extension

Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.

> incarcerated students really want to learn

They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.

> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens

Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.

> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.

* Base decisions only on things that would be relevant in a trial, like evidence and criminal history.

* Nobody should be detained just because they haven't paid bail money. If we decide that someone can be released, it should be immediate and unconditional. The court should charge no more than they can immediately collect.

* Make detention as pleasant and convenient as possible for the accused. We should have facilities specifically for this purpose that are more like hotels than prisons, at least in principle.

* Eliminate any trial delays that aren't strictly necessary, i.e. due to congestion or beurocracy.

If a serial killer is caught in the act, there would presumably be enough evidence available at the bail hearing to justify detention.

What is a "fair" criteria to base this decision on? Is it fair to throw someone in jail because they are young, or they got layed off, or they don't have friends or family? How is any of that better than jailing them for their skin color?

These are exactly the things that justice is supposed to be blind to.

I'm rooting for the algorithms here, simply because they make the inherent injustice of pre-trial detention harder to ignore. We can convince ourselves that this injustice is somehow corrected by the presumed wisdom and compassion of a human judge. But by formalizing the logic, we have to acknowledge that we are literally throwing people in jail for plainly unfair reasons.

But in any case, if Twitter's architecture is truly scalable then any intrinsic slowness of the language shouldn't be a big problem, because they can just toss more hardware in to compensate. What is a problem is a buggy VM that leaks memory. To run thousands of instances in a heavily instrumented way, the VM must be stable and predictable.

1) Their backend crashes constantly during normal use, so they have to shut it down when nobody is around to babysit.

2) The form submits directly to some poor soul's email, who then has to copy it onto a piece of paper and drop it in a folder. To manage the workload, the form is simply disabled when this person is not around.

3) The job of "web server" has not been mechanized in this particular office, in order to preserve the charm that only comes from a web site lovingly typed in real-time by a hard-working civil servant.

Apparently, "full partners" can actually get real customer service and avoid these problems, but you need to get on the order of 1000 views/day before they offer you that, which most people never achieve.

I will absolutely never do business with that company.

The WHATWG did not adopt h.264 as a standard, nor any other codec.

Mix black and white together, and you get... gray!