plantteacher @ plantteacher @mander.xyz

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The article covers that: “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can't afford a basket of groceries.”

Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.

.. or farmers trying to sell obscure things like celery root!

seriously though, the article seems reasonable and balanced to me. E.g:

• “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can't afford a basket of groceries”
• “It's important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem”.

What’s Kenji? Is it the cookbook mentioned here:

https://www.kenjilopezalt.com/

?

And email, done right (safe, no spam, secure, private) is one of the hardest things to do. It’s not easy.

It should be easy when ~95% of the traffic is internal, which is the important traffic. Students and profs emailing each other. How often does a school need to collaborate with another? Google has ruined email and if mail to externals is unreliable that’s fine. Hopefully students are not becoming helpless when the need comes to write a snail mail letter.

I would rather not condition students to satisfy corporate hoops imposed on them by surveillance advertisers.

But can you, do you want to explain setting up thunderbird to the median college goer?

Thunderbird is a convenience. Every student should have access to a UNIX or linux lab where they can type “pine” at a shell prompt and get a preconfigured mail client. If they want the extra convenience of using a 3rd party client, just give them the raw generic parameters. They are students -- it’s their job to struggle through puzzles.

When I studied compsci, my prof told me ½ of what I learn at the uni will be obsolete by the time I report to work. So his take was to give a strong dose of the kind of knowledge that does not expire: theory and concepts. We learned a language that does not even exist in the real world (PEP5), which was a blend of important constructs from several real assembly languages. He said if you learn PEP5, you will be best adapted to picking up any assembly language. If he were to teach a real assembly language the chances we would encounter it would be slim and we would be alienated by dissimilar other real langs.

The wise move is not to make students dependent on implementation specifics.

On a note on matlab, in addition to industry, there are certain fields in academia, eg neuroscience and many engineer fields, where matlab has been part of their culture for quite some time. My guess is you can make the case for some other proprietary softwares used in university. Changing culture in a field is not an easy thing; but fortunately people in science usually notice these issues and make a choice for themselves.

IIRC, the GNU Octave language is similar enough to MATlab that if someone cannot adapt something must have gone wrong with their instruction, which should not be centered around implementation particulars.

MATlab can only be justified in one niche case: simulink, which GNU Octave does not offer. A prof should have to have simulink as part of the course if they are going to justify spending dept money on MATlab.

I have a postfix server that Google rejects. I was told I need to setup DKIM. Then I was told it’s not just enough to have DKIM configured, but I will be forced to solve Google’s CAPTCHAs before my DKIM is accepted. In the end I opted not to ever send email to google or MS recipients.

Perhaps universities could go as far as setting up DKIM but then refuse to support Google’s special needs (such as CAPTCHA solving). If email from the uni to a google acct bounces, no problem because the sender is at least informed that google refused their RFC-compliant message. But what if Google accepts the msg for delivery then files it as spam? Should the university mail server give the sender a notification that a msg was delivered but likely to a spam folder, I wonder?

When the hard-working little swimmers encounter the thicker vaginal mucus, their path is slowed. So the sperm often join together at their heads, which gives them greater swimming speed (up to 50 percent faster) than if they were to carry on individually.

I wonder why that is. If a group of people were to join together and run, the speed of the group would be capped by the slowest runner. And aerodynamics would be worse.