krellor @ krellor @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

You do you, you beautiful server hugging butterfly!

These are three topics that people love to focus on price against traditional services without looking any deeper.

Streaming is only just as expensive as cable if you subscribe to a bunch of them, but if you pick and choose, start and stop, it is cheaper. Further, it is a better experience. You can watch what you want, when you want. You don't need an annoying DVR setup, etc. The experience is better, even if you do choose to pay the same.

For Uber and Lyft, I don't use them because they are cheaper; I use them because they are better than traditional taxis. Seriously, how many people who say they aren't better than taxis have even used taxis heavily while traveling? Using taxis sucks, except possibly around airports or in the rare city you can walk outside and hail a cab. Outside of that you often have to call in, wait for an extended time with no ETA, etc. Lyft and Uber are a better experience, especially when you are outside major tourist or travel hubs.

Finally, cloud is more expensive, but gets you all sorts of benefits. Those benefits may or may not be worth the cost depending on you or your org, but it is not 1-1 to running on prem. On AWS you can trivially automate events across the entire ecosystem of services, run serverless infrastructure, etc. There are many great use cases for spending the money on the cloud, and most organizations should have a hybrid approach.

Sorry, end rant, but I always get tired of the false equivalence of these three things and the tunnel vision on price.

Shouldn't it be pictures of a warehouse first, and then on the full moon it turns into a house making it a werehouse? A werewolf turns into a wolf on the full moon, so the "were" prefix should proceed what it turns into. Unless this is supposed to be a were-warehouse.

Makes me nostalgic; I miss climbing the Cascades and the Leavenworth area. Looks like a fun day!

But using student aid doesn't change that cost. Now, UC Davis and Lewis and Clark State college are both on the expensive side, but they publicly list the cost of attendance. All the FAFSA and their financial aid system does is take that cost, and match it with available aid.

It really sounds like you were offered similar aid packages at multiple universities that included tuition, fees, housing, and meal plans, were sticker shocked, and went to a fourth university and just paid tuition and found cheaper living arrangements. Which is a great way to do it, but not a fair apples to apples comparison.

The reason the distinction is important is because you could have opted to pay just the tuition like you did, but using grants (which aren't paid back) and student loans. Some people can't afford to pay for school out of pocket and they shouldn't come away from this thread thinking that applying for student loans increases their costs, which they don't.

Edited to add: the reason it's worth discussing is because people shouldn't think that applying for student loans will increase the cost of attendance. It won't. The costs of public universities are fixed, publicly listed, and don't change based on your need for financial aid. If you need student loans to pay tuition, it is ok. Just try to avoid financing housing and food costs of at all possible.

Something about the story here is off. I work in higher Ed, have multiple degrees I paid for partly with grants, scholarships, and student loans.

The FAFSA is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The way it works is you report your financial assets and your parents income (unless you are considered an independent student, over 25, etc), and the FAFSA calculates an expected family contribution towards your education and determines eligibility for Pell grants, subsidized student loans, and unsubsidized student loans.

The school you are admitted to looks at the total costs of attending school, and then calculates the amount of student loans you need after applying grants and scholarships.

In the story above, the only way to get the same number for student loans (or parent loans) poping out is if the cost of attendance is identical. So something about the story smells from the start. Then it ends with them applying as a "regular" student and just paying tuition. But there is no tuition difference, or enrollment difference. FAFSA is just financial aid and doesn't impact what the costs are at all or what kind of student you are enrolled as.

So if tuition at Oregon was $10k, applying for a FAFSA wouldn't change that. All it would do is give you access to grants and student loans.

Being generous, maybe they were confused by the attendance costs including things like dorms and meal plans. But they could have opted out of those costs, just like they did at Oregon.

Long way of saying that the story just doesn't match reality so I would take it with a grain of salt. Higher Ed has many faults, but this story is more one person's confused anecdote rather than an exemplar of what is wrong with the system.

I was an operations director in a prior role and oversaw the design and construction of several buildings. The last building was about $70 million, and we spent around $6 million on the design and programming.

What most folks don't understand is the scale of minutiae. I've spent an entire day of meetings hashing out floor box standards between all parties (IT, facilities, design, construction). The amount of preliminary site studies, permit planning, etc, that goes into hundreds of miles of rail, plus stations, interesting into existing infrastructure etc... It's significant.

I've also overwhelmed fiber builds, and have seen costs range upwards of $500k-$1m per mile of new fiber depending on if poles exist, or of trenching, right of way, permits, etc.

And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg for what goes into these plans.

I don't think it's as much that the meta model was replicated as much as they fully open sourced it with a license for research and commercial use.

I actually think the market demand will be fairly small for fully offline AI. The largest potential customers might be government who require full offline hosting, and there is a small group of companies servicing that niche. But even government customers who require that their data is segmented are simply having enclaves setup by the big cloud platforms where they guarantee that inputed data isn't fed into the training process and doesn't leave the customer environment.

I fully support folks who sustain open source AI frameworks, but in terms of commercial customers that will drive industry trends with dollars, I expect there will be demand for hosted solutions that use proprietary models.

I'm not familiar with your school background, but I suspect a watershed distinction is rural vs urban districts. I've had kids in both, and in rural districts, the buses are important, but not as vital for in-town kids as in the metro areas. I'n the rural districts as many kids were dropped off by car or public transit as took the school buses. In the metro areas, the bus might be required or effectively the only option.

It's all speculation, but this isn't Podunk Kentucky; this is Louisville. This is really something a metro of nearly a million people should have figured out by now. But easy to Monday morning quarterback, and I do sympathize with the funding constraints and public apathy.

This is not a picture of happy neighbors, lol.

One of the big issues is that school districts get funding based on things like property taxes, or geographic location. The result is that affluent districts or schools are will funded and have good services, and others do not. There may also be some willful underfunding in some places as well by folks that balk at any taxes or bonds that don't help them immediately.

However, even an underfunded district should have been able to see this plan would have issue and raised a red flag with the community in advance.

I mean, the lack of sidewalk for the k-5 kids is a big deal depending on the type of road and how busy it is. The busses not getting kids home until 10 pm is beyond the pale.

Plus a 6 am pickup for k-5 means the kids are walking to the bus stop around dawn or even in the dark parts of the year, with no sidewalk. The school could be miles away which in city traffic could be significant, and many folks don't have other options.

What a terrible situation for the kids and families.

It's a lot of fun with friends or casual players. Gets less fun if you end up in a lobby with folks that take it serious.

The problem is that things which are local news gain emotional traction and spread beyond usefulness. When I lived (and boated) in Washington State, a series of boating accidents involving teenagers led to a state law requiring licenses to operate powered vessels and new safety regulations. The local coverage of those accidents was helpful and likely necessary to change the laws.

This article should be seen by people in Arizona so they can make decisions about their safety regulations. Unfortunately, it gets indexed and pushed beyond its relevance.

I used to manage site licenses for a large university and these software companies really rake you over the coals. For example, Adobe and MatLab wouldn't license software for just lab computers or to a subset of the student population. They required we purchase total headcount licenses that covered everyone at the institution. In the case of MatLab you also pick out about a dozen of the toolbox add-ons, so it becomes a difficult task of getting the faculty to rank sort all of the packages.

We ultimately ended up purchasing the licenses for the institution but I can understand an institution saying they can't afford it and passing it on to the students in the classes that need it.

For most people computers are just the same as cars. People want a car that will drive them from place to place, are easy to refuel, easy to operate, and can be taken to an expert for anything difficult or that requires specialized knowledge. Same for computers. Most people want a computer to navigate the web, install the apps they are used to and that their friends use, is easy to operate, and can be taken to an expert for any involved work.

Even the friendliest of Linux distro don't check all those boxes. You cant get ready support from a repair shop, many of the apps are different or function differently, and it doesn't receive all the same love and attention from major third party developers as Windows does.

Most people could learn to use Linux; it's not that hard. Most people could learn to change their own oil. But for most people, it's not worth it. For most people it's not the journey, it's the destination and cars and computers are just tools to get there.

Played a ton when it first started; stopped when they released a bug that wiped out the contents of any container with an empty slot. Lost all my stuff. Couldn't really get back into it having lost so much time and with devs that had such iffy null handling via their Lua code.