You misspelled "ads for prostitution." Which they eventually stopped doing, only after considerable public pressure and state AGs threatening criminal prosecution.
Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
It's … okay … but it still falls down in a fair few areas? It's crap at finding restrooms. Finding a stop on the road is also difficult, as it seems like it just defaults to a basic radial search, when as a driver you want things down-route, not radially out. All the AI in the world can't seem to figure out when I'm looking for gas or food that closed businesses are not results I want to see. It eats enough CPU to melt phones, such that Android now has built-in support for this?!¹. Attempting to report things often goes in vain². Some of the notifications need work ("object in road ahead" … I'd kill for what lane! this one is just anxiety in a notification), and it'd be nice to see the lane designations ahead of time (it only shows them once you're like <1mi out). I've never gotten the AI-home detection to work. Attempting to navigate to the house of anyone with an Irish name gets me a bar, and the forced-voice-navigation when in a car means I have to be able to pronounce the destination. Google does not seem to grok that sometimes … there's a person in the car who is designated navigator. They can type, it's fine. Some turn directions could be better if you incorporate more precise language into them³. Some directions could be abbreviated "Navigate to I-4 North": I live here, I don't need step-by-step hand-holding to the interstate, but I'd like to plug in the destination before the car is rolling.
¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying
²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice!
³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.
> There wasn't much demand for the extra capacity. Even low end cpus from a decade ago are plenty capable for just browsing the web and typing up documents.
It stalled before the rise of PC-as-Internet-portal.
I bought a high end PC in 2003, and 5 years later the PCs were not much faster - probably not even 2x. Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.
It stalled because scaling got a lot more challenging. Not because of lack of demand.
Yes, but it only stalled along a single dimension - Single core clock speed.
I was building gaming machines in the early 2000s, I absolutely remember the 4ghz wall that cpus hit.
But it wasn't a real wall... because we then got one of the arguably most influential processors ever in the Core 2 duo. Which... blew the limit away by giving you two processors clocked at 2.93 GHz each.
And honestly, even then - it was lack of demand (we could go to 4+ghz, but we didn't want to pay the power bill for the rest of the system - the planned pentium 5 was 7-10ghz on paper, but they canceled the project because keeping it fed and cool was too hard for personal desktop machines).
Of Note - we did reach these speeds on consumer hardware (ex - in 2012, Andre Yang hit 8.794Ghz on an AMD FX-8350)
So it was never "impossible" to keep scaling. It just wasn't worth it compared to going multi-core.
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And maybe it's because I was in my formative years at this time, but you're off by 5+ years with this:
> Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.
Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004. Wikipedia was released in 2001. Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s. What do you think the damn 2000s dot-com bubble crash was?
at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).
> Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004
Well, Gmail was actually one of the last web based email clients people used :-) Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and so many others predate Gmail by years.
> Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s.
One of them. People still used non-browser apps for all kinds of things: Media consumption (people didn't watch movies on Youtube), Office (Google Docs was very much a niche thing for many years), photo-editing (lots of pirated versions of Photoshop/Lightroom years after the iPhone release), etc.
Most non-mail, non-social media, non-shopping stuff people do on the web these days was a dedicated SW from the vendor in those days. Want to make a photobook? Download this Windows binary and set it up there. It will then communicate with the server for the order (no browser utilized).
> at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).
Spring chicken! My first online experience was on a 340 baud modem :-)
So yeah, perhaps after 10 years they'll change once they'll see other index funds doing better, and have data to back up that in the long term, early inclusion didn't hurt.
> we need to apply the same constant social pressure to mathematics skills that we do for learning to read.
Ha Ha Ha! Cute you think society cares about reading abilities!
I mean, OK, you are expected to be able to do basic level reading. But, say, reading something independently to learn something? Even when I was in university 20 years ago it was a struggle to get people to read.
> It's hard to convince kids why they should learn advanced abstract math, beyond what is necessary to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill.
When I was just a bit younger, I detested what I'm about to say, but now know as the "reality".
Your argument is focused on rationalism. You're trying to give kids/teenagers real world reasons to learn something.
People are rarely motivated by reason. They are motivated by emotions.
If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of very "rational" adults (college professors included) who clearly know something to be true, will admit to it, but will still go the emotional route.
As a parent, I looked into the research on changing/shaping children's behavior. And the key things that stood out:
1. If you know enough adults who do equivalently bad things even while they know the harm in it, don't expect kids to behave based on reason.
2. Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives. They shouldn't clean up the table because it will keep the house clean. They should clean it up because they'll get a (short term) positive reward.
3. Focus on building the ritual as a habit, and separate it from any semblance of morality. The brain needs to get accustomed to the actual behavior. The rationale can be added (now or when older), but if you focus too much on rationale without the habit, you'll get someone like me, who realizes a lot of behaviors are good for me, but won't do them because "my brain isn't wired for it".
Getting back to kids learning algebra, or whatever: Their lack of incentive isn't because they can't connect to practical skills in life.[1] The reason they don't want to do it is because it is not a valued skill amongst their peers. And it's also not a valued skill in American society.
That's why high school kids in Eastern Europe or East Asia tend to know this a lot better. If you can't multiply two numbers on paper, you're an idiot. Everyone will know you're an idiot. As much an idiot as not being able to read properly. So you learn it because you know that it's just a baseline intelligence marker you should have by a certain age. You don't whine about it any more than you'd whine about how to properly eat food without spilling it. Sure, once they're older and reflect back, they may say "I never needed algebra", but it doesn't bother them. Knowing it is merely part of being cultured.[2]
Now being motivated by shame is really not a great way to get people to do something, and that's not what I'm encouraging. The point is that it's a broader societal problem. Why should they learn it if they see no one else values it?
[1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
[2] This is why California, in particular, had a strong push back regarding calculus not being taught in high schools. There's a strong and relatively wealthy Asian/immigrant community in those places, and they've tried to maintain the value of being decent at math. (All the stuff about impacting university education is fluff. I used to work at a university, and they had remedial programs for incoming students who didn't know algebra/pre-calculus. It adds to the time to graduate, but by and large is successful - it's OK if you go into engineering without being exposed to calculus).
> [1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
'It's fun' is a pretty compelling reason for both kids and adults to learn certain things, but you can't just decide what's fun and what isn't. Maths rarely gets to have that reason (and when it does, it applies to people for whom this entire problem isn't relevant).
Actually, when I read they usually graded on a curve, I lost all interest. I don't respect teachers that grade on curves.
You should be graded by how well you know the material - not how well your peers don't know it. I'm always grateful both my undergrad and grad professors didn't curve on a grade.
In my first company, I had 4 different jobs. It was a common adage: Go into a low performing team that does simple work and you'll get promotions much quicker than in a high performing team doing challenging (but fun) work.
It was right. I had 2 "dream" jobs where I did cool, challenging stuff, but where everyone was more than competent. They turned out to be career killers. The promotions I got were all in the other 2 jobs where I did boring business logic coding, and where my peers were barely competent (one had trouble navigating directories using the command line).
That's what happens when you grade on a curve. Smart people begin to work on boring stuff, and not the real challenges.
For failing grades sure, there must be some sort of minimum competence. For sorting out >= B/3.0 grades, a curb can work since you are getting evaluated against your peers to see he is standing out vs just doing acceptable.
If you wanted to grade purely off a curve, you would be stuck with old test problems that were thoroughly vetted and calibrated, an impossible task for smaller classes where the material changes rapidly.
> For sorting out >= B/3.0 grades, a curb can work since you are getting evaluated against your peers to see he is standing out vs just doing acceptable.
I'm still not getting it. For a standard course, the criteria for what is "good" vs "great" should be pretty clear, and it should be independent of your peers. You have a syllabus, and a set of abilities for each grade level. If you hit those targets, you get the grade. If half the class gets an A, then it means they're pretty smart, or you did a great job in teaching. Of course, there's the chance the class was too easy, but you can always fix that.
No, I don't see why you're stuck with old test problems. For standard engineering classes, there's a huge (almost infinite) set of problems one can create.
For smaller classes, grading on a curve is even sillier, as the variance is always higher when the population size is small. For example, a lot of my small classes consisted of highly motivated students (all "A material"), because they're usually obscure electives where the content is challenging. You then pointlessly penalize students who sign up (just like they do at work). In fact, my professors were usually much more lenient on small classes for this very reason (i.e. lowering the standard needed to get an A).
I once took an Intro to Analysis course. It was moderately challenging. I got the highest score in the class, and my grade was A-. Everyone else got B+, B, or lower. A friend of mine (who didn't take the course) got really upset that I didn't get an A (or A+) given that I was the top scoring student.
But I knew my level of understanding/performance. It wasn't that great. I felt even an A- was too high a grade for me. And the teacher did a pretty good job in teaching. Why should I get a higher grade just because the other students were worse?
> For a standard course, the criteria for what is "good" vs "great" should be pretty clear, and it should be independent of your peers.
Do you think upper division college classes are somehow like high school classes with well developed curriculum and teaching professors who teach the same thing every quarter? Now you expect the professor to not only come up with new test material, but also extensively calibrate it before students take it, maybe for a 15-hour per week class (3 hours of teaching + 12 hours of studying), with maybe 15 students? Well, thank God we have AI for these kinds of things now.
Ok, let's exclude upper devision classes and just focus on lower division courses (since you mentioned an Intro to Analysis course). Here you have a relatively better chance of a well understood enough curriculum and testing material to actually not grade on a curve. BUT these are also usually weed out classes, with the idea that they only have N spots for students to proceed on to the upper division course, so curving serves an actual purpose that is aligned with the intended result.
> Do you think upper division college classes are somehow like high school classes with well developed curriculum and teaching professors who teach the same thing every quarter?
I repeatedly said "standard course", which implies it is a commonly taught course (be it upper or lower division). In my undergrad, Analysis I, II and Abstract Algebra I, II were upper division courses. In the engineering departments, stuff like Electromagnetics I, II were upper division.
Anything that is not an elective (and even some popular electives) were standard courses.
Now I'll grant that in CS, some material like machine learning changes rapidly. But in most engineering, very little in the undergrad material changes. Even my semiconductor courses in undergrad haven't changed much in decades.
So yes - for most of those classes (and that means the vast majority of undergrad engineering) classes, the curriculum is relatively standard.
> Now you expect the professor to not only come up with new test material, but also extensively calibrate it before students take it, maybe for a 15-hour per week class (3 hours of teaching + 12 hours of studying), with maybe 15 students?
First: In my very average undergrad university, professors were always careful not to reuse old homeworks/exams. It wasn't a huge burden. Professors who don't do this (e.g. most professors in top universities) signal very clearly their lack of interest in pedagogy.
Second: You want to do a curve on <= 15 students? Are you aware of basic statistics and the problems you get with small N? Are they using a normal distribution or one that is more appropriate for small N?
And as I already said, for a lot of electives where the material isn't standardized, professors lean towards lenient grading. They offer those classes because they want people to take it, and grading via a curve discourages it.
> since you mentioned an Intro to Analysis course
That was an upper division course. Yes, I know some universities have it as a lower division, but many (most in the US?) treat it as upper division.
> BUT these are also usually weed out classes, with the idea that they only have N spots for students to proceed on to the upper division course, so curving serves an actual purpose that is aligned with the intended result.
It was not a weed out course. Neither my undergrad nor grad math departments had weed out classes. I saw that concept only in the engineering departments. My EE department had only Circuits I, Circuits II and digital logic as "lower division". Circuits II was the weed out course, and you were not allowed to take anything else (e.g. E&M, Electronics, etc) unless you got a B or higher.
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