agiacalone

It's anecdotal, but my wife was a Disneyland cast member for ~5 years. She claims that the words 'thank you' were a rare occurrence to hear from guests...

Current CSU Lecturer here, working for one of our largest campuses. Since I started 10 years ago, my department (CS) has seen more than double the amount of enrollment. Projections for us are to double again in the next 4 years or so.

The decline in student population might be a thing system-wide, but not for certain areas like STEM.

Edit: Also, we have lost quite a few faculty due to our poor pay, which makes our overall class sizes huge. When I started, class size was capped at 35. Now I have two lecture-hall size classes at ~100 students per class.

Ahem. https://nestflix.fun/sick-sad-world/

It just means that services that allow bad actors get blocked. Like Google Groups.

I have and enjoy using “public” Usenet servers like eternal-september and SDF which disallow spam and hold users accountable for their actions.

Killfiles are the generally accepted way of combating spam on Usenet. With only a few lines, I see very little of it even on the wider Usenet groups.

Generally blocking public services (like Google Groups) is enough to block 90%+ spam

Small newsgroup services that use NNTP, like Usenet, still exist as well—not to mention the “big” services.

Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to.

https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP

(SDF is member only access)

It happened to me on Arch during the switch from init to systemd.

Update was documented, but I didn’t look. Did my `pacman -syua` as I normally did on a daily, and rebooted to a totally borked system. This is when I was a grad student and really needed that laptop that week.

I still love Arch, but I can’t trust it anymore as a daily driver.

I have a close relative who works for the beast, and he claims that everyone there "eats the dogfood".

Knowing what I know of him, I believe it and he certainly lives the company life. He even used to have (and claimed to like) a Windows phone. ;)

Preferences are preferences, but mine would be Cinnamon DE.

Simple, fast, lots of functionality. Reminds me of all the best parts of Windows XP and the focus is on tasks/programs and not full-screen apps like modern Gnome.

And almost as lightweight as FVWM (not quite, but closer than most mainstream DEs).

I’m confused. Are you advocating for complexity regardless of need?

I feel like there’s some unsaid intrinsic value to having text-based files versus a compiled format like parquet. Size and speed aren’t nearly as critical when size is small, and this seems like adding unneeded complexity for all but some specialized use cases.

I've used some form of *NIX since 1999, almost exclusively.

Began with Red Hat 5. Moved on to Slackware for my server at the time, and Debian for workstations (I also had various MacOS machines as well). Dabbled with Arch for a few years and Manjaro. Recently, I sold all of my Apple equipment and standardized on...Linux Mint.

Mint + Cinnamon DE is simply amazing and even with lower specs on the current laptop I'm running (Thinkpad T460S vs. Apple MBP 2019 i9), the difference is stark. Not to mention rock-solid stable.

No going back for me.

From the article:

“They released an early spreadsheet tool called Multiple [sic] in 1982. But Lotus 1-2-3 was the first killer application for the PC.”

Same. Let the GNU fight this fight and we benefit. It's about choice.

Shouldn't the credit go to VisiCalc instead of Excel?

Excel rode on the popularity of VisiCalc and Lotus 123 for years.

https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/visicalc-excel-and-the-ris...

A few reasons, although you are only seeing part of the picture with the project. The lectures were all theory-based (more along what you would find in the book).

1. I had a whopping three weeks to prepare this course from scratch (welcome to Uni teaching) and it was what I could scrape together in that time.

2. Parsing is highly useful, and I felt my students could benefit from it.

3. It was what I did in undergrad.

4. It was not too difficult to accomplish, and a project like this can easily get out of hand for a semester project.

We have a similar course too which focuses specifically on language design without the compiler part (they do get a bit of compiler theory) which satisfies that "requirement" for graduation. It is much more popular than the compiler course which is perceived as "harder" (it probably is when I teach it). ;)

Uni CS lecturer here. One of my mentors in grad school was the compiler professor, and I learned a lot from him. I also got a chance to actually teach compilers for the fist time last year and it was one of the most difficult courses I have ever taught. Used the dragon book and had my students create their own lexer/parser based on an invented language that I came up with.

Compilers is one of the few topics that none of my colleagues seem care about, but IMHO it's so very important to learn how to do. In my Uni, the course only gets taught once every few years (it didn't help that our last department chair didn't care for the course at all and never scheduled it).

I count the day that I finished my LL(1) parser and lexer for my own compiler course as a student as the day I "earned" my chops.

Edit: Since there seems to be some discussion on this thread, I'll throw in the actual project that I gave my students (warts and all). https://github.com/agiacalone/cecs-444-semester-project

This is a really neat project. It reminds me a lot of Inform, in the sense that a full “modern” language was designed around creating an older-style of game.

I’m with you. I really liked the essay, and I also particularly like speculative fiction.

I moved to San Francisco in 1999, my early 20s, and got a landline. Cell phones were not yet the norm, and I really didn’t have much interest in having one until a girlfriend of mine insisted I get one in 2000.

If I remember correctly, Pac Bell had a “opt in” white pages phone number removal which was not charged, but my parents just a few years prior had to pay for theirs with Pac Bell.

As others have said, .mobileconfig or official app work great.

I geek out a bit and use Surge for iOS (pricey and not for non-techie users) and run a few proxies. It'll also allow for DNS override, which I use NextDNS's DNS over HTTPS.

https://www.nssurge.com/

NextDNS (or a similar DNS ad-blocker solution like PiHole) works wonders on iOS.

I have no problem parking my 2016 Toyota Corolla. Even on busy city streets.

Never understood the desire to drive around a massive truck or SUV, especially in an city environment.

Maybe this will sound bizarre, but in high school, we were taught Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.0 by being given a thick beige binder and a set of floppy disks. There was barely an interface. We had to figure it out by flipping through dead trees and learning key combinations.

The best is when we discovered the keyboard overlay. No more memorization!

Ripped all my DVDs in 2010, donated them, and haven't looked back. Nowadays with Plex, I see no reason to ever use physical media again

Reeder on iOS is pretty good. Been using it for years across multiple versions

Some of us who never left RSS think those two things are features

I had one of these when I was a teen! Granted, it wasn't originally mine, but I found it in my grandfather's shed in the early 1990's and I kept it on my nightstand for years. It worked too (I might have replaced the vacuum tubes originally...I don't remember now) and the thing got uncomfortably hot.

It had an "alarm clock" feature which would turn on the radio at the time the connection for the alarm would happen. But I was always too nervous to use it because I was afraid the house would burn down if I left it unattended.

Edit: Also, I don't know if it was the tubes or the internal speaker, but the damn thing was LOUD.

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/motorola_56ce1_56_ce_1_chhs_49...