Gather round my pilgrims, for today I shall recount the tale of Soupsgiving.

Soupsgiving is my annual tradition of Th*nksgiving, but everything is Soup. It’s simple. Souper simple.

Unlike Th*nksgiving, a colonist propaganda holiday if you really think about it, Soupsgiving is a nondenominational, anarchist festival of nourishment that transcends cultures, as well as a souper douper great time.

The First Annual Soupsgiving: The Genesis.

It all began on a dark and snowy night, in a brownstone on the Upper East Side of New York City. I was living with a dozen other 20-somethings, many of whom had gone home for the holidays, and us stragglers huddled together to weather this cold and dark winter.

My housemate Emily and I brainstormed the most fucked-up twist we could put on Thanksgiving, and decided upon an all-liquid theme.

Coincidentally, our roommate Nancy had some temporary stress-induced face paralysis, which made her unable to feel her jaw. So soup was the perfect meal for her. We did not plan this, but let’s say that we did. It was a Soupsgiving miracle.

This was also the first extended conversation I had with Mehran (who I would later raise as a god-figure). A few hours prior to Soupsgiving, Mehran was helping another housemate Josh book a same-day flight to go on a date with a girl in another state. As a token of his gratitude, Josh gave Mehran a handful of gummies, and Mehran immediately took all of them. This caused him to become high out of his mind, a state in which he was either giggling or zonked out, his eyes watering with tears. It was quite the first impression.

Among all these characters and peculiar circumstances was one very normal person Emily had met a few days prior and then invited. I don’t believe we ever heard from her again.

I had planned to make a soup-themed dessert, and figured pumpkin pie was the move, as it’s essentially a baked soup. I put marshmallows on top of the pie, thinking this would toast them crème brûlée style, however, it instead made the pie catch on fire. Upon witnessing this inferno, I immediately shut the oven door and googled what to do, turns out that just closing the door and leaving it in there was the correct move.

At the end of our feast, my co-conspirator Emily summed the night up beautifully: “I’m sleepy from soup and the adrenaline from the fire has worn off.”

And so, from a group of misfits, that cold and snowy night, a beautiful tradition was born.

The Second Annual Soupsgiving: Soupburbia.

Soupsgiving II took place when I was living in Mountain View, and it was rather un-momentous. As one would expect of a celebration in the suburbs.

However, there was no oven fire this year, so that was a marked improvement from the previous.

The Third Annual Soupsgiving: Mega.

For the Third Annual Soupsgiving, a vision came to me in a dream. Megatable. Three long tables, aligned together as one, adorned with soup. A nice sit-down Soupsgiving.

I looked into renting chairs, and it was very expensive. So I figured I’d do Amazon rentals (buy them then return them after). Sorry Jeff. But also, I think you can take the hit.

This year, I introduced a Soupsgiving competition. Attendees were instructed to dress interpretively as their favorite soup, and the winner would be crowned the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy of the Soup Party. Some people got confused and thought the competition was based on the soup they brought, which was ridiculous.

The winner of the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy of the Soup Party was Jonathan, and I knighted him accordingly.

I also made alcoholic soup (mulled wine).

Towards the end of Soupsgiving, we combined all the remaining soups into Mega Soup. At first the mixture of different noodles, vegetables, and other chunky ingredients made for a rather unpleasant texture. Then Cool Alex blended Mega Soup together, double-strained it, added garnish with a flourish, and presented It before us. It honestly wasn’t bad. So we had a ritual Consumption Of The Mega Soup where we gathered around and in unison slurped from straws together. The sound of collective slurping haunts me to this day. It was beautiful.

In the aftermath of Soupsgiving, I returned all the folding chairs to Amazon, and this was a huge bitch to deal with. But t’was small sacrifice to pay for the glory of Mega Table, the legacy of Mega Soup, the knighting of the inaugural Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy of The Soup Party, etc.

The Fourth Annual Soupsgiving: The Souposium.

By the time the Fourth Annual Soupsgiving came around, I had run out of soup puns to include in the invite, so I just shoehorned “soup” into a bunch of words in a nonsoupsical way. I refuse to s(t)oup to repeating soup puns.

I figured, we were more mature now. Four years more mature. The time had come for a formal, classy affair. The Souposium. Black tie. And everyone looked sooo cute in their formal wear!

Since this was a distinguished event, we obviously had to drink the soup out of soupagne glasses. No bowls!! No spoons!! Such are the implements of cowards.

I made everyone prepare a presouptation, reminding them several times. For those who nonetheless neglected to come prepared, I assigned them a slam poem about soup written by one of eight AI models.

Some of the best presouptations included:

• A saucy soup-themed erotica

• Reading an excerpt from chapter 15 in Moby Dick, titled “Chowder”

• Performing the song “Soup” by Remi Wolf

• Playing banjo and singing “Jambalaya”

• The thesis “How soup is responsible for decline of society through video games”

Having instated the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy tradition at last year’s Soupsgiving, I figured that this year, we’d have pageant rules for passing on the title. The voting system was a constitutional monarchy, with everyone casting a vote, but me making the final call.

Sam and Greta (or as you may know them, “Thomas the Spank Engine” and “Jane Goodgirl” from Strippers for Charity) were crowned the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boys of the Fourth Annual Soupsgiving, and Jonathan passed on the crown.

After the presouptations concluded, as the projector was already set up, guests started heckling me to play youtube videos, so I let them do that while we mingled.

This year’s Soupsgiving was the best yet, and it warmed my heart like a simmering soup to have all my friends enthusiastically join in on the bit.

Although most of my stupid little parties for my silly little friends are one-time affairs, like a perpetual stew, no Soupsgiving is the same. And tradition is important, honorable. Sometimes.

Anyways, I hope you and your loved ones stay warm and soupy this holiday soupson.

For paid Soupscribers, I offer a preview of next year’s Soupsgiving theme: The Disouptation, the souperb soup-related challenge from this year’s Souposium, and various consouperations of what constisoups a good party.

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In a recent interview, Hollis Robbins said,

General education requirements are the worst. They are taught by the least seasoned faculty members, everybody hates them… They do a great disservice to most students who don’t need a general education. This is where I think AI is most disruptive, because AI is general education… AI should deliver that and leave the specific knowledge, the expertise to the last two years of school… [Why spend tuition money] on what you can get for free? (timestamp 25:40-26:54)

For someone who regularly decries the use of the first-person plural as cowardly generalization, Robbins sure does generalize about the seasoning of professors, what everybody hates, and what most students need. I’ll stick with the first-person singular: I couldn’t disagree with her more.

I may not be quite as seasoned as Robbins, but it’s close. I teach four courses per semester, and the majority of these are general education courses. I’ve taught gen ed classes to thousands of students. Sometimes it is drudgery, but it also can be very gratifying to see the light come on in their eyes as a topic or an argument lights a spark. In general I don’t hate teaching gen ed; like any course, it really depends on who signs up and how good the students are that semester.

Even people at the top of the food chain are known to teach gen ed (to be clear, I am in no way putting myself in their league). Richard Feynman delivered his famous Lectures on Physics to a required freshman class at Caltech. Steven Pinker has repeatedly taught Psychology 1 at Harvard. But that’s not a reasonable expectation. What should brand-new PhDs teach? Just grad students? Senior-level courses only? The industry consensus is that novice teachers need to hone their chops in freshman courses. If people feel like debating that, fine. Keep in mind that there’s an argument to be made for having the best teachers at every level, and teaching ability is going to be a Gaussian distribution.

So what’s good about general education?

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Undergrads change their majors. A lot.

This study says that a third of undergrads change their majors at least once in their first three years. A more recent claim is 80% do. I’m not sure where the latter data comes from exactly, so I am less confident in it, but it may reflect a longer tracking period. A reasonable Fermi estimate is about half of all undergrads switch majors at some point.

In addition, about one out of every seven freshmen is undecided; that is, they come to college with no major declared at all. This means a mid-sized university with a freshman class of 2000 has nearly 300 new students without a major. Faculty are then pressured by the admin to get the undeclared students to commit to a major by their sophomore year, since that improves both the retention rate and the five-year graduation rate. There’s nothing nefarious about this—we want the students to succeed and get their degrees. If they mess around for three years jumping majors or taking random classes, they are much less likely to graduate.

How are students going to figure out what major they want? Remember, they probably don’t have any idea how to even formulate their query or what the options are. Very few high schools have philosophy, sociology, psychology, or anthropology courses, which means most students have zero (or close to zero) idea of what those fields are all about. So how would they get AI to teach them? They wouldn’t even know what to ask. They don’t know what they don’t know.

I can’t help but wonder if Robbins is imagining herself or other faculty—smart people who knew what they wanted to do and what they were good at from an early age and couldn’t wait to go do it. It’s easy to forget that most students are not like that.

Making students take a smorgasbord of gen ed courses gives them a taste of lots of different disciplines. Some of these will resonate and be a hit. I’ve had plenty of philosophy majors who came to college with no idea of what philosophy is, take Intro, and decide this is the greatest thing ever. My colleagues in other fields have had the same experience.

Adults change their careers. A lot.

I am in no way insulting job training. Being a welder, an electrician, a chef, a nurse are all fine and worthy occupations. It is risky, though, because hyper-narrow job training gives you the skills to do that one thing. If you love it and want to do it the rest of your life, all good. But if that’s all you know, it does make it harder to shift careers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Americans change jobs 13 times between the ages of 18-58. Calculating the number of times they change careers is more difficult because “changing careers” is not well-defined. If a fiction novelist starts writing non-fiction biographies, is that a new career? If you are promoted from bench scientist into management, is that a new career? Nevertheless, a commonly cited range is that Americans have 3-7 distinct careers over their lifetimes.

Gen ed is not some form of job training, and it is not meant to be. However, some grasp of other fields, perspectives, and ways of thinking provides other tools. Knowing what else is out there, and how some knowledge of economics would be useful, or how you could utilize an historical perspective, or having a bit of appreciation for other cultures, has value. Higher ed isn’t here to slot people into their one and only lifetime job. Real education hands you a Swiss Army knife: a variety of tools for a variety of tasks. Gen ed shows students what’s in the knife.

Education is (partly) curation

A great deal of what the faculty do is curation. If I send a student into the library, how will they know what to read? To look up? To study? What’s outdated, what’s foundational, what’s cutting edge? They won’t. I tell them. The faculty curate. The average high school graduate wouldn’t even know what questions to ask AI about fields that were not high school classes.

AI provides information, not understanding. That comes from directed, guided doing. Gen ed is not memorizing a bunch of trivia that you could just as easily look up on Google or ask ChatGPT. Proper gen ed provides perspectives on information. Suppose a student is interested in history. Should they understand the sweep of history as driven by great men and women? As relentless class warfare? As oppressors and the oppressed? As the inevitable unfolding of the world spirit? As the march of progress? As a continued fall from the golden age of antiquity? In game theory terms? A typical 18-year-old plopped in front of an LLM wouldn’t even know what to ask or how to analyze an answer if they did ask.

I have some doubts about Jared Peterson’s project (for example, why can’t qualitative decision points be reduced to quantitative ones tractable by rational decision theory?) but he does use this handy chart:

First and second-year students don’t have much information about disciplines not covered in high school, probably don’t have a frame of reference for contextualizing any information they do have, and if they do have a frame they don’t yet have the critical skills to adjudicate among multiple frames. These are all things the faculty are here to provide.

How is AI going to do that? Well, two of my books, including my intro to philosophy textbook, were pirated by Anthropic to train Claude. I know this because I was contacted to be part of a class-action lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic. So maybe down the road Claude could teach my Intro class, but wouldn’t it be better for students to just get it from me instead? The actual author and subject-matter expert?

A four-year degree is testimony of education

Studying only one thing is either job training or monomania. That is fine, but not the same thing as becoming an educated citizen, which requires at least some well-roundedness. A bachelor’s degree is ideally testimony of that education. Community colleges are the ones offering two-year degrees, typically explicitly vocational in nature. Most colleges and universities have committed themselves to the idea of four-year degrees as the marker of being college-educated.

Now, I think in the future there will be a lot more options. I expect more short-term certificate programs, or brief courses of study designed for narrow purposes. Some schools are doing this already, and traditional colleges should be flexible and open-minded about this kind of thing. But completing a couple of intensive six-week seminars is not the same thing as becoming a well-rounded, broadly educated person. Gen ed isn’t something to “get out of the way;” it’s an integral part of that education.

Everybody wants to skip right to knowing karate. But gen ed and all our introductory courses teach them that they first have to learn to wax on, wax off, paint the house, and sand the floor.

Robbins imagines that students will be so self-motivated that they will go get two years of “free AI education” on their own initiative, when the reality is that faculty struggle to get them to show for required classes that the students have paid for. Far more likely is that overconfident students will just jump ahead, naively assuming they are ready to do the crane kick, and get flattened. I am—and the rest of the gen ed-teaching faculty are—here to be their Mr. Miyagi and make sure they win in the end.

If you have a remote position open, your challenge is not attracting the correct candidate, it’s filtering out the bad ones, because you’ll have hundreds or thousands of them.

This my favorite technique:
Add a programming knockout question to the application process that is so simple to solve that only* unqualified developers will not do it manually.

Here’s the question:

result = 0
for x in [3,3,5]:
    if x >= 3:
        result = result - x
    else:
        result = result + x

What is result?

1	0
-11	-10

Reveal the answer

If you got 1, congratulations, you have wired your brain to easily interpret code.

If you got -11, you copy pasted it somewhere. The trick is that there’s a hidden equal sign.

The logic of course is that for a good programmer it would be more of a hassle to copy, open an interpreter or ChatGPT, paste it, run it, then answer, than just run the code in their head.

I used a very similar question while I was CTO at MonetizeMore. Interesting things happened:

50% of candidates got the AI/Interpreter answer.

47% Answered the question correctly.

3% Answered incorrectly.

A few candidates resubmitted the application after getting the answer wrong (we didn’t tell them), one of those candidates was a great hire.

One candidate posted the incorrect question to a forum, and got an answer. So when subsequent candidates Googled the incorrect question, they got the wrong answer.

—

*I should say this method is not perfect, and you’ll get false negatives, but I see it more as doubling your ability to process candidates, or reducing in half your recruitment time.

School districts from Utah to Ohio to Alabama are spending thousands of dollars on these tools, despite research showing the technology is far from reliable.

(Image credit: Beck Harlan)

If you recognized yourself in a few of these points, that doesn’t mean Linux isn’t for you. In fact, you can count it as an invitation. It just means you’ve spent a long time in an ecosystem that treats you more like a product than a participant.

by Maureen Holland

Web feeds are incredible! And a bit confusing! Why are the feed links often called “RSS”? And why is this “RSS” feed in an atom.xml file… hang on, what is feed.json for? What are they even feeding into anyway?

To start, web feeds are often referred to as “RSS” because RSS is the oldest format. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is an XML-based specification for web content syndication (including podcasts).

Syndication is the sale or licensing of material for publication or broadcasting by others. In broadcast syndication, networks sell reruns of their original shows to other platforms, where those shows might reach a larger audience. In web content syndication, feeds package web content into a format that can “rerun” on a feed reader application. A key difference is that feeds are not sold to feed readers. The “audience” for web feeds has a much more active role to play. They are subscribers, choosing what content they want to follow and what reader they want to follow it on.

Other web content syndication specifications include Atom (also XML-based) and JSON. If you’re interested, CSS Tricks has a breakdown of the technical distinctions between these formats. A web feed (even one that says it’s an “RSS” feed) could be any of these formats under the hood.

A very basic web feed looks like this: https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/feed.xml

Simplified example below:

<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<atom:link href="https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
		<title>Magpie</title>
		<link>https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/</link>
		<description>
		Blog of writer and web developer Maureen Holland. Untidy nest of shiny things.
		</description>
		<language>en-ca</language>
		<item>
			<title>A Vanilla Personal Site</title>
			<link>
			https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/a-vanilla-personal-site
			</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">
			https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/a-vanilla-personal-site
			</guid>
			<pubDate>Tue, 18 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
			<description>
			I rebuild my personal site every few years. This time, I decided I wanted to go as minimal as possible. It's been the most enjoyable iteration.
			</description>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

This XML file includes general info about the feed (channel) and lists one item which contains a title, link, description, publication date (pubDate), and globally unique identifier (guid).

A feed reader, like Feedbin, NetNewsWire, or NewsBlur, is able to parse that information and serve it in a human-readable format that will look something like this:

It uses the unique identifier to determine if an item in the feed is new. It can do this for any number of feeds, constantly updating a reading list of your favourite web content.

Importantly, feed readers have no proprietary control over your feed list. If you are dissatisfied with your reader, you can export your feeds to an OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file and import them to a new reader later.

The Joy of Autodiscovery

Remember all that stuff about RSS and Atom and XML and JSON? Forget it!

A subscriber shouldn’t have to know any of that technical detail. This is where RSS Autodiscovery comes in.

You can implement autodiscovery with a single line of HTML in the head of your website (and if you’re using a blog platform, chances are it’s already there by default):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Magpie" href="https://maureenholland.ca/magpie/feed.xml">

Now, no one has to hunt for your site’s subscribe link (or “RSS” link or whatever). They can copy/paste the website address into their feed reader and let the application do the work of finding the feeds.

If you want, you can also include separate links for different categories. WordPress, for example, automatically generates feeds for entries and comments. Ghost includes a main post index, author archive, and tag archive.

This is not required but can be helpful if your site has a lot of frequently updated content or a wide range of topics. Subscribers may prefer a subset of content (i.e. long form articles or short “Today I Learned” posts).

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Everything" href="https://example.com/feed.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Articles" href="https://example.com/articles.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="TIL" href="https://example.com/til.xml">

Wrapping Up

I started subscribing to web feeds after reading Tim Kadlec’s Investing in RSS. When I’m online, at some point, I will be checking my feed reader for a bit of inspiration. It’s a form of self-care to step out of the daily grind and step into someone else’s brain for a while. As much as I’ve learned from the articles I’ve read, it’s the feeling I’ve had reading them that I remember most, that spark of connection or revelation. If I’ve been offline for a while, the unread notifications can pile up, so I also consider it a form of self-care to select “Mark all as read.”

If you’re already a fan of web feeds, check you’ve made it easy for others to find your feed with autodiscovery. If you’re new to web feeds, pick a reader and try it out for a month. Then switch to a different one, just because you can.

This post owes a lot to Matt Webb’s great work on https://aboutfeeds.com/.