IMO it’s a reasonable point to make when compared to something like the Framework. And it took legal action to get them to offer battery replacements for iPhones, I don’t think you can really claim they’re passionate about component reuse.
> "[...] they just last way longer than any of their competitors."
Citations, please.
In the meantime, an anecdote: My oldest modern-era (64-bit) daily driver is one I use heavily since 15 years. An HP, 16 or 17 years old. The only component that ever caked-out in that bird was the original mechanical hard drive, which died just this year. Similar experiences with IBM/Lenovo, Panasonic and Fujitsu. Apple laptops I don't even look at for they don't offer anything I need.
My 1,500-student public California high school currently lists 7 administration-team members (principal, executive assistant, three assistant principals, school-facilities manager and food-services manager) and 11 administrative-support members (school data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior-clerical assistant, separate registrar and attendance roles, interventions-support specialist, and others). That doesn't include 4 site maintenance, a network-support and a separate network-systems specialists; a separate media-library specialist; 2 psychologists; a college and career advisor; 4 school counselors; a wellness-space support specialist; and a social science and an athletic director.
34 administrative hires. One per 44 students. Many of those roles strike me as fluff.
It’s because there are tons of laws and regulations regarding minors in school, and administration tends to be homegrown (initial expertise in teaching) rather than explicitly developed to navigate the social, political and legal landscape. I’d wager that more than half of those positions are “best practice” staffing decisions in response to this landscape. A handful might also be due to expressed needs and wants of parents. Likely wasteful overall, but students, teachers and families would likely feel the impact and not be satisfied if any positions were axed.
> Which of those roles specifically would you say are fluff?
Food-services manager (it's all oursourced to Aramark), data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior clerical assistant, one of registrar or attendance, two of site maintenance, one of the network specialists (probably both–one across the district is plenty), and probably at least one of the counselors and the separate social science & athletics person, who should just be one of the physical education teachers. That's about ten people, or a million dollars–minimum–in annual savings.
As a full-time position? Aramark literally ran the lunch counters. I could see it being a district-level position, though it would be better positioned as a general procurement role.
> Data-processing specialist and print-center technician both sound like fancy names for secretarial roles
I agree. I was suspicious when I didn't see a secretary for each of the assistant principals listed.
> You're honestly saying schools need fewer counselors in what has been generally regarded as the worst generation for child mental health in years?
I am. Unless the counselors are constantly doing actual therapy I'm deeply sceptical you need that many for a student body of that size. The fact that they're assigned based on the first letter of your last name versus anything remotely thematic or behaviour based seems to emphasise that hypothesis, for me at least.
(When I went to the school, there were bullshit jobs everywhere. One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students. Her role was "strategic" or some nonsense.)
> One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students.
Why would she? That'd distract her from the actually important work of fabricating the reports that make her looking amazingly competent.
My mom is a retired teacher and her main complaint during the last 10-15 years of work was that with all the bullshit paperwork they're required to fill, the teachers literally don't have the time to just plain interact with the students. You want to make an odd, unscheduled extracurricular event? Waste a small pile of paper before organizing it, arguing for how amazing it will be for the students' education, and the an even larger pile of paper afterwards, bluntly telling just how amazing it all worked out and checked some tick boxes the upper management cares about.
This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.
Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.
>This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.
There's plenty of drudge work teachers do that's not "fostering the development of inquisitive minds". Grading papers, preparing lesson plans, etc. I don't see why not at least some of that can be offloaded to AI.
> Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
Khan Academy showed that one great teacher distributed to millions does that pretty well. It doesn't make sense for every teacher in the country (the worst and the best) to create their own syllabus and teach the same thing over and over again.
Sure, let's have 100 child classes which are hell on earth for everybody involved, starting with the little kids who will literally be scarred for life from it.
Teacher costs should be going up as much as we can afford, to keep reducing class sizes as a fundamental part of quality education.
I agree that admin is ripe for efficiency gains. A local school district cut dozens of teaching roles, not even one person from their extremely bloated central administration. It's also out of touch with the schools with no campus visits, and serves mainly as a hindrance to any sort of actual work going on inside the individual schools. It's a horrible caricature of bureaucracy.
> Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.
It can't.
The only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes.
Every study and every practical example of doing that ever done shows that it negatively impacts student outcomes.
Not because the teacher is failing to be whatever it is you imagine "more productive" to be but because there is a minimum amount of attention needed per student for them to not fall through the cracks and one person's attention is not scalable.
> only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes
And hours in class. Or productivity of time in class. I'm not saying the former is desirable or latter feasible. But the education "production function" has three inputs.
Oh, it definitely can, in a way very similar to the way you can dramatically increase doctor's success rates by being selective about who you treat.
Specifically: take the most disruptive students and eat them. (Be stealthy about it, the point is not fear of punishment.) The productivity difference between a classroom that spends 90% of its time on instruction vs 90% of its time on classroom management is massive.
That's why you have to be careful about applying business notions like "productivity" to governmental duties like education and mail and highways. (I dearly wanted to include healthcare or at least hospitals in the list, but I live in the US.) Businesses can and should be selective and take higher risks. For governmental tasks, productivity isn't even well-defined. If you're failing (or eating) 20% of your students but the other 80% are doing amazingly well, is that better or worse than 99% of everyone doing just okay? How about if everyone's test scores go up and practical ability goes to shit? (This is not a hypothetical, not where the kids have figured out how to use ChatGPT even for the tests. Which is a lot of places.)
Teaching is nowhere near Pareto optimal right now, so I'm not arguing in favor of the status quo. I'm just saying you have to be very, very careful when pushing for "productivity".
You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year, but you would increase costs; and in some parts of California, you would need to rebuild schools with air conditioning to hold classes effectively in the summer.
Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
>You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year
Productivity is output divided by some input, either labor or money. Working for longer isn't going to magically increase productivity.
>Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
Right, I don't have a specific solution for increasing teacher productivity, but it's not obvious that it's a law of economics that it can't increase. People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
> People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
Form contracts and will generators and what not was automation for lawyers. Plenty of enter symptoms to get a diagnosis stuff out there for doctors; or the more paletable, enter symptoms for charting, get a suggestion and enter medicines and get alerts about interactions.
in California there are not more students.. all tiers of schools show falling enrollments, year after year. Except community colleges, where they have discovered that more than 15% of all students are ghost enrolled.
--
California K-12 public school enrollment fell by 74,961 students (a 1.3% decline) for the 2025-26 school year, marking the largest drop since the pandemic. This loss was significantly higher than the state’s Department of Finance projection of only 10,000 students.
The decline is driven by lower birth rates and a reduction in immigration, with the latter exacerbated by families fearing enforcement actions. Los Angeles County accounted for nearly half of the state's total loss, losing 32,953 students, largely due to a decrease in newcomer students within the LAUSD.
Private schools saw a steeper drop of 6.6%, while homeschooling declined by 3.7%.
The enrollment drop is causing budget deficits, leading to staff layoffs, program cuts, and potential school closures.
Hispanic students experienced the largest numeric loss (48,064), while white students saw the largest percentage decline (2.68%).
English learner enrollment fell by 8.2%, partly due to reclassification and partly due to out-migration.
From glancing at the numbers it looks pretty similar, but there's been a huge drop in births in California in the last 10-20 years so it's probably the last few years where that will be true.
Peak birth year was 1990 after booming through the 80s, births started falling off a cliff after 2008 and last year there were about the same number of births as in 1980 despite the population increasing by 80%.
Microsoft has always stood for mediocre quality software so that's no surprise.
Also, they stopped caring about Windows because they want recurring service revenue. Making Windows a subscription service for consumers would outrage the users (even though they kinda already do this for business with Microsoft 365). So the consumer market is just viewed as a billboard for M365 and Copilot. So everything you see there is just lowball effort, even worse than their normal quality.
It's demonstrably possible. And further, why does what some portion of Microsoft, a huge, multi-headed beast, does qualify as the bar for what is reasonable for users to expect?
This, and add to that the fact that web apps make it trivial for the dev to just randomly change the GUI out from under me without my consent or ability to prevent it, and, well, wonder why I and so many others dislike them? I want to be able to refuse app updates, thank you very much.
A question - Which portion of Microsoft, the multi-headed beast develops pure-native apps now ? Even the Windows 11 Settings app is Javascript.
The multi-headed beast has been assimilated by web-tech. They can't code GUI C++ no more - except their compiler/graphics team. And even the latter are dying.
Id be interested in a source for both this and the parent's comment. How do we know which settings pages use which tech? Have people been decompiling them?
Yeah exactly, on Linux I mostly use Qt apps and they're great. Even Telegram is native. The only one that I use that isn't is Obsidian. But all these notetaking apps are electron (and markdown) somehow.
Considering people are leaving Windows in part because Microsoft is shoving web slop into it, perhaps other devs should learn the lesson that it's not acceptable to use web frameworks on the desktop.
Yes. Hollywood is mad, but piracy sites are still up and unblocked. Book publishers are mad, but Anna's Archive persists on CCTLDs.
The US by and large doesn't censor websites even if the content is illegal in the US. They'll get a warrant and seize servers or domains if it's in the country, or maybe poke international law enforcement for cooperation, but it doesn't really extend beyond that.
> It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants (“Newly Detected Websites”) by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs’ DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the “Landing Page”).
Actually no, Iran's missiles aren't that accurate and if you count those that disintegrate on the way, hit open areas or are intercepted you get very few missiles that are able to hit from the very few that are launched.
This can be seen in much less overall damage than the 12 day war or the death count which is lower
This is genuinely hilarious to say this with a straight face
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