University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto is photographed at the administration building on the UK campus in Lexington, Ky., on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024.
Article note: Lambda School/BloomTech is, was, and always has been the most obviously predatory fuckin' thing, sitting right at the intersection of rampant fraud-adjacent startup behavior and rampant fraud-adjacent higher ed behavior.
They had their bogus "Don't pay unless you get employment in the field" shtick, which was so loosely defined they always won. Their "income sharing" agreement is ... a loan with particularly unfavorable terms. Their startup douche/VC buddies love them because they trivialize programming to depress wages in the nerds they try to exploit in other valley bro endeavors.
$164k fine and some debt reduction? Execs should be in jail. Their fake-loan and VC lucre should be getting liquidated out in the settlement. At least they're basically banned from handling education money now, though they've already one greasy regulator-avoidance restructure so it may not be adequate to put them down.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist — it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt.
Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years — rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition.
Article note: They're for consuming arbitrarily geo-fenced content, torrenting, and other "someone will personally or legally harass you for trying to consume content without subjecting yourself to the middlemen's increasingly outrageous terms" applications.
Most of the privacy marketing on VPNs is like a "For tobacco use only" sticker on a bong.
Article note: I feel this in my bones.
That said, I'm not sure the author's prescription of "we need fewer more elite academics" is helpful or even relevant - we need to evaluate academics in ways that don't incentivize spraying high-volume bullshit or the behavior will exhibit regardless of numbers. Their premise also seems to imagine that luminaries are preordained geniuses rather than products of their circumstances (both in the sense of "people whose conditions permit them the latitude them to become intellectuals" and "as our overall understanding of things improves, the opportunity for new fundamental ideas shrinks"), which seems hard to defend.
Maintaining our escalating technological society requires a larger group of specialists, and that makes space for a growing number of PhDs both for higher-education and niche subject expertise ... but the majority of people filling those roles are being competitively evaluated on their ability to publish and hype papers and attract research funding, which incentivizes each and every one of them to spray or be out-competed by someone willing to spray, until we're left with a population of academics made entirely of game-playing sociopaths. This isn't unique to academia, we're further along watching the same shit play out in a wide assortment of industries (See: every time you hear about Boeing in the news in the last several years.).
The TEA expects to save between $15 and $20 million per year by using its new “automated scoring engine.” | Image: The Verge
Students in Texas taking their state-mandated exams this week are being used as guinea pigs for a new artificial intelligence-powered scoring system set to replace a majority of human graders in the region.
The Texas Tribune reports an “automated scoring engine” that utilizes natural language processing — the technology that enables chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand and communicate with users — is being rolled out by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to grade open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams. The agency is expecting the system to save $15–20 million per year by reducing the need for temporary human scorers, with plans to hire under 2,000 graders this year compared to the...
Article note: It's a 2011 article, and the start is a little screed-y, but it is a _fascinating_ look at the various convergent type element designs.
I was aware of the Blickensderfer and TTY cylindrical style, and that IBM licensed the Marx toy for some of how it manipulated the cylinder, but there are a number of details I hadn't seen elsewehre, and I'd never come across the various precursor convex type element designs.
Article note: Ooh.
That's less nasty than resin, and in the same price range as other enthusiast benchtop fab tech. Toolchain looks credible.
Excited to see SLS maybe coming down to accessible, assuming they haven't over-promised or wandered into a patent minefield.
Article note: If an employer MDMs a device, or has root/admin on it, or prevents the owner from having root on it because their B2B security theater crapware takes exception to root and/or running under a VM, they pay for it and any service or upkeep.
Gray zones include open standards - like TOTP or SMS - that you can noninvasively integrate into existing tools - and things jailed to VMs on machines the owner controls.
I'm still forcing UKY's Duo setup to degrade to SMS mode because it thinks (almost? I have a phone rigged with Knox based pseudo-rootful ad blocking that might pass - I don't care to try) every device I own is tampered. Occasionally I get an automated-looking prompt about it and fill in "You can supply a dongle, pay for a phone, support an open standard like TOTP, or deal." No idea if anyone reads it.
Oh boy. Roku has an… Interesting new patent. Thought you could avoid the ads infesting every “smart” TV you buy now by using external devices through HDMI?
Disclosed herein are system, apparatus, article of manufacture, method and/or computer program product embodiments, and/or combinations and sub-combinations thereof, for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device via a high-definition media interface (HDMI) connection, where the media device provides media content and/or a control signal. When the media device pauses the media content, the display device can determine that a pause event has occurred and insert an ad shown on the display device. Further, some embodiments include determining the context and/or content of the media content that is paused, and determining an ad that is customized to the determined context and/or content to be displayed on the display device. In some embodiments, the display device can determine additional information from the control signal that may also be used to determine the ad to be displayed on the display device.
