Daily Archives: 2020-05-11

College Advice from a University Instructor

I’ve seen a spate of articles pop up recently discouraging people from going to college in fall 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation. They’re mostly from self-mythologizing startup douches and/or carpetbaggers trying to sell alternative education products, so there isn’t much of value in them and I won’t be linking.

However, talking about them has me refining and recording the advice I give to prospective college students.
So in that interest, a list of my usual advice. Which is very, very explicitly prefaced with the usual “Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer” disclaimer.

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Federal complaint against new girls-only STEM school in Lexington says it’s unfair to boys.

Source: Kentucky.com -- Education

Article note: I've been helping out with UK's WIE program for years. I've always been of the opinion that it would be great if we could offer it to everyone, but there are no where near the resources available to do so, and we're maximizing effect with the demographic targeting. I have very mixed feelings about single-gender primary schooling in general, and STEM-focus primary programs seem to produce interesting pathologies.

Federal Department of Education sex discrimination investigations have been opened on Fayette County Schools’ new all-girls elementary STEM program and four female-only STEM programs at the University of Kentucky following … Click to Continue »

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Rust concurrency: the single-writer principle

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Single-Writer (or "Owner Writes") is _the_ way for doing hardware description language work, and usually the least-awful way to do most parallel programming. We've known that for _at least_ a decade, but software people hate to hear it because it means you have to do actual mental work instead of grunt programming to solve problems. It's really clear why you don't fuck around with contention when you're thinking in terms of "I'm going to have to drive this D flipflop with two different wires, so I need an extra layer of arbitration logic, so I did this wrong."
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