Manish

yep! like, if you want to test ability to perform under time pressure, be explicit about it, and justify why you think that's useful. otherwise it's a pointless distraction

("abusable" accomodation = something that gives abled people a leg up too. e.g. having a reader doesn't really give you a leg up and I would be surprised to hear if someone was abusing that accomodation)

yeah I'm not saying a universal solution is always possible

though specifically in the case of education abusable accomodations are very often patching up a flaw in the system that has nothing to do with disability

requesting a reasonable accommodation for my right to be a perfectionist tryhard

lol I love "we have a time limit because our students are self-detrimentally too tryhard"

At my weirdo tiny "SLAC but every major is STEM" undergrad it was pretty common for exams to be "you have 24h from whenever you open it to finish it" or similar, and I realize that's a lot easier at a tiny school but imo fundamentally it's the right model for most things

but, basically, "extra time on tests" really need not be analyzed as an accomodation in the first place, it *could* be looked at as a way of improving the testing system for everyone. and that's one way out of the "abusing accomodations" death spiral

an additional problem is that a lot of people are Stockholm'd to the bad proxy being The Point, Actually, where people think that a math test *should* test for your ability to math under time pressure

a solution there is to design tests that do not have an associated time pressure; i.e. make it so that everyone gets "extra time"

the main problem is that there's a resource constraint here: proctoring tests for double the time needs more resources if it's just the default

but they weren't *supposed* to evaluate that! and this bad proxy hurts everyone, because getting good at passing tests under time pressure is a separate skill that can be specifically trained

for example, the classic one: extra time on tests.

this is an accomodation because tests are a bad proxy for evaluating skill: they also, unfortunately, evaluate your ability to perform under time pressure.

this matters for some people more than others, hence, the accomodation

it's hard but I also feel that in many cases the solution lies in making the "accomodation" no longer an "accomodation" and just something available to everyone, or entirely obviated by the system

*especially* in education where most of these things are about bad proxies anyway

if you do not think that your multiple ton hunk of metal which you are flinging down the highway at sixty miles per hour will eventually kill someone you are not qualified to work on any such thing

if you want your religious gear to be tactical you should just convert to sikhism instead of doing whatever this is

YouTube video by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know It's Illegal to Say

Take Trevor Moore's advice
youtu.be/KivCRqfFcqY?...

i do want to point out that this does challenge the ironclad conventional wisdom that no one gives a shit about democracy

lol @hikikomorphism.bsky.social just described Ea-Nāṡir as "CMOT Dibbler (Assyrian Edition)"

25p coins are 4 anna :)

1 anna doesn't work in the modern decimalized system

wait how old are you that you actually had 1 anna coins in use

it was very funny to hear myself explain a coin as the equivalent of a long dead denomination of a completely different currency

and even funnier when it worked just fine

so in British India, an anna used to be 1/16th of a rupee. After independence they decimalized the currency so that a rupee was 100 paise

but in marathi people *still* refer to the 25 paise coin as "4 annas"

so it's our closest word for "quarter (coin)"

was helping these older Marathi folks figure out how to BART

at one point the machine gave them a pile of quarters and they asked me what the coin was. I unthinkingly responded "४ आणे" (4 annas)

which is both a very culturally accurate translation but also makes no sense

ECMAScript excitement 😉

Congrats to @manishearth.bsky.social on unflagging TC39 Stage 3 Temporal in V8 today. Heading for Chrome 144 🎉

By many metrics this new date-time API is the single biggest change to JS ever 🔥

V8 uses Boa's temporal_rs by @jason-williams.co.uk Kevin Ness & Manish 👍

tldr was that they tend to get used as political career kickstarters

most countries have appointed or half-appointed-half-elected school boards with skill requirements

i once heard a really good talk from a former councilmember/mayor about how elected school boards are horrible and lead to the worst outcomes

apparently it's the largest elected position in the country??

yeah like for local politicians I've noticed both: our former mayor definitely had a lot of growth over the years

and otoh my former councilmember was a total windsock and kinda bad

both were "politicians first" vibes wise. the mayor was good at it.

primary elections are another way in which a party attempts to update its positions based on what is representative of the people

i kinda feel like it should be both: your party should have strongly-held beliefs, and be known for them, and then be open to trying to follow popular positions for the rest, which increases the chances that their positions are actually representative

no the plural of pierogum would be pieroga not pierogi

but you are welcome to accept it nevertheless