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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The “big five” banks in the states actually represent less than half the American population, whereas the major banks in Canada cover about 85% of us. (Note these numbers are from before the pandemic - I’m no longer involved in the banking industry.)

    The US system is still incredibly fragmented, though a lot of consolidation is happening (yay oligopolies). Canada, on the other hand, has had stricter regulations for longer, which meant that even the 15% of Canadians with small banks and credit unions were included in the changes to the industry as they happened.










  • I feel like there need to be multiple CS pathways. For example, people who want to go into hardware development might take a set of courses more closely aligned with electrical engineering.

    There are.

    My university (and many others) offered Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering. Computer Engineering is sort of a middle ground between EE and SE, where you learn hardware concepts like circuits and semiconductors (for hardware development), but there are also algorithm-based courses.

    Each of the programs has many options for elective courses, and you can focus on databases, algorithms, security, web development, or whatever you want. The core concepts are the same, and it’s more about learning broad concepts and skills, rather than focused skills. Things like Redis and Elasticsearch didn’t exist when I took my database course - the practical portion was mostly just SQL. Things like Docker came even later. But the broad concepts I learned allow me to jump in and use “new” technologies as they mature and stabilize.

    None of the programs were just “coding bootcamp”. Coding was almost inconsequential to my degree (CompEng), though I understand it’s used more heavily in Computer Science degrees. I had a single first-year course that was supposed to teach us programming - all the other courses just assumed a basic knowledge. The focus was more on the design, the logic, and the algorithms. Anyone can code - the bootcamps have that right. But not everyone can design and implement a distributed system efficiently and securely.




  • According to the article, 25% lead to convictions. I don’t know if there’s an appropriate quantity of strip searches greater than zero, but if it’s going to happen, this actually seems like a pretty good result.

    I guess the questions to ask here are: could these arrests be made without a strip search (e.g. would a frisk have been sufficient)? If not, could the strip searches be done by an adult of the same gender and also in the presence of their parent or guardian?

    There’s definitely a lot that is bad about this, but if 25% of strip searches result in conviction, there’s clearly another problem here that needs to be addressed.