You can claim that there are requirements that are not mentioned anywhere in any of the instructions given to the students, but there’s no evidence for that in what they were actually given.

I fully agree that her paper is shitty. But, the ways in which it’s shitty aren’t criteria for the assignment, other than the bit about “is the paper clearly written”. I’d hate to give a hateful girl who did such sloppy work a passing grade, but I can’t see how you can claim her shitty writing didn’t mostly meet the criteria as listed.

IMO a reasonable grading rubric would be something like:

• In your own words, cite specific arguments made in the article and any evidence given to support them (5 points)
• Analyze one or more of the article’s arguments, by either showing why the supplied evidence is strong or weak, or by finding and citing another credible source that either supports or disputes those arguments (10 points)
• Write clearly and persuasively, aiming at a late high school / early college audience (10 points)

Both teachers make comments saying something like “you are being asked to support your ideas with empirical evidence”. If that’s true, it certainly wasn’t in the instructions the students were given. They were only asked for a “thoughtful reaction or response”. You could twist the idea that “thoughtful” is supposed to mean “supported by empirical, scientific evidence”, but it really doesn’t sound like that was the assignment at all. Maybe if every other assignment had been graded that way, and it was well known that a “reaction paper” had to use scientific evidence, and that “thoughtful” meant “carefully citing scientific evidence”, but as it is, it just looks like a really shitty paper that nevertheless meets the requirements of a really sloppy assignment.

Well, the TA does a pretty good job explaning where it is lacking.

Again though: Which aspects of the grading rubric do you think she failed at? The TA talks about things that aren’t on the grading rubric, or if they are they fall under “bad writing” which is only worth 5 points.

It’s been around since the 1980s. If you didn’t know it it’s not because you’re a millennial, it’s because you weren’t part of the right subcultures when you were young / teen / 20s.

In what sense did she not do the assignment? Which aspects of the grading rubric do you think she failed at? Her rhetoric may be flawed, but that wasn’t part of the assignment. You could argue that flawed rhetoric is bad writing, but that’s only 5 points of the assignment out of a total of 25.

Let’s take a step back and look at the assignment itself.

• “write a … reaction paper”. What is a reaction paper? They didn’t have those when I was in school.
• “includes a thoughtful reaction to the material presented in the article”: That’s incredibly vague. What counts as thoughtful? How are they grading that?
• “The best reaction papers illustrate that students have read the assigned materials and engaged in critical thinking about some aspect of the article”: That’s it? The best papers illustrate that the student has read the assigned materials and thought about something in them. But, that’s only the best papers, acceptable papers what… don’t indicate that the student actually read the required materials? Or maybe they read them but didn’t actually think about them?
• “Does the paper show a clear tie-in to the assigned article?” Again, that’s it? It has to be related to the thing the student was supposed to have read?
• “Does the paper present a thoughtful reaction or response to the article, rather than a summary?” Ok, so you don’t get good points if you summarize without saying anything of your own. But, there’s no indication here on what “thoughtful” means. It could mean anything from deeply introspecting your own feelings about something, to doing some research to see if the observations / findings / results from something you’ve read match scientific studies.
• “Is the paper clearly written”: Only 5 points? Given how wishy-washy the other requirements are, this should be the majority of the points.

Given how terrible the assignment was, just about anything should pass as long as it’s clear the student read the article and thought about it. Even if their writing is shitty, that’s only 5 points.

Did she demonstrate that she read the article? I guess so. She didn’t quote from it, and only talked about a couple of aspects, like teasing as a way to enforce gender norms, and that encouraging diverse gender expressions could improve students’ responses. But, if that’s what’s in the article, she clearly demonstrated that she did read the article. I don’t know what a 10/10 would be in “show a clear tie-in”, given that it’s only a 650 word essay and you’re told not to summarize. But, it seems pretty clear she read it and that she wrote about what’s in the thing she read, so 8/10.

Did she write a thoughtful reaction to what she read, rather than a summary? Well, yeah. She didn’t summarize the article at all. You can argue how thoughtful her response was, but she engaged with the ideas in the article and reacted to them, just as she was asked to do. If thoughtful means “did you question your own beliefs”, then it wasn’t thoughtful. But, if thoughtful means “did you read the article and have thoughts, which you expressed”, then yes. 7/10.

Is the paper clearly written? It’s pretty shitty writing, 2/5. Luckily for her, how well it’s written is only 5/25 points.

So, 17/25 points for a shitty essay which, nevertheless, fully meets the requirements for a shitty assignment.

He successfully ran away from, clinched with, and dropped to the ground to avoid a boxer who hadn’t fought a match in a year and a half. He managed that for about 6 rounds. Then he got tired, and he started getting hit, and then he had his jaw broken into 3 pieces.

My guess is that you didn’t put on the jumper properly and accidentally shorted them out. I know I shorted out things back in those days by putting jumpers on wrong. But who knows, you might be right. It was so long ago and the effects of getting a setting wrong were often so much more serious back then.

problem there is getting the entire industry on board, you inevitably run into the “now we have 1 more standard”-problem

True, but, this is one way where the near monopolies in the PC space are an advantage. If Nvidia makes the change on their own, all the motherboard companies would have to follow suit. If Nvidia worked with AMD it would effectively be a standard already.

Nvidia might want to do it as it stands because their main market these days is data center “GPUs” which are nothing like the gaming cards, so if they could make their gaming cards look more like the datacenter “GPUs”, they could possibly save some design time.

Physically smaller, but that’s only because they’re still designing it to be compact, where the motherboards are designed to be spread out. We’re still basically using the same setup that was used for the Voodoo VGA graphics cards in the 1990s, but the cards have more and more powerful, but also bigger and bigger.

It would be really nice if they re-thought the way the second computer connected to the first, and gave people more control over that second one. For example, mount the graphics card parallel to the motherboard instead of perpendicular, and give it more space to spread out so it’s easier to cool. And, speaking of cooling, allow us to mount our own coolers on the more easily. My graphics card is by far the loudest fan in my case. I want a quiet computer, so I want to be able to put a Noctua fan on my GPU, not just my CPU.

I haven’t bought a GPU in years, but it’s absurd how they all seem to now take 3 slots.

The motherboard architecture really needs a revision in the modern GPU world. Instead of balancing it in a tiny slot, it should be stacked parallel with the motherboard and supported on all 4 corners (and possibly in the middle too to prevent sagging) similar to how the Raspberry Pi world has Pi Hats which go on top of the main board.

Physically assembling it is still fairly difficult. There’s the physical effort of wrangling a heavy heatsink or a huge graphics card into place while being gentle so you don’t bend or break any of the connectors. There’s plugging in all the cables in a tight space where you can’t always clearly see. There’s knowing which cable goes where when the labeling is small and all the cables look basically the same. There’s the challenge of knowing when a cable or a card is properly seated, knowing how much you can push to get something locked into place, without pushing too much and breaking it.

It’s harder than lego, but it’s not rocket surgery.

It warned you about that, but I don’t think actually frying a monitor was common. I was cautious, but I still made mistakes and gave it values that my monitor couldn’t handle, but the worst that happened was a dangerous sound coming out of the monitor and no useful picture on the screen. I immediately shut off my monitor when that happened, but it didn’t do any permanent damage.

Probably a cheaply made monitor might have issues, but well built monitors had hardware protection against invalid settings.

Yeah, that never happened. Smoke coming out of the drive would require a short, or power where power isn’t supposed to go.

It didn’t air in Canada. What happened was that the Canadian outlet that has the Canadian rights to redistribute 60 Minutes in Canada accidentally made the segment available in their app thinking that it was going to be broadcast. So, the same version of 60 Minutes that aired on CBS in the USA aired in Canada, but the app contained the CECOT segment.

The influencer obviously has much less skill than the boxer. But, he has been getting the best training money can buy for several years, and he’s used a lot of steroids to get as big as possible. It’s not like you or me getting into the ring, it’s a decently talented amateur boxer going up against a pro. He was trained on how to defend himself, and had the experience to do it. I think he got as badly injured as he did mainly because he acted like a twat in two ways. First, he spent a lot of the match running away, which tired him out. Second, he spent a lot of it showboating and taunting Joshua, with his hands down.

The punch that wrecked his jaw was a clean hit that happened both because the influencer was too tired to defend himself properly, and was acting like in idiot and not defending his head. Joshua was eventually going to win, regardless. But, the influencer probably would have been less damaged if he’d fought fairly and protected his head. Then he’d have been hit through his guard, which would have been enough to drop him, but not to wreck his jaw.

I completely agree. He was in the ring because he was earning tens of millions of dollars to do it.

I could imagine giving him kudos if he’d been willing to stand toe-to-toe and actually engage in a boxing match with Joshua. It would probably mean that he’d have lost more quickly, but at least he would have been trying to win. Instead he spent almost all the time running away, and when he couldn’t run away anymore he’d drop to his knees and attempt to wrestle Joshua to the mat. In a competitive boxing match I think he would have been disqualified, or at least had a major points reduction by the end of the first round.

Look, if I were offered tens of millions to engage in a real boxing match against a real boxer, I’d definitely take it, and my approach would be basically the same: run away and try to avoid taking damage. For tens of millions I think almost anybody would take the fight, and almost nobody would actually fight to win, if it risked being hit harder. But, the difference is that I wouldn’t be the one organizing the event. I wouldn’t be claiming I had a chance. I wouldn’t be trying to intimidate the actual boxer at the weigh ins.

The influencer hyped up the fight like he had a chance, he posted training videos showing he was taking it seriously, he used a lot of steroids to try to get as big as possible. Then, as soon as he got into the ring, he did everything possible to avoid fighting aside from leaving the ring.

Death is extremely rare in boxing, serious injuries are also rare. The main issue with boxers is the lifetime of getting hit tends to add up, especially hits to the head.

Jake Paul’s jaw injury is just about the worst thing you could expect to have happen in a single boxing match, as long as the referee was competent and didn’t allow a fighter with a concussion to keep fighting.

For interesting definitions of “high level”. But, whether or not he’s a “high level” competitor, he does actually compete, and he’s willing to lose against more skilled opponents. That’s far more than Musk would ever do.

He engaged in competition with an actual athlete

I haven’t been paying much attention, and didn’t even know this fight had happened until after the memes, so I might get some of this wrong. But, from what I gather, the influencer initially planned to fight a boxer who was significantly smaller and lighter, but there were legal issues with that fight. So, instead he arranged to fight Anthony Joshua. Joshua hadn’t fought in something like a year and a half. But, is an actual boxer who hasn’t fully retired.

The way the fight went, the influencer kept running away until he was too tired to keep running, at which point, finally, the boxer was able to actually start landing punches, and eventually he broke the influencer’s jaw in 2 places.