For me, it was mostly coding stupid exercises in Maple (obscurest lang ever?), then printing them out, chopping the prints with scissors, then gluing it into a composition notebook with my handwritten answers to whatever questions I had to answer.

So basically, as I was taught: It's like 3rd-grade level papercraft with a sprinkling of stuff so obvious, you wouldn't think it needed its own branch of study.

That's actually quite a lot, ngl, but that would be "an almost incomprehensible amount of bandwidth" or something, which was not the language they chose

Wow! That's almost the price of a cell phone worth of used hard drives that could fit in a purse. Boggles the mind.
(I spent way too much time checking those numbers. You can get decent 10TB used SAS drives for about $80 with 1-year warranty)

The name of this phenomenon is called "accurately articulating what it is that you want", which is what it would have been called the first time if more people knew about it

Others here are saying the same things, I'm just here to dumb down the TL;DR

- People on phones: Don't let people be on their phones during a show. Provide an adjacent "phone lobby" or something for people who genuinely need to interact with their device during a show. Have motion-tracking spotlights illuminate offenders with the beam of shame. DO SOMETHING
- Your sound is bad: There's a sweet spot between too loud and just loud enough. When it's too loud, it's painful on top of bad.
- Commercials before the show: Fine, but keep the sound down so people can chat (and be on their phones), but then start on time.
- Gross theaters: Design some kind of theater that cleans itself like a dishwasher if you have to. The floors are sticky and it smells weird.

I'm competent enough about caring for children to get them to medical appointments on time and protect them from violent harm, which is more than I can say about the school I pulled them out of.

Of the many people at the school I've asked, at length, about how their attendance system(s) work such that I can achieve success with getting to medical appointments on time, no one seemed to actually understand it.

This is an embarrassingly low bar under which to fail.

I'm not seeking to actively disrespect teachers, schools, and the whole educational system. But any honest assessment of what they actually do is unflattering.

The good teachers? Their value is far and away negated by everything else working against them.

I'd like to say that this isn't a gross failure actively harming our kids and should be disposed of, but then I have to weigh that against the reality of what they're producing.

Good lord, no! The ease of compromising cell phone service to intercept SMS texts makes your advice a hard security no-no.

Sure thing! Using Ollama, it's as easy as falling off a log.

https://ollama.com/library/lla...

It didn't take me but a few clicks and scrolls from the link provided to find out the aerogel is NIPAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That's made from nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. There's so much else in the world to grouch on, but this story is actually good news and interesting, not at all worthless.

It would be nice if they could give some attention to quality for their own products, especially the Family Link parental controls app. It's so bad that I would gladly throw it in the trash if only an API was available, but I need this functionality and it's unforgivably defective. You just find the parts that work reliably enough and kludge an actual solution around those.

The whole product reeks of overpaid software engineers on a scrum team delivering almost-correct software for story points.

You'll often see "oops, there was an error" and the only reasonable action is to try again. No explanation, no way to diagnose, no obvious path to deal with the error. Just hope it doesn't happen again, but if it does, pound on it like a TV from the 50's or something?

Interface is terrible, duration limits don't work (loads of people complain about this specifically), and scheduling is too dumbed down to work realistically and assumes your activity will happen neatly between midnights, without telling you of course. Find out yourself the hard way, suckers of giant corporations.

Just download a competing product... psych! Their anticompetitive practices seem to be preventing that very effectively.

As a kid in school, I found math tests easy because all you had to do was provide a correct answer.

Writing for good grades was always a struggle though! You'd put so much thought and effort into something, only to get bad marks for artistic choices or having different viewpoints from the teacher. In time, I got a peek behind the curtain and learned that written work was graded more by weight than quality. Put enough words on the page with appropriate punctuation, and you win.

This comeuppance is righteously due.

This checks out, but today is the first time I knew about it! Apparently it was available as a separate download.
https://christianliebel.com/20...

I knew about IPX/SPX and NetBEUI for getting win pcs to talk to each other on a LAN, but trumpet winsock was all I knew for making things work.

Shortly afterward, I got on board with linux and PPP for dialup connections, and then DSL eventually came around for affordable high speed internet. ISDN was a thing, but not something I could afford during its heyday.

So much nostalgia!
- Win 3.11 didn't have a tcp/ip stack, so you used trumpet winsock.
- Most images would slowly load from top to bottom, but interlaced gifs would give you a sense of the whole image as it loaded.
- No frames, no javascript.
- Gray was the default background color.
- The blink tag was in common use.
- Most content was static, but forms were a fancy thing and could send data to a CGI backend handler.
- Usenet was fun and cool!
- Gopher protocol was a thing, but had no obvious advantage over http.
- You didn't have an email spam filter, and you didn't need one.
- Majordomo handled email lists.
- Telnet and ftp were the tools everyone used.
- Finger protocol existed!
- Teardrop attacks (invalid packet fragmentation) weren't known yet.
- You could get guitar tabs for Nirvana songs, thinking those guys will make lots of albums in future decades.
- No usb.
- AT keyboards.
- Physical power switches for your AT power supply.
- Vesa local bus peripherals seemed like the future.
- Some dude was working on a unix variant you could run on a normal pc. Lee-nooks or something

I'm certainly forgetting a lot of things. Everyone had rollerblades on.

This exploit is not at all like providing an arbitrary "from:" header. We've had SPF for decades now, plus there's DMARC and DKIM. Anonymous smtp relays have been exploited out of existence. The "system" is not "still vulnerable".

Everything about this semi-informed nonsense is so far off the mark that it's hard to distinguish from intentional trolling.

My love of education is a major factor in my disgust for "higher education". My very first class in college dedicated the whole time to having us form groups to solve a remedial algebra problem, the kind where you thought students wouldn't be admitted without having mastered previously. Oh, and there's a high school student there to get college credit too.

No, I went there for "higher" education and found out that it was really just an expensive tool for driving class division.

Then later in the workforce, it's more of the same: incompetent people with degrees talking about how college didn't teach them basic practical skills needed on the job.