This is counter to the current perception of professional players, which is that world champions from ten years ago played the way that unexceptional ladder players play today. I think the average skill level has been increasing monotonically over time.
Fine, overall skill has increased. But given the vast amount of information and strategy guides, it is much easier to get to a diamond level now than it was before.
That idea doesn't seem coherent to me -- Diamond is just another way to say "top 60-90th percentile". The vast amount of information is available to everyone equally, so it doesn't explain why some people are above average players. Players in every league have improved.
There's no static "diamond level" way of playing that's been unchanged over ten years to compare against.
I’ve played since the release date thru now with gaps of time not playing... from my experience it’s unequivocally clear that the skill level is much much higher than when the game first came out. Like not even close.
That's true. Watching the first WCS championship is extremely cringy even for a normal-skilled player today. It's cool to see how the meta has improved in recent years !
For iCloud Drive, we should be able to manage which files are saved locally and which aren’t. As is, documents can be manually downloaded but there’s no way to reverse it and have the given documents stored back only in the cloud (freeing up local storage). Then magically a week or more later stuff is uploaded and no longer stored locally. It feels fickle and frustrating.
Also, for anyone thinking of using iBooks with iCloud Drive (iBooks syncing via iCloud, or whatever it's called) and importing ebooks or PDFs from iCloud Drive into iBooks, be aware that they will disappear whenever your device is low on space.
I loaded up a bunch of travel books on a 32GB iPad for an overseas trip this summer only to have them all evaporate shortly thereafter. Every time I got on decent WiFi I would redownload and reimport them from iCloud Drive. Sometimes they would stick around for a few days and sometimes they would be gone in literally hours (gone from the device, not from iCloud Drive).
Incredibly frustrating if you have big reading plans for your offline time. My understanding is that there's no way to get the books to stay put without disabling iBooks iCloud syncing and then loading or importing them the old fashion way (from Dropbox, or via iTunes etc).
This is what I'm waiting for to move wholesale from Dropbox to iCloud Drive, some sort of file attribute that can be sent to say "only store in cloud, keep a local stub" or "ensure always locally cached/pinned locally". Would also love to see iCloud be a Time Machine backup target.
"Bailiff is a simple menubar app which lets you evict iCloud files and folders from local storage, or download them when you want. Saves your Mac’s startup disk from getting cluttered with files you don’t want or use."
Things human value (exploration, science) aren’t necessarily things other species would value. We tend to destroy the planet in our pursuits, so I’m not as confident as you are in our own species’ intellectual superiority.
Many species have better memories than humans, including most monkey/ape species. We have exceptional dexterity while dolphins don’t, so is it a fair fight to judge intelligence by putting a telescope into orbit? Do dolphins have as high a rate of depression in their species as humans? Do they have as many wars as us? Again, are we really that much more intelligent than these other species? Measuring intelligence is hard because we don’t have a rigorous definition.
The only species which even begins to have a plausible comparison is the octopus. Yes, I feel completely confident saying we're more intelligent than orcas or monkeys.
But the question was if “more intelligent” gives us the authority to eat them, or make them go extinct by destroying their habitat, or abuse them for medicine trials.
And if “more intelligent” is a valid reason you are immediately entering a weird area where it is okay to eat a baby because hey, it’s less intelligent! But I doubt many people would think that’s a valid reason, so we’re back to speciesism. which is also problematic because then we appoint the human as sole judge and juror of all living things.
That's a separate question but not the one any of the posts I replied to were addressing. I don't think it's honest to attribute to shield properties they don't have simply because you don't like the implications of the reality.
Which is where someone pays you to vote a certain way. It follows that they want proof, so the receipt shows proof of your vote.
I think it's also likely to cause harassment outside of polling places with gangs on sidewalks asking to see the proof that people voted for their candidate. You DID get a receipt, didn't you?
Abuse of mail in / absentee ballots are one of the few frauds that actually happen. The elderly and tight-knit religious groups are particularly vulnerable.
I think he is referring to cases in the past where politicians and political parties would pay people to vote and require they bring the slip back to prove they voted for the right guy.
I am extremely familiar with both tests. What version of the SAT are you referring? The current version (re-designed a few years ago) is nearly identical to the ACT with the exception of integrating graph-reading questions into the reading and writing sections rather than having their own section.
I took them within a month of eachother, but I can't recall which I took first. I got my results back first on the SAT, so possibly it?
(On a sidenote, it's annoying that the SAT site didn't allow me to use things on it related to my test scores because of the age I got them at. Suppose it's legally mandated though.)
Do you recall when you took the test? I’d like to find the test because I work with ACT tests daily and have never seen a passage where the laws of physics were intentionally violated for sake of “comprehension.”
Additionally the ACT reading passages are very focused, not vague. They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things. The ACT is designed to predict how students will perform in college, not how “smart” they are or how “good of a reader” they are.
I similarly had a question on my 4th grade qualification exam. In the science section they asked a multiple choice question as to what would change the weight of a glass of water. One of the "wrong" answers was heating it... luckily I knew that I wasn't supposed to know relativity so I answered it correctly.
> much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.
Wait, what?? That was certainly not my experience, and judging by the barrage of texts I get from my now college-attending child, isn't his experience either.
He did find a lot of what he was given in his California high school was boring. Enrolling in it was a bit of a shock after his prior experience.
Reading is often boring when the text is not of interest to the reader. Perhaps it depends on your major and so on, but as a former English major I would find it extraordinary for someone to go 4 years of college and never read any text they weren’t interested in. Not to say that any of the books I read in college were bad, but taste is a thing. Just because something has won a Pulitzer Prize or whatever doesn’t mean it will be equally interesting to all people.
Pretty much every "recognized" book I've read was interesting in some way or another. I might have disliked it, or disagreed with it, but it surely wasn't boring. I used to find lots of books boring when I had no idea how to read them. Especially older works require context to read them in. You have to figure out why you are.
Another thing is that a book may not be worth the investment, but that's a different category. I don't really want to read War and Peace or Infinite Jest, but I doubt they're boring. I'll just get more enjoyment bang for my buck out of reading my preferred genre, but if I had to read them for professional reasons (I consider college such) it wouldn't be an issue.
> taste is a thing
Taste is a very, very overblown thing. It's often used as a strict thing, set in stone, and giving full carte blanche to ignore lots of works or people. But in reality it's very flippant and malleable and often developed out of sheer chance.
You'll find that people who don't read at all have no taste for any book.
I'm studying CS and don't even look at textbooks until I'm doing a problem set and realize that I don't yet know enough to solve it. In most cases, I just need to look up a definition. Then I can search for the relevant passage and read just that, which doesn't feel boring because I have a clear goal.
Of course that strategy doesn't work if you're asked to "read this book and write about it" (Obviously, I have no idea what an English major is like.), but when it's applicable, postponing reading until you have an immediate reason to do it helps me a lot to avoid boredom.
>They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.
Wow. What a revelatory statement.
Some reflecting observations.
1. Since when is an institution designed to increase your knowledge uninteresting?? That signals a broken institutional approach.
2. The number one real world skill is being able to filter for signal against noise.
If you're inserting a bunch of noise into the test, the most highly-adapted minds are going to be filtered out with low results.
If you're learning something foundational, it's usually incredibly dull until after you've learned it. Its difficult to imagine anyone finds matrices, and associated basic operations, to be an interesting representation until after they've learned to make use of it to understand bigger ideas. Those first few lectures are horribly boring. And of course, undergrad is mostly foundational learning.
And then you should consider that at least in the US, you have 2 years of general education; that is, you have 2 years of courses outside the field you've explicitly decided liking.
And of course you can have a preference of practical over theory, where most lectures on theory are uninteresting unless they clearly lead up to a practical implication, that you're currently interested in.
It's absurd to imagine that anyone goes to college with a 100% interest in every course, unless the college caters directly to each student's whim. And we know they don't, and im not sure we want them to.
In the article, the writers says pilots and witnesses have come to him in frustration with the lack of investigation into what they’ve seen. So that makes the obvious explanation you suggest not as likely.
It’s damn effective, harder to believe pain is felt by most (all?) animals than that it isn’t. The default assumption should be that they feel pain, not that they don’t.
