It is quite telling, regarding the state of higher education, if actual teachers actually talking to students 1:1 (which is all that an oral exam really needs to be) is brushed away as a non-starter. I can highly empathise with students who feel like the whole enterprise is a farce, and trying to game and cheat that system at every possible turn is the only appropriate response.
So, the advantages of physical media are much touted these days, but all the actual physical media we have are yesteryear's technology, and each come with their own unique problems, plus there is the problem of waste. Why isn't a new physical format taking hold?
Something like Bandcamp-style downloads, which you put on a micro SD card. You put the card in a 3d-printable piece of plastic, resembling a cassette case. When you buy the download, the band sends you a printed piece of paper (the inlay for the cassette case thing) saying “limited edition run #1, Sequence Number 465/2000; thanks for your support”. If you want to get fancy, maybe record the transaction in some kind of ledger; perhaps put the buyer's name on the band webpage as a patron.
For the software, perhaps there could be something open source based on hardware like the anbernic rg355xxsp and similar devices (multipurpose, portable, hackable by design, …)
It would take very little to get it established: A critical mass of bands in some genre getting together, their fans getting on board, and things spreading from there.
From this site, we have no indication that any actual person is putting any kind of good-faith effort towards trying any actual thing.
All we know is that a bunch of marketers are trying to find out: Given a certain amount of marketing effort, how many people can we sign up to a mailing list, and how many people can we get to pay a $99 reservation fee, if the product proposition is: You'll get a slick-looking "Developer-Terminal" (specifics to be determined) for $1.999. -- Based on that, they will decide whether they will lift a finger to figure out what the product should actually be, let alone put any resources towards developing it.
That's where the negativity comes from. They are eroding people's good will. Good will that is sorely needed when actual companies make actual products and need actual consumers to pay attention to actual product launches.
I think, the lesson learned from › Python v. R ‹ is that people prefer doing data science in a general purpose language that is also okay-ish for data science over a language that's purpose-built for data science but suffers from diseconomies. Specifically: Imagine a new database or something like that has just come out. Now, the audience that wants to wire it into applications and the audience that wants to tap it to extract data for analytics put their weight together to create the demand for the Python library. The economies for that work out better than if you had to create two different libraries in two different languages to satisfy those two groups of demand.
» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]
With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.
I was going to disagree by saying that the menus are extremely confusing to the elderly. However if the goal is to extract money from them by generating confusion about what is an on-demand vs a streaming piece of media; you could not design a better software system. Reminds me of the theory that micro-transaction revenue in video games has driven menu UI in the direction of confusing and disorientating the player.
I was very much the kind of student who didn't perform well under exam-taking pressure. For marked work that I did outside of school, it was straight-As for me. For written exams performed under time pressure and oral examinations (administered without advance notice), it was very much hit-and-miss.
If my son should grow up to run into the same kinds of cognitive limitations, I really don't know what I will tell him and do about it. I just wish there was a university in a Faraday cage somewhere where I could send him, so that he can have the same opportunities I had.
Fun fact on the side: Cambridge (UK) getting a railway station was a hugely controversial event at the time. The corrupting influence of London being only a short journey away was a major put-off.
As a parent of a kid like this: start early with low stakes. You can increase your child's tolerance for pressure. I sometimes hear my kid saying sometimes after a deep breath, "There nothing to it, but to do it". And then work on focusing on what they did better versus how they did in absolute terms.
I see collapsing under pressure to be either a kind of anxiety or a fixation on perfect outcomes. Teaching a tolerance for some kinds of failure is the fix for both.
I've had various issues installing Void so I succumbed to Manjaro, which works surprisingly well. I have noticed in general that many non-systemd distributions work less well over time for some reason. Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead, but even trying more modern variants simply no longer works as it once used to work. At the same time there is less and less adapted documentation to be found. It seems the non-systemd distributions not only declined in absolute numbers but also in regards to manpower and time investment. MX Linux also lags behind updating versions of numers programs: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx - it has gotten a bit better after libretto, but it still lags behind compared to e. g. Fedora.
The thing where Void really stands out in my opinion is "hackability" and providing an inviting on-ramp for making certain kinds of customizations that would be intimidating in terms of their complexity in other distros. -- I don't use it as a daily-driver desktop.
For example, I have a chroot'able tarball providing all dependencies for all software I write that runs on a server. I build that tarball myself from source in an airgapped environment. (I had been doing something like this, minus the airgapping, with Gentoo from about 2012 until 2024). I looked for a replacement for Gentoo in 2024 and landed on Void. Most of the time when I do a build, I just pull the latest commit from the repo, and it "just works", even though Void is not even advertising itself as a source-based distro. Sometimes it breaks because of the distro itself (just like Gentoo used to). But, with Void it has always been so much easier to diagnose and fix issues, and the project is also quite inviting to merging such fixes. With Gentoo, it had always been quite painful to deal with the layers of complexity pertaining to Gentoo itself, rather than any package that has decided to break. Void, on the other hand, has managed to avoid such extra complexity.
Lately, I've started to play around with Void's tool for creating the live installer ISO. It's quite malleable and can easily be repurposed for building minimalist live/stateless environments for pretty much any purpose. I'm using that to create VM guests to isolate some contexts for security-purposes like a "poor man's Qubes OS" kind of thing.
There's an old presentation from late 90s or early 2000s where Linus talks a bit about the origins of Linux, how much he hated working with OpenVMS at university, and how much of a breath of fresh air Unix was. The reason he liked Unix so much was that "you could understand the whole system. Maybe you don't know exactly how the startup system works right now, but if you need to know then you just go in there and figure it out".
This fairly accurately describes why I generally prefer systems like Void (including for my daily desktop). Alpine has a similar experience (although I hate OpenRC), as do the BSD systems (mostly; there's some ridiculous historical complexity here).
Artix is great IMO. You can choose your init system. It's not for your grandmother perhaps. It's a rolling distro like Manjaro and I think it generally benefits from the Arch ecosystem. I only really notice it getting better since I've been using it for the last 3-4 years. The change to using pipewire for sound was unpleasant and the one other major problem I had was Chromium breaking Signal for a time. Everything else has been happiness.
As a Slackware I stick with release because it is extremely stable and my main System (Thinkpad W541) works fast as most modern systems with 16G mem and 8 CPUs. If I ever got a brand new system (doubtful), I would use current until the next release.
Also, I like the fact I do not have to install patches every other day. Plus PV keeps the applications I use most up to date in Release.
That is the good thing about Slackware, you have current for the adventitious and release for people like me. And both you admin the exact same way.
FWIW, I use regular Window Managers as opposed to desktops and my main programs are Emacs (latest version), vim (close to the latest), Firefox (latest), mutt, tin, irssi and some games that come with KDE.
Non-useful distros become unmaintained, that's how things are, regardless of service supervision. If you want a maintained non-systemd distro, try Alpine Linux.
Void is pretty well maintained, as of lately, and did not give me any headaches for last several years. That's a lot for a bleeding-edge rolling-release distro. Yes, its my daily driver.
(Alpine is great, but I did not try it as a daily driver, it's sort of not intended for that, it seems.)
> (Alpine is great, but I did not try it as a daily driver, it's sort of not intended for that, it seems.)
I can't say what it's "intended" for, but I run stock Alpine on a desktop and a laptop, and postmarketos (an Alpine derivative) on another laptop, and I assure you it works great as a daily driver.
There's no need to welcome me to war. I'm not in one, despite the fact that the powers that be are hellbent on getting me (and everyone else) into one.
Oh, yes. That's exactly how it works. No one would ask you "do you want to get into a war"? Ukraine didn't want to get into a war. Turns out it wasn't their call to make!
Least you can do is be prepared. If a hostile country believes "oh, they can't handle a war, it's going to be so easy", the risk of that country trying shit goes up. And if you really can't, the war would be more devastating than if you can.
The truth is that countries can't want anything, be hostile, or have any other personal trait simply because countries are not animate entities but rather a huge number of absolutely different people with different goals, and most of them would just love to mind their own business and don't want to kill and die in the name of some scum calling itself government.
Speaking of war as something inevitable, something unconditionally built in into human nature, and telling people who want peace to prepare, as in Orwell's "war is peace", simply reinforces the narratives of said scum and spins this morbid wheel up into total destruction.
Profits as a measurement of success, at this point, seems like a meme from yesteryear.
The left is perfectly happy to burn money to save the environment, feed the poor, educate the stupid, whatever. The right has joined the money-burning party, pushing for deglobalization, propping up dying companies and industries, re-establishing industries that haven't been viable in a long time. Who still cares about profits? Surely investors do? No, not really, certainly not in tech. Investors will happily throw money at tech companies who never make a dime, as long as they are vaguely saying the right kinds of things, being attached to the right kinds of hypes, and fitting in with the right kinds of herd dynamics.
Generating or destroying money is not going to help or hurt anyone's career these days. Being on the currently-career-promoting side of the "woke" issue. Now there is something to take seriously.
I've semi-recently gone down the TV platforms rabbit hole again, and my overall impression is that they're all horrible.
I ended up grabbing a 6-year-old mini PC I had lying around in the basement and a >10-year-old TV that my father-in-law was going to throw away, as well as a Logitech y-10 air mouse [1] that I am lucky enough to have bought way back in the day.
I put desktop Linux on the PC with KDE plasma (avoiding Kodi, which, somehow, consistently attracts me but then annoys and frustrates me whenever I actually use it) and Brave.
I cranked up the scaling factor in KDE, and made a tiny tweak so KDE won't ask for superuser passwords and passwords on wallet access.
The browser is the only app I ever use on that thing, although it also has a DVD drive and VLC, and I copied my film collection onto the local disk of that thing.
I logged into all the media platforms I pay for (and the free ones I frequently use) and made an HTML file that links to all of them, using a huge font size, and setting it as home in the browser.
It cost me $0 (considering all the recycling), and it's a better experience than anything that money will buy.
I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.
Last time I tried, I found that the VOD platforms I care about have their respective best implementations in their Desktop/Web-versions. Android Apps were not always available, and to the extent that they were, half of them were on Amazon/Fire, half of them on Android TV/Google Play. I remember, in one case (Masterclass), they used the Android App to upsell me on their "Premium" subscription (or maybe it was the download-feature on the Android App).
So I would have had to pay more, switch between multiple HDMI sources to switch to the platform with the app I wanted to consume, and would still have had to use my desktop PC for some of the content I was paying for.
And then, I could never get the apps I actually cared about to occupy most of the screen real estate (or at least be suitably prominently placed). Most of the real estate was dedicated to dark patterns trying to get me to pay for stuff I didn't want to pay for, even though I was already a happy paying customer for more than enough stuff and there wasn't a “give it a rest, already” setting anywhere to be found.
I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age.
It's just such a sad and sorry state of affairs. How did we get here?
> I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.
These things just spam analytics and ad requests 24/7 too. The only one that's tolerable (and quite good) is Apple TV.
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