The acceptance rate is sort of a weird criteria for NYU when you compare it to the other schools it is listed with. It is a very popular school so it gets more applicants than 3-4 of the other colleges it is listed with combined, it has a slightly higher rate than most of those schools. It also accepts more students than probably all of those schools. I went there it is a good school. I don't think most people would put it in the same category as MIT. I certainly do not think it is as prestigious.

If you are using acceptance rates as a proxy for difficulty of schools in a given year, you need to adjust by desirability of location and perceived seriousness of degree programs.

And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.

A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.

Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.

This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:

* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).

* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).

* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).

So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.

I did college radio for a bit. You could play whatever you wanted up to a certain extent. At least where I was at, ~'06, you could play like 30? minutes of whatever you wanted, it's been a while might be more or less. The other x minutes of your hour you had to play a selection of music. It was a very wide range of things so you could easily find something to fit into your show but it had to be from the pool that college got.

Maybe other colleges did it differently but we didn't have a program manager or anything. Everyone was free to do what they wanted outside of some FCC rules and what I previously mentioned.

If you work at a small shop that may work. Everyone is 100xer now thanks to AI. No one has time to actually go through all this nonsense, not even the people who "wrote" it. Approve and pray you're not the one on call is the only viable strategy for some.

A lot of these age verifications things have to do with "protecting children". If that's the end goal we don't really need to verify anyone's age. Apple/Google, any smart phone maker, should be forced to add proper parental controls.

Parents should be able to control what apps can be used, what websites can be viewed, who the phone is able to contact.

That doesn't require knowing my age, or anyone else's.

Also, as an iOS developer, it's not my job to parent your child. The age ratings are clear on the app store, if you give your child unrestricted access to a phone that's on you, not me. If the OS doesn't have proper controls that's on Apple/Android, again, not my fault and not something I should be forced to police.

Thanks to Texas, I can see roughly how old your kid is. I'm not supposed to keep that information though. ;) I'm sure everyone who makes app will comply with that and not use that information for any other purposes and you can bet Texas has the means to audit every app on the app store to make sure that they're complying. lol

I don't know the exact legality of it all, but Polymarket wasn't operating in the US up until recently. Even though they are now, they maintain two separate markets. One that is somewhat regulated in the USA and a blockchain based market outside the US. For most of its existence it has very much been offering things that were illegal in the US even though they are based in NY.

I get the DRM hate but I've had a kindle, a few at this point, for roughly 14 years. I've read over 6 books this year alone. Not sure it's the device if you've only manage to read 6 books in 20 years.

When learning a new piece you should play all the way through once. You should play through it again, stopping at all the problematic areas and making note of them, but continuing. After that there are a lot of ways to go about practicing a piece. I think repetitions on the problematic areas in conjunction with working backwards, especially if you want/need to memorize the piece, is fastest.

Playing through the whole song from the beginning over and over again is not an efficient way to learn a new piece of music.

Not the whole song, just the part you mess up. For instance, in the guitar part for Under the Bridge by RHCP, there's the simple melodic part that only requires learning the chord forms and picking patterns.

That transitions into a more rhythmic chord progression with a few embellishments, which also isn't terribly difficult at first, but then a few verses later that ramps up a good amount and becomes moderately difficult.

If you stumble on that transition / passage, then that is where you would stop and then practice until you do it correctly 5 times.

The next day, once you've rested and let your brain absorb the info, try it again and you'll find it much easier to get right on the first try.

Working backwards is a really neat trick. That's something I wished I figured out a long ago.

It depends on what your goals are. If you're doing it for fun or as a creative outlet this is great advice. If you're trying to actively get better you won't do it this way after a certain point. You need to be actively practicing and engaging your brain. It does matter what you play and how you play it.

Sure, there's "deliberate practice" and it matters - but so many people seem to think if they're playing that's what they should be doing, or it's a waste of time. In reality that often isn't much fun, and they start to associate the instrument with this sort of difficult and often disappointing experience, and they give up.

You are right.

I think there are quite a lot of people who are only interested in playing and never deliberately practising. They do not get that far (they do not have to!).

And then the vast majority of aspring guitar players who frequent learning online material (including me) spend all of their time practising and learning, and too little of it playing for fun and performing. Most are constantly frustrated about their progress.

Then there is a small group of people, who spend a lot of time playing for fun and performing, but also a good amount of time deliberately practising. In my experience, those tend to be the ones people think are great players.

> could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.

In 2015-2017 you could interop with C, C++ support wasn't added until very recently.

I do agree with you though and I am not sure what the exact reasoning is, but Swift is definitely an Apple ecosystem language despite the random efforts to gain traction elsewhere.