Vikram Bath
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vikrambath.bsky.social
Vikram Bath
@vikrambath.bsky.social
1.8K followers 590 following 6.1K posts
Former business school professor, current software engineer. Writes at ordinary-times.com
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vikrambath.bsky.social
It’s the top story, but man “named in Epstein Emails” is. The most lukewarm phrasing possible
November 13, 2025 at 12:18 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
This week, a math professor at MIT told me that incoming students are, on average, noticeably worse at math than they used to be. Harvard, of course, just added a remedial math class, Math MA5, "aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students".
November 12, 2025 at 9:06 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Oh, I scrolled down and did see it, but the ratio-ing reply is also shown
November 12, 2025 at 8:18 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
My Threads looks like this
November 12, 2025 at 8:15 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
This is from an amicus brief hosted by the Supreme Court www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22...
In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part- time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.
November 12, 2025 at 8:02 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Fei-Fei Li is a legitimately brilliant Stanford CS professor and AI got her talking babble like this for money
In this new essay, I lay out the framework for what truly spatially intelligent world models must achieve—three essential capabilities for building AI that creates with a storyteller's imagination, navigates with a first responder's fluency, and reasons about space with scientific precision. 2/n
November 12, 2025 at 5:50 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Literally every engineering school Dean will tell you that employers come to him and say the graduates are great technically, but could they please work on their communication skills and ability to work collaboratively on a team?

That distinguishes the graduates they want to hire
November 12, 2025 at 5:46 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
One of these headlines intends to inform. The other one informs too, but does so in such a way as to obfuscate the part that sounds bad
November 12, 2025 at 2:24 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Tutor comments from the course’s TAs seem useful. This is the last three pages of the document linked
November 12, 2025 at 2:18 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Lest we think this is a humanities major thing. There are CS and engineering majors who need remediation!

5 of them are literally mathematics majors!
November 12, 2025 at 2:12 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
“Below is a representative sampling of 12 of the 30 questions, covering the three groupings of
grades 1-2, grades 3-5, and grades 6-8, along with the percentage of students who took the
assessment test and gave the correct answers to that particular question.”
November 12, 2025 at 2:10 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
This is the grossest example of clickbait I’ve ever seen. ~“No, we won’t tell you which one until you click and load up some ads!”~
Huff post: Trump regurgitates one of his most despicable racist lies online
November 12, 2025 at 11:17 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
If you were bright and poor, the state of California stuck you in a LCFF+ school, and you got great grades in class thinking you were doing fine and then you go to college and find out they didn’t teach you anything so you have to redo K-8 math
November 12, 2025 at 11:02 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
These students are from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools, “California public schools in which more than 75 percent of the school's total enrollment is composed of students who are identified as either eligible for free or reduced-price meals, or English learners, or foster youth.”
November 12, 2025 at 10:59 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Many of the students who need K-8 math remedial classes took calculus in high school! And their grades are no lower than the other kids who don’t need remediation!

Hard for me to see how you can persist in this without standardized testing
Grades achieved in high school math classes are not helping UC to evaluate math skills much more either (Table 3). While there are some differences between those who need preparatory courses and those who do not (and are placed into Math 10/20A) the difference in high school math grade averages is very small, often less than one-tenth of a grade point. The correlation between the average math grade and the placement result is only around 0.25 on a scale of 0 to 1. In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0.
November 12, 2025 at 10:56 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
High school grades are nonsense now senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347...
The elimination of standardized testing resulted in more reliance on high school grades even though the STTF report notes the worrisome trend of grade inflation in many schools that had already been substantial in 2020.5 During COVID, grade inflation and lowered standards in California high schools likely accelerated. The disruption created by COVID made it very difficult to objectively evaluate students. Many classes moved from letter grade to pass/fail for
November 12, 2025 at 10:56 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
UC San Diego:“[While Math 2 was designed to remediate missing high school math knowledge, most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school…Math 2 for Fall 2024 focuses entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8)]”
While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
November 12, 2025 at 10:56 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
He’s now pushing ads claiming he’s a real person who reads books
November 11, 2025 at 10:43 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
These were not the answers I was expecting about needing to pee during a marathon, and I would like to go back and delete them from my brain thank you
Just finished my 4th marathon (3:02) and every one I’ve done so far I have to stop at least 1 time to urinate. I usually have to go a few times right before the race begins This last race I had a black coffee and PH 1500 (electrolyte mix with 750mg sodium) 2 hours before and nothing else to drink beforehand until the race started. I thought taking a high concentration sodium drink before would decrease the urge to urinate before but it didn’t. For my next one I’m just planning to have more time prior to the race when I have liquids but does anyone have advice on this ? Thanks! Peeing yourself is worth a sub 3 hour marathon Commenter ran in Lisbon and a girl had pooped over herself in the first 10k
November 11, 2025 at 10:34 AM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Elon mad
So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated , uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy person in the world.” Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human.
November 10, 2025 at 7:08 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Oh, we have what he added to his doc now
I feel fairly flexible on what the exact contours of our non- monogamy look like. What sounds sexy to both of us? Let's do that! Overall, I expect this to be a thing we figure out over time, with frequent check-ins and iteration. There will, of course, be some jealousy, but we won't consider that an emergency that instantly trumps all other concerns. Instead, we'll treat it like any other challenge where our goal is to find a compromise that maximizes wellbeing on both sides.
November 10, 2025 at 4:22 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
A four-act play
i know two guys who are considering having kids via surrogate bc they badly want children but haven’t been able to find partners to do it with. they’re both extremely successful and love kids. i dunno what’s going on with dating but i don’t think it’s just men being anti-commitment and women being too picky. I suspect I'm one of the two guys Romy is talking about. Regardless, she's describing my situation. I'm giving myself about another year of searching for a partner, but will then pursue single fatherhood. I'm still hopeful it won't be necessary, but in the end I can't allow myself to miss out on raising children. Even having gone this long without them is an agony. you are! i really want you to become a dad and i admire your commitment to this goal, but also i wish i could find you a partner. to any single ladies reading this: ben’s smart and charming and very tall, and he came and held my tiny baby recently and was really good at it Before I send your profile to a friend, and just based on the water you seem to be swimming in, I have to ask—are you looking for a monogamous relationship? Reply: Kind of. Gonna add a section about this in my doc shortly.
November 10, 2025 at 4:07 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
I am starting to understand how he bankrupted a casino
The President just proposed a $2,000 tariff “dividend” for each person, excluding high-income earners. If the cutoff is $100,000, 150M adults would qualify, for a cost near $300 billion. If kids qualify, that grows. Only problem, new tariffs have raised $120 billion so far.
November 10, 2025 at 4:00 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Angus King declared defeat the day after Trump posted this
Entrance to the new ballroom at the White House
November 10, 2025 at 3:58 PM
vikrambath.bsky.social
Aura Hack: If a girl catches you looking at her... Whatever you do, do not look away. Samuel L Jackson staring intensely
November 10, 2025 at 11:17 AM