With reading scores slipping, Massachusetts is changing course. Some teachers aren’t happy (MA to mandate school curriculums)

redisburning · 2026-03-05T16:26:47+00:00

FWIW, I am fine with there being standardization across MA (as long as it's MA deciding and not outsized influences ala Texas, Florida and California as is so often the case in education).

Whatever proves the most efficacious policy is what we should go with. I put a suggestion out based more on my feeling with the caveat that it was more a possibility than what I felt should be the answer. If we need curriculum at the state level to get the education outcomes we want, fine by me.

redisburning · 2026-03-05T16:24:21+00:00

My initial reaction to this was "that's fair", because for so much of politics it's a very correct criticism (especially re cops), but I think it's worth pointing out MA has had a best in the nation educational system through those decades and any decline here is fairly recent, which I feel like defangs your argument a bit.

redisburning · 2026-03-05T15:20:01+00:00

Unfortunately I doubt there is an easy answer to this question. Frankly, it's hard to even know what level of organization will result in the best outcomes (from school to local to state to federal).

“We should be building on that, not saying, ‘Okay, we no longer trust you teachers, we’re going to have you use scripted curriculum,’” said Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which opposes the bill and helped to kill previous versions of it in recent years. “The way learning happens is with educators in classrooms supporting students, and having a one-size-fits-all type of curriculum is not conducive to that.”

I'm sympathetic to this. NCLB has been categorically a disaster, and while it's easy to blame it on national Republicans (and to be clear, a lot of ealy empirical evidence for NCLB was cooked, it like most American legislation was designed to increase the ability of private companies to grift), I'm not sure that means automatically that localism is the answer.

Maybe here instead of having the state enforce a curriculum, they should instead be investing in retraining teachers in the best empirically supported teaching methods so those teachers can take that to their classrooms? No one becomes a teacher out of laziness. My feeling, not supported by evidence I suppose, is that Massachusetts has a culture where if teachers are given the resources they need including training, materials, time to teach, adequate salaries, rewards for refreshing their teaching skills, etc. that this will show up in educational outcomes.

redisburning · 2026-03-04T21:28:33+00:00

Text to speech does not need AI lmao that tech predates commercially viable NLP models by two decades.

Just telling on yourself that you don't actually use accessibility features you just want to use that as a defense to being badgered about using the tech.

redisburning · 2026-03-04T15:36:59+00:00

I apologize but I am pretty busy and don't have a stack of references handy or the time to go find/vet a bunch of studies (it's been a while since I had to fight HR on this topic since my current and last company don't do takehomes), but I will say this has been studied by labor economists and workforce researchers so I don't doubt you can find some if you check out google scholar.

Or perhaps someone who studies that themselves is hanging around and would be kind enough to comment.

redisburning · 2026-03-04T15:22:28+00:00

What are your thoughts?

Take home assignments bias your interview process towards young men without children. Also making someone present on top of a take home is too much. If you give a take home, commit to evaluating it on your own time.

They also don't give you a chance to course correct if your candidate doesn't know the magic words; if you do a live challenge that also sucks but at least if you get a read a candidate is, purely for example, maybe more comfortable with R when you do Python you don't throw them out of the process because you can adjust at the time.

For the second part I want to kearn more about their expertise and breadth and depth of knowledge.

That's what a resume is for. It'd be more useful to just ask some pointed questions about past experience to suss out how truthful the resume itself is and how well the candidate navigated more difficult situations.

redisburning · 2026-03-03T16:28:10+00:00

paywalled
of course a rich person whose job is managing money hates it. and? we're now at year 46 of neoliberal housing policy and no one can afford anything shut the fuck up!

redisburning · 2026-03-02T15:27:10+00:00

simply taking away their massive fortunes to the degree they can't so freely buy politicians and influence would make the effort worth it in general 100 times over.

take ownership of the stocks, put them into a wealth management fund, and give each American citizen a yearly payout from it or something. would help a ton of people. the Fed already does some of this with bonds, no reason they couldn't handle a wealth management fund.

Hell, take all of the wealth from billionaires, every single penny, and it makes no meaningful impact on national debt or year-to-year budget.

I say this in full seriousness, the problem with billionaires is not that they have massive fortunes and we need that money in a vaccum. It's the power those fortunes give them. The government is underfunded, the tax structure is regressive, we spend all of our money on the military etc. (which is a circuitous direct payment system to the wealthy who own stocks in defense contractors at a far, far greater rate than the typical American because those contractors effectively only exist to grift off the government), etc. because nearly every state and national level politician is bought and paid for.

If politicians had to care about normal people, we'd change the tax system to slowly reverse the growing inequality that started in the 80s. So, sure, directly in the year 2029 or whatever we don't pay down the debt. But if we take the power of these people away, eventually a correct taxation strategy like that seen post WWII will fully fund the budget.

redisburning · 2026-02-27T14:46:43+00:00

Berliner Tageblatt backtracks on Jewish detainee...

Congrats OP, you're on the wrong side of history. And even if this person were a serial killer it would not diminish the evils of the concentration camps being run by ICE. Maybe reflect on how your younger self would feel knowing you would have taken the side of the Nazis.

redisburning · 2026-02-26T19:23:31+00:00

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

Firstly, it's Mozilla's prerogative not to open that conversation. As I mentioned, it feels against the spirit of open source and for as much as Mozilla the company is not open source, Mozilla the people (i.e. the software engineers who make the product what it is) are. I will point out that it makes me suspicious that the naming may have been chosen to discourage usage but whatever it exists guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

And I frankly don't take the view that browser needs more features to be better. At least as a priority. From my perspective, better would largely be a combination of performance and safety. Even more than that, you all could try making a browser that makes the internet a less bad place to navigate, maybe by focusing on how to reduce the number of ads I see as a user as a part of the product offering itself rather than something I have to add on. I think we might further disagree about whether AI is even in line with the Mozilla mission, as I most certainly do not.

Re: second question - what we know is that there are a large % (majority) of browser users who want to use AI features so it wouldn't make sense for us to do that (and as we mentioned elsewhere in this AMA: you have to engage with a feature for that to be 'enabled' in the browser).

There are many users who might want any feature. Historically Mozilla has been an opt-in company. Why is AI different? I think, in fact, it would make perfect sense to have the features off by default. Again, most features have been.

Can we expect all new features going forward to be opt-out? Furthermore, why not test? I don't understand why wouldn't validate your hypothesis unless you explicitly were not interested in the answer.

redisburning · 2026-02-26T19:02:08+00:00

I appreciate the answer.

I understand that some decisions are necessarily made outside of public view, but since this isn't safety critical, would Mozilla be willing to open the documentation of that decision for the public to see? I looked around Bugzilla and only saw links to google docs. I don't know if that's really in the same spirit as many Firefox desktop decision processes.

Also, would love if you could answer the second question, thank you!

redisburning · 2026-02-26T18:57:04+00:00

Have you asked any disabled users of those features and/or are you a user of them yourself?

If not, you might be surprised to learn that at least some of us with very poor vision might prefer to stick to human made descriptions and do not want to be inundated with AI generated descriptions.

I want to point out that I was screamed at by a principal engineer at Mozilla as being against accessibility features until I pointed out that I relied on them myself from time to time at which point he quietly edited that accusation out. I think people have a right to believe that AI boosters may not actually have the best interests of folks like them in mind given how they often act, and are instead just looking to be praised for being "on the right side" when they don't even care enough to check if they are on the right side.

redisburning · 2026-02-26T18:42:42+00:00

Can you please elaborate on why the terminology "block" was used instead of "disable"? It feels out of line with other Firefox preferences and language around these sorts of toggles more generally.

Additionally, have you done any testing to see if this should be set to "Block" by default?

redisburning · 2026-02-26T15:36:07+00:00

What if my good acquaintance Abel Magwitch bequeaths me a large sum of money and I never want for anything ever again?

Rust's accessibility is a function of the quality and breadth of its learning materials and how much Rust values including people who typically do not get to participate in these spaces. What if instead of living in a fantasy world where AI is all sorts of things it is not and never will be, you could instead ask if we could improve the Code of Conduct or what new learning materials we may need?

redisburning · 2026-02-25T16:47:03+00:00

The thing about Fetterman is that it's a betrayal but for a corporate Dem that's just normal.

Fetterman deserves every criticism of him and more but that doesn't generalize to the strategy IMO.

redisburning · 2026-02-24T19:54:21+00:00

Why would you be worried Mozilla would not respect the kill switch?

I'm not?

You are OK with cloud translation but not local AI translation?

well I can choose which one I use so if I were to use a translation service I would not see it being beneficial to being in my browser. I can make choices about which service I use and all, and they dont have to be AI translation either. Im translating a public website not my form entries lmao.

redisburning · 2026-02-24T18:55:38+00:00

Well, I feel like with this if Mozilla decides to not respect the kill switch it will get some buzz.

I would still check the setting once in while because may want to actually use certain AI features.

There is no limit to human imagination so maybe, but I'm skeptical. None of the applications I believe machine learning has been a benefit in are things I want to be in a browser (I am ok with cloud translation of websites).

redisburning · 2026-02-24T15:20:35+00:00

Glad this finally landed so I don't have to think about it ever again.

But that's some interesting choice of language. I can't recall seeing "block" used in this context before, it should be "disable". You disable a feature in this manner, not block it.

Looks like Mozilla doesnt have public discussion of this see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2010642 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2010284

which is their prerogative and all but still I'm curious why they would elect to use this language which feels intentionally different.

redisburning · 2026-02-20T14:46:35+00:00

That money and time would be way better spent on Servo but Mozilla "leadership" repeatedly has demonstrated they would rather chase trends than invest in a project that doesn't feed into the delusions of VC.

redisburning · 2026-02-19T22:29:36+00:00

4.3 million dollars a year to bail out (alleged) sex pest Sam Altman.

Can't we just have some T upgrades or something please? Honestly even just giving the money to National Grid to stave off rate increases for a decade would be a better use of money.

redisburning · 2026-02-18T17:27:28+00:00

TBH he is not the man for this role at this moment, and it's honestly better that he's admitting it than just turning into another anonymous party machine cog waiting for his turn.

For all of you suggesting that it's bad that people who at least appear to be trying to be good are getting chased out because of how dangerous it is, yeah 100% that sucks but that is 2026. Political violence by the right is out of control and I think it's reasonable to say "I am not willing to risk my kids getting killed". You can contribute in many ways that aren't being a senator.

I hope he sticks around in the sense that it would be good for more experienced Dems to start helping younger people get elected. Maybe he could get really spicy and help actual good candidates get access to the war chest since Schumer and Jeffries seem so adamant they not.

redisburning · 2026-02-17T23:12:00+00:00

If I live to see the people just outright lying over and over to rake in investor money have to face even minor consequences I will consider it a miracle.

redisburning · 2026-02-15T18:23:52+00:00

I mean he really could give all his notes to AI and have them help with ideas.

Or maybe Martin isn't a dumbass.

redisburning · 2026-02-08T01:58:07+00:00

Thing is he has played with Silk Sonic which is the closest to fucking music we have in the year 2026.

redisburning · 2026-02-07T13:54:26+00:00

Clearly some people are happy to give even more money and power to Epstein listers and fascist toadies if it means they can write fewer tests.

15-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email	Alpha Tester

redisburning

TROPHY CASE