That we only need to abolish PhD programs is like shaving the foam off the top of a spoiled bear and thinking that fixes it. The whole premise of college has been rendered obsolete by the Internet a long time ago. What does a University provide that you cannot find online? You are paying to read textbooks and listen to someone quote from those textbooks. Do you need someone to tell you that you must study X for N hours a day and then pass a test for it? Follow your curiosity and enforce your own discipline. Other than that, colleges are merely social clubs. In the USA, the job requirement for a University degree has become part of the grand grift for profit: you are billed outrageous amounts for babysitting and then pay more in interest on the loans that you will be saddled with for decades. This, like so much of our society, has become a scam.
I wholeheartedly agree. In the UK, I find it especially irritating that the biggest selling point touted for going to university by a lot of people is the "social experience", not the education!
Either way, most of the education seems to happen when you're locked away in your dorm room. I could have honestly done that studying anywhere with a bit of peace and quiet.
To be fair, while this works great for certain subjects like computer science, there are things you can't learn online. Medicine, chemistry, biology, experimental physics and most of engineering require labs and tools and a level of personal oversight or interaction that's just not accessible to young people otherwise. You might be able to get rid of lecture halls in the long run, but you'll never get rid of labs.
This makes a great case for community-based labs. There have been some startups doing this for mechanical engineering, at least. A big issue is the monopoly over labwork by the university system and then industry. The first requires your money, the second requires that you give money to the first.
The thing is, these things don't generate money. A first year lab course in physics, chemistry or biology will only cost you money. It's all about the students learning and it will be years before they are able to do something that generates money. There's a reason why companies don't train their own chemists out of high school. Universities run these labs anyways and if a single student drops out they don't lose a huge investment. I'm all for more dedicated in-house training and less academic requirements, but the reality is that the economy is not suited to handle that.
Do you think that in the hypothetical absence of the formal education system, the vacuum would be filled by the collaboration of a likeminded community? Social communication among groups with common interest is easier now than it has ever been, particular across vast geographies. This is a least one positive effect of social media, notwithstanding all its negative societal impacts.
Oftentimes we read a comment of the kind "bad or good code can be written in any language or paradigm" in response to writings of the ills or virtues of said language or paradigm. Thus implying that we really shouldn't care of the choice of tools but rather concern ourselves with the individuals using them? This seems like an easy out. Too easy. If it is bad code that we need to worry about, no matter what the syntax or semantics, then how do we do that? Is bad code, like porn, something that we only recognize when we see it, impossible to clearly define? If that's the case, then we really need to figure out some better way to guide us. The mention of Kevlin Henney is particular here in that he has made presentations specifically identifying examples of bad code and how they are made better. If no language or paradigm can help steer us in the right direction--a proposition that I do not believe--then there best be some clear way to tell us how to avoid the pitfalls other than "I know it when I see it."
Exactly the point in my strident post below, that now has a negative value unsurprisingly given the content of many of the replies here. Is it unfairly rude to challenge the ethics of what people choose to do? Is the world not shaped by what we do or even somewhat by our mere participation with what others do? Nothing will get better, and perhaps even worse, if all we care about is our own personal gain.
Wow; it's all about you: what you have to gain or lose if you leave or stay. Not a single mention of conscience about contributing to an enterprise that has and continues to do so much damage to the human psyche. That's really sad.
A computer should still function when offline. A time will come when more people distrust the internet and return to using their computer and its apps disconnected from it, or at least highly restricting what apps try to connect to. I do this already using Simplewall because it warns and asks permission for any app or protocol that I do not specifically allow, and I end up blocking most of them, especially OS "services".
TL;DR, literally, I didn't bother to read the whole thing. Time pressure will never go away. It only takes common sense to realize that those who want something, i.e. are paying for it, want it as soon as possible. The difference from making physical things is the perception that software is soft: it seems to be infinitely malleable and all it takes is hand waving magic or sheer willpower to manifest it. This is of course the lie that those building software understand, and those that do not, will not.
The Guardian might have been good once, but I stopped reading after it became obvious that they now shill for the establishment, push irrelevant click-bait headlines, and beg for money every time you open the page.
What is going on at Mozilla? It's getting harder to stay faithful to the organization supposedly representing the open web. They are acting more like the profit-first companies that are strangling our use of the internet. Starting a browser to a blank page should not make any outbound connection until the user requests something. Apparently their HTTP3 support is choking while trying to connect to some centralized service. This is an unacceptably poor engineering design.
Nearly no one in software development, particularly VR, seems to care about the morality of supporting Facebook. Are we too mesmerized by their latest shiny toys, Quest 2, et. al.? Doing a search for anything concerning the ethics of feeding the Meta beast led me to this scant result.
