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> And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.

Perhaps in your corner of the industry. On the consumer side people have been very vocally tired of purchasing products piecemeal on a subscription basis for a long time now. I, personally, am so sick of everything being a subscription I refuse to participate except in one or two services I use almost every single day. SaaS vendors to me are without a doubt vultures. A good exception that makes me happy is jetbrains. They are one of the few I am happy to pay for. Most of the other consumer grade SaaS is churn and burn crap.

I personally welcome the death of SaaS. I hope it brings forth a new era where I actually own things and can pay a company every couple years some nominal percentage of retail for a “service pack” upgrade.


This is decidedly not true on almost every account.

Europe has its own opioid crisis, and we absolutely can blame other countries who play host to the primary runners of heroin and synthesizers of fent. The pain industry is just the first baby step to hard drugs. We already handled our side after OxyContin - it’s impossible to get more than ibuprofen from a doctor without doing backflips through flaming hoops.


I live in the European country most like the USA, in a poor area of a major city. I'm not aware of any crisis. It was never that easy to get opioids here and our doctors work for the government, not themselves.

> We already handled our side

What did you do about the millions of Americans already hooked?

As I understand it, stopping the supply from pills mills lead to people hitting the street to buy product cut with fent. Some handling.


I am from Spain, from a blue collar town. Nope, that's utterly bullshit. There's no opioid crisis there.


You missed the sarcasm. HN articles all follow a formula, almost predictably so, where they’re lazy thought pieces by a self important blogger.


This might shock your worldview but cheating is absolutely rampant in STEM programs in person too. I still remember the corrupt graduate students who would circulate exam answers and/or take money to get copies of exams. Tutoring services range from valid to straight up homework cheating. Students share answers all the time, sometimes innocently, because humans want to help each other. Students are much, much smarter than faculty when it comes to stopping cheating. Good luck stopping it in a lecture hall of 100 people!

Every accredited online course program requires proctoring. To think in person stops cheating is naive. We need to rethink how education works if people feel the need to cheat so much. I’ll give you a hint: when people pay 5,000 dollars a class they’re going to cheat because they’re financially incentivized to do so. Administrative bloat in university needs to be done away with immediately and costs of education fixed by the government to some number that is reasonable for most people. Education should not be for-profit. Right now it is, even at public universities.


I have 30 years of experience teaching mathematics in higher education. Around 50% of higher education occurs in community colleges. Another large percentage occurs in regional state universities and small liberal arts colleges. Many of these don’t have graduate students and don’t have large lecture hall courses. Your experience is not normative.

Every accredited online course program requires proctoring.

You are wrong.

Your logic is quite bad too. The response to the statement that there is massive amounts of cheating in online courses shouldn’t be: “there is cheating in face-to-face courses too”. Obviously what matters are the relative rates of cheating and you’ve not provided any evidence or reasoning as to why the rates are comparable.

To think in person stops cheating is naive.

Obviously. And I never stated or implied that there is no cheating in face-to-face courses.


Remote and correspondence (the same thing really) have existed forever. There is zero basis for your statement it’s worse, and there is zero basis for your statement that there is compromise. Remote schooling allows people who wouldn’t have the means to educate themselves formally such as working people, parents, adult learners, etc to do so in a manner practical to them.

I have a degree I got in person and now one I am working on remote. Do you know what the difference is? NOTHING! When I went in person I was making up for the shortcomings of professors too. I was still having to teach myself a lot. The only true difference was I wasn’t able to do more than terrible part time work and I drove 45 minutes one way.

Malware vendors like honorlock have made remote schooling much more difficult. Not in terms of learning but in terms of overall stress level. Remote schooling itself is an incredible way to break from the aristocratic ideal still pedaled by universities today.

I’m envious of students whose parents prepared appropriately for their kids to go to school and focus full time. I was not one of them. My situation made worse by my parents making just enough to disqualify me from any aid despite their contribution of 0. The existence of remote schooling has allowed me to pursue my educational dreams.


I don't really believe the bent on this article that the hospital was at fault. There's an implication that Lawrence Livermore was in some sort of cover up and I don't really buy that line of BS either.

Its a tragedy someone with a horrible disease was taken by fake medicine (DMSO). I do find it weird that the explanation would be dimethyl sulfate production due to a defibrillator but stranger things have happened. If she really did use an incredible quantity of the stuff I suppose it's not entirely unrealistic to believe small quantities of gas local to the body could've been produced but not enough to spread even to the other end of the room.

The only thing the hospital is liable for a mistreatment of her body by not immediately getting it to a place where it could be examined before decay set in. But, on the other hand, who can blame them. All they knew is they had a biohazard of unknown capacity. Anyone with any number of unknown, horrific, highly contagious diseases would be treated the same.


While I agree code like this shouldn't be released fail-deadly it's also patently obvious it's not to be used. There is sufficient notice in the README. If someone uses this, it's at their own peril.

Would you make the same argument for reference implementations of algorithms? For example, small details leading to bugs that can be compromised?

At some point people have to be responsible for themselves...


Looking back at what my best managers (I have two) had in common:

* Cared deeply about my personal progress. Not just at work but in life. Am I feeling okay? How are things going? What are your interests? Are you doing what is interesting to you? Both of them became actual friends outside of work once I left one of the companies, and the other manager left the company I was at during that time.

* Treated me as an equal and used their power in my favor. Bad project? Moved me off it. Salary problems? Fought for a raise. Needed to skill up? Got me what I needed whether it was books, or classes, or whatever.

* Didn't bother much about using 1:1s for "business". It was my time, and they made sure I used it how I wanted. If I wanted to wax poetic about my hobby project for 30 minutes I could.

Importantly both of them understood that what I was doing for the company was a JOB and there were no qualms about that. "Careers" do not exist anymore. This refreshing reality and human feel is something pinhead middle managers I've had since seem to miss.


> Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that

This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas to the lowest bidder. You pay expert prices for this. Even their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time the contract would be up for negotiation.

> So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies

Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower and sleep in the office. That's why.

These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and the health of their employees.


Not an exaggeration, I can confirm OPs story at my own university. When I was in school (2010) the first year had a drop out rate of over 80%. The first class took out over 50%. Many people didn’t have any idea how to use a computer at all. The other weed out was after all the math classes.

Professionally I’ve been in charge of interviewing foreign candidates from those headhunter type programs. I’ve legitimately interviewed people who claimed years and years of experience but had no measurable computer experience.

My high school aged family has next to no idea how to do anything on a computer but use a browser.


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