Let’s play this through: let’s say they anticipated the drop in 2022/2023 state aid perfectly a decade ago. How would that have changed anything? The budget is what it is, what could they have done in 2021 or before to soften the blow? Maybe they could have started gradually raising the school levy to spread the burden across multiple years, but that wouldn’t change the fundamental problem—just the years in which it was paid for.

I’m struggling to understand how this link supports the various posts you’ve made in this thread. The article says that the state pulled back subsidies/aid to JC schools as JC property values increased over the last decade. Is there something the JC BOE could have done about this?

Thanks! A few questions below:

1. What do you see as the bottleneck to be overcome to make library learning program synthesis systems (e.g., Dreamcoder) scalable? Where I've seen recent work on these systems, the work seems to focus on improvements in (a) search algorithms (e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.12485.pdf); (b) program abstraction/library compression (e.g., https://mlb2251.github.io/stitch_jul11.pdf and http://andrewcropper.com/pubs/aaai20-forgetgol.pdf); (c) optimizing neural guidance (e.g., https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rCzfIruU5x5 and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.05922.pdf); and (d) specification (e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.05060.pdf and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.02495.pdf). While obviously work proceeds in these (and other related) domains, I'd love to hear your thoughts on which one(s) are the bottlenecks where breakthroughs are most needed.

2. In the immediate term (3-5 years), in what fields (e.g., theory generators to aide scientists or as modules in robotics) do you think library learning program synthesis programs will have the greatest impact?

3. (Sorry if this is especially stupid, but) Do you think humans have explicit representations of rules (e.g., programs) in our brain "hardware" that we could in theory point to?

4. I was intrigued but also left a little confused by the LARC paper. In the conclusion you advocate for that we need advances to help map from natural programs to machine programs or, instead, that machine programs should have the properties of natural language (like being ambiguous)? Or did I miss the point entirely lol?

Huge thanks again for your time.

Hi Evan—I think you and your collaborators put out some of the most interesting research out there (at least the parts of it that I understand). Unfortunately, I’m only a lightly technical hobbyist (not an engineer or even in STEM), so before wasting your time with my noob questions, I just wanted to confirm this AMA is indeed open even to idiots.

So your friends paid $16K per year for a place worth at least $800K for 6 years until the city got around to revaluing their house to market price… and your assessment is that that was unfair to your friends? Isn’t the story that your friends snuck into a property tax loophole and benefited from it for half a decade at the expense of their neighbors? As someone else pointed out, the reval wasn’t a tax increase. It was just a rebalancing of which units owed which share of taxes. Before the reval, other units were screwed with higher taxes than was fair (because units like your friends’ were paying artificially low bills).

As to the BOE budget change, that’ll be painful for sure, but again, not a tax increase. The BOE’s share of budget for JC schools went up because NJ state’s subsidy to JC schools went down. No net tax increase—just changed where the taxes came from.

Apologies for the tone, but it’s difficult seeing many of these posts repeating the same misleading headline. I think there’s plenty of room to be unhappy with the tax burden and/or how JC officials have spent their budget and those conversations should be had, but I hope we can do so with full information.