The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.

I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth

Even if it is just a scam?

He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.

His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?

In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.

I prefer my mental image.

How so? Why is the alternative killing?

The thing that completely takes me out of the movie / show whenever I see it is people who get knocked backwards by bullets / shotgun blasts. The maximum amount of momentum transferred by a bullet or pack of shotgun pellets is the same amount as the shove it gives to the shooter’s hands or shoulder.

If it’s in a Chinese Gun Fu, Wire Fu, Gun Wuxia type movie where everything is slightly fantastical, I can accept it as a kind of over-the-top element of that style. But, it really bothers me when it happens in something that’s otherwise fairly realistic.

The movie version of being “knocked out”.

Someone is knocked unconscious for long enough to be moved to a new location and probably tied up. And they wake up just fine. They’re able to engage in witty banter with their captor. If they manage to break free they’re able to fight effectively.

The reality? A massive concussion. Extreme disorientation. Likely to puke if they have to move much.

If you ever watch a “knockout” in boxing or MMA, the unconsciousness lasts a seconds at most, mostly not even a second. Someone’s knees go wobbly then they recover, but they’re still disoriented and uncoordinated. If they’re out for longer than a second or two, everyone’s concerned and the fighter is rushed to the hospital.

No one secures the neck strap on motorcycles

It’s been a while since I rode a motorcycle, but apparently things have changed a lot.

I don’t see anything unprofessional there. Just naughty words. But, the naughty words are somewhere where they warn you that the code below doesn’t behave as expected, or complain because there isn’t a better way to do something. That seems like the best time to use strong language.

Cleaning it up is a great idea in theory, but in practice almost everybody has higher priority things to be doing. Leaving a comment in the code for why something is ugly is the best thing you can do when you don’t clean something up, so that someone coming along after you doesn’t struggle with it. We have no idea how many “naughty” comments are no longer there because the issues they addressed were cleaned up.

Most of the places I’ve worked I’d have been told to get rid of the cursing before checking something in. But, my own personal codebase has tons of this sort of thing.

But, aside from the cursing, these actually look like excellent comments. Comments should warn you when the code isn’t what you might expect. These are excellent from that point of view. If this is what a random sampling of the comments in the codebase looks like, it is probably a very well commented codebase.

They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.

And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

It’s true that ads almost always show 10:10, but there are plenty of learning materials online that have other times.

Reasonable, but not as good as a simple bar chart.

i’m not convinced that’s true though.

Ok, well the people I linked to have done actual usability studies to back up their claims. But, you have a feeling?

Because it’s easier for humans to read?

With only 2 values? Why would you want that? And what makes you believe they’re as good as a bar chart for that?

You should know that pie charts are widely seen as being very ineffective ways of communicating data.

I’ve never liked them. It’s a design that’s like “give me a rough approximation of the time” vs. a digital clock that gives you the precise time. And, if all you want is a rough approximation of the time, a digital clock is still probably better because you just read the first few digits.