Superb article by the Economist on the success of super-strict classrooms in Britain.
The fascinating points:
Pupils work hard, and they’re not only OK with it, but it motivates them to aim high
A strict classroom helps pupils from poorer families as children perceive discipline as safety and a promise of success (safety that they might lack at home or in other schools)
Speaking of success, the school weaponizes praise, and children strive for merit points. Competition is not only biologically embedded but also raises everyone’s grades as the school is among the best in Britain.
Poetry is embedded in the school, with lunchtime poetry recitals:
A young teacher stands at the front and shouts the first word of each line; the pupils respond with the rest.
Fantastic, to-the-point, book about the philosophical ideals of the National Socialists.
To quote just a single passage:
History has taught us that the philosophy and ideals the Nazis stood for were and are false and terribly destructive, but we do not do ourselves any favors by writing the Nazis off as madmen or as an historical oddity that will never happen again. The Nazis stood for philosophical and political principles that appealed to millions—that attracted some of the best minds of their generation—and that still command the minds and hearts of people in all parts of the world.
And that means we must face the National Socialists’ philosophical and political ideals for what they actually are—we must understand them, know where they came from, and what intellectual and emotional power they have. Then and only then are we in a position to defeat them. We will be able to defeat them because we will understand their power and we will have more powerful arguments with which to fight back.
“When I began observing the world’s largest chimpanzee colony, at Burgers’ Zoo in 1975, I had no idea that I’d be working with this species for the rest of my life. Just so, as I sat on a wooden stool watching primates on a forested island for an estimated ten thousand hours, I had no idea that I’d never again enjoy that luxury. Nor did I realize that I would develop an interest in power relations. In those days, university students were firmly antiestablishment, and I had the shoulder-long hair to prove it. We considered ambition ridiculous and power evil. My observations of the chimps, however, made me question the idea that hierarchies were merely cultural institutions, a product of socialization, something we could wipe out at any moment. They seemed more ingrained. I had no trouble detecting the same tendencies in even the most hippielike organizations. They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades’ girlfriends. It wasn’t the chimps who were odd, but the humans who seemed dishonest. Political leaders have a habit of concealing their power motives behind[…]”
Two years ago I replaced my Airpods with the Airpods Pro.
The upgrade was significant and necessary, as after 2-3 years, the battery of the old ones was worn out.
Some months ago (as the Airpods where nearing their 2 year anniversary), the first major issues started to come up. The right microphone wouldn’t work well, when touching the right Airpod I would hear a cracking noise, and the battery was slowly decaying.
Turns out that there’s a service program from Apple and Airpods exhibiting crackling or static sounds are eligible.
So I went into the Apple Store in Amsterdam and got a new pair!
Some notes:
You need a genius appointment if you want help quickly
They told me the test process would take two hours, so I got back to the office. Once I got back (15’ later) they called me. They were ready
Even though only one Airpod would malfunction, in their test, both were faulty. I don’t know if this is true, or if they simply didn’t want to give a customer one with a new battery and one with a 2 years old battery
The actual price for 2 new Airpods is EUR 180.16. Phew!
Now my case has an old battery. I’d love to buy the new Airpods Pro 2 case, but there is inconclusive evidence on a reddit thread about the compatibility.
OpenAI has just open sourced Whisper, an automatic speech recognition.
I just tried it out and I’m blown away.
Installation was a piece of cake (even though there was a missing step, but I’ve opened a pull request to help out), and once you’re there, it literally takes seconds to start transcribing:
whisper my_file.m4a --model base
The output is ready to be used in subtitles programs as well, as it looks like this
[01:23.000 --> 01:31.000] Camilla, first question, what keeps you awake at night?
[01:31.000 --> 01:36.000] Around data analytics, let's keep it to that box
[01:36.000 --> 01:45.000] Yeah, so I think we have three different, very specific business units
[01:45.000 --> 01:52.000] And we have teams that are divided between being masters in data in analytics
[01:52.000 --> 01:57.000] And they know much more than I do to having people who are just hearing about data
[01:57.000 --> 02:00.000] And it's a very, very scary topic
[02:00.000 --> 02:08.000] And what I'm supposed to be doing is raising the level so that we at least come to the same level of understanding
[02:08.000 --> 02:13.000] What does it mean for me? What does it mean for the company? What is data?
[02:13.000 --> 02:17.000] I mean we really go into those type of basic conversations
[02:17.000 --> 02:23.000] So that really is a challenge and an opportunity, huge opportunity
[02:23.000 --> 02:26.000] So that keeps me awake at night, how do I do that?
(The audio was taken from an interview I had with Camilla Björkqvist last year).
Caddy is an open source web server that can be used to, among others, proxy other sorts of server adding https with valid certificates.
At home, I have a Unifi controller that uses https but has no valid certificate, so I decided to expose it through caddy.
Since I run caddy as an unpriviliged user, it listens to port 2016 for http and 2017 for https. My router then listens to port 80 / 443 and reroutes to port 2016 / 2017 on the host running caddy.
The working configuration I came up with my Caddyfile is pretty simple
{
http_port2016https_port2017unifi.lanzani.nl {
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8443 { # the unifi controller runs on the same machine as caddy
transporthttp {
tls_insecure_skip_verify # we don't verify the controller https cert
}
header_up-Authorization # sets header to be passed to the controller
}
}
}
