know a large number of teachers who have been campaigning for years to eliminate all forms of teacher evaluations, with the claim that “you can’t measure what we do!”.
Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.
The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.
The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.
Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.
> but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences
Everyone should watch the fantastic documentary "Waiting for Superman" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/) that highlighted just how problematic the teacher's unions have become and how much of an impediment to education they are.
Even in cases of gross negligence (showing up to school drunk, completely failing to teach, etc) bad teachers just get bounced to another school. Teachers who physically assault or sexually abuse a student might remain on the payroll for years while the bureaucracy slowly reviews their case.
The unions have also prevented any form of incentivizing teachers to perform well or rewarding good teachers. In fact, the union leaders prevented the teachers from even voting on changes (that the majority of teachers wanted) that would have allowed good teachers to be rewarded and bad teachers to be removed from the classroom.
There are a lot of problems with education in America, but the teachers unions have to be right at the very top of the list.
Amusingly I had the exact inverse of this experience. My senior year I signed up for the AP Bio course, but we only got 22 students signed up out of the 25 required to allow the class to happen (a very stupid system in of itself). Because the class was canceled, and the very competent well educated biology teacher had a slot free in his schedule, he was forced into teaching the gym class (which I also had to take since I'd been avoiding PE for the last few years). He knew the situation, and after the first week handed me the advanced bio textbook after class one day, and then turned a blind eye to me sitting on the bleachers reading instead of running laps for the rest of the semester (dont come at me for physical fitness, I was a skateboarder and in better shape than 90% of the kids already).
This is pretty much Van Inwagen's argument in Material Beings -- recommended if you haven't read it!
Copied from wiki:
"Every composite material object is made up of elementary particles, and the only such composite objects are living organisms. A consequence of this view is that everyday objects such as tables, chairs, cars, buildings, and clouds do not exist. While there seem to be such things, this is only because there are elementary particles arranged in specific ways. For example, where it seems that there is a chair, Van Inwagen says that there are only elementary particles arranged chairwise."
Something I read, not sure if it's true, that the language of a certain Native American tribe (Navaho?) has no nouns. Instead verbs are used to describe things like tables and chairs, as table-ing and chair-ing.
That makes sense since a chair is only a temporary arrangement of elements that used to be (doing) something else, like tree-ing, and will inevitably fall apart and cease to be chair-ing in the future.
It made me think of how names, nouns, and objects are a kind of illusion, a mental convenience of freezing things into place as we talk about them, when in fact everything is in constant flux of coming into being and disintegrating back into that nameless movement.
There's this FinTech ad on the NYC subway right now. I can't remember the company, but the entire ad is just a picture of a guitar and some text.
Anyway, the guitar is AI generated, and it's really bad. There are 5 strings, which morph into 6 at the headstock. There's a trem bar jammed under the pickguard, somehow. There's a randomly placed blob on the guitar that is supposed to be a knob/button, but clearly is not. The pickups are visually distorted.
It's repulsive. You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar? I so badly want to cover it up.
> You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar?
Is this not evident? Because using AI is much cheaper and faster. Instead of finding the right guitar, paying for a good photographer, location, decoration, and all the associated logistics, a graphics designer can write a prompt that gets you 90% of the vision, for orders of magnitude less cost and time. AI is even cheaper and faster than using stock images and talented graphic designers, which is what we've been doing for the past few decades.
All our media channels, in both physical and digital spaces, will be flooded with this low-effort AI garbage from here on out. This is only the beginning. We'll need to use aggressive filtering and curation in order to find quality media, whether that's done manually by humans or automatically by other AI. Welcome to the future.
For the curious, it would be something like "makku-fu-ruri"
This was my experience in Japan as well. So many words we're used to saying in English use mouth shapes that the Japanese language does not, so you really have to tweak how you say things to align with what's available.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version