In a thread like this a long time ago someone recommended Nail’d Steam page

It’s typically 0.99 and just a silly, fun racer. It’s fun to kill some time on.

The killer app for steam deck for me was emulators. I played through some Zelda games (windwaker, OOT via ship of Harkinian). And some Pokémon. What’s nice is for emulators the battery life feels near infinite, and you can hit the power button for instant sleep. Makes picking up games on down time really easy.

Last recommendation is outer wilds. Played great on the deck and the controls are good.

This brought back intense flashbacks of floating through bramble!

I think it might be real:

I think you’re on the right track. It’s like they heard “you can’t hold and observe an electron” and just really ran with that but missed all the actual nuance behind it. Still baffling why they would print this, seeming to point to on something like only god knows how electricity works while there’s a person using a very clearly engineered device and electric socket.

This article actually helps. I knew that plasma was the preferred name but never knew about the actual changeover. I didn’t realize it was over a decade ago though!! I guess I can still keep saying “I use kde” since I still use all the k* software in addition to the kde plasma desktop environment.

Then what does the DE in KDE stand for?

(Edit: it was more of a joke, but I guess I am serious. Has it officially become not an acronym?)

Oh this touches close to him. I got into pgfplots since it would generate plots in latex at compile time and keep fonts consistent, etc. plots looked amazing though.

The worst was when a colleague couldn’t get a pdf to upload into a google doc, so he just made an ugly ass bar chart in excel for the final draft since that was easier. The only reason he could do that so quickly was because he could read the data so easily from the plot I made. Ugh. Still burns

I have a much longer response, but I’ll try to make a short one. I think there’s a lot more a college degree does (should?) offer/signal, but over the last 50 ish years, that has largely eroded away to just being a professional training program or a gatekeeper to a job. Higher ed in society he mostly turned to social efficiency as its guiding principle instead of several other curricular philosophies. Combine that with the increasing and intense research pressure and it’s the exact situation you describe. Neoliberalism has pushed away long term thinking and risk from corporations, so that burden of risk is taken now by universities (and young people in the form of graduate students) which can be subsidized by government grants. This funding scenario pushes professors to focus on grants and research and to not care about their teaching. It’s not good.

Ooh, and add in ever increasing journals and submissions, and you are correct!

(Or pass them along to grad students who take it extremely seriously)

The entire peer review system is somewhat of a mess since publish or perish and citation indexes have been embedded into promotion and tenure as metrics.

Nope, looks like they DeMorganed to avoid parenthesis

(Oops, didn’t realize 5 other people said the same thing! I don’t think my client loaded all the comments the first time.)

For professors it’s somewhat included but in the pay structure and an expected part of service. So you could argue that it’s not necessarily “free” time, but it’s not a great argument. Reviewers should still be paid and not expected to do this for free.

So much this. PhD just means you are earning significantly less than your peers for at least six years, and then if you stay in academia, it’s less your whole life. There are some nice perks though, but for purely monetary reasons, you do not go for a PhD.

I’ve actually found that college athletes (the ones I get to teach) are much better prepared (for “adulting”) than their peers at graduation. They have much better time management skills and tend to manage and navigate group dynamics better. I think some of what you are saying heavily depends on the sport or perhaps athletic level. I’m not teaching anyone near going pro, they just like their sport and enjoyed the scholarship.

Salt of the Earth

It’s more pro-labor and unions than anti-work, but is absolutely amazing, and there’s a cool story about production getting banned and the actors in the movie are the actual people from the incident. Totally worth watching.

The Dash Berlin ASOT 600 set (specifically Sofia) got me through my dissertation writing. Even now, if I sit down with a coffee and turn on the set, within the couple minutes I am completely in the zone for working. It’s like a brain hack for me.

I also like the Music for programming site (specifically RITES) which is also good for some focus music.

I’ve tried to get some folks to post their dissertation writing music and form a massive playlist, as it seems really common to have some certain song or album. I’m sure it’s similar for other intense work flows too.

No, I think that exits. C-c k kills the buffer, C-x 0 (zero) will kill the frame. But I may have changed my binds and can never remember which is window and which is frame in emacs terms.

However, it’s somewhat moot as just about everywhere you run emacs, it’ll open up in gui mode and you can use the file menu. (Or use F10 to bring up the menus in terminal, but I have no idea where on the manual it would say that)

Yeah, I had a few scripts just act weird on osx. The parameters were different and some of them just behaved differently. It was oddly frustrating.

He does get a bit ranty. I still appreciate his take though. Some of the LLMs are super helpful for me for some tasks, but the hype cycle for AI is really a lot to take and it does warrant some actual pushback against it. I can tell I’m becoming more of an old man, but it’s nice to have someone else confirm how bad the Internet is becoming. It’s almost like a hazy dream for me of back in the early days when it was just people sharing weird stuff with each other and not the active battle to fend off ads and scummy sites to find things.

That’s almost the exact opposite experience for me. Maybe there’s been a more recent update, but I remember searching for specific phrases in decade old messages and the gmail (web site) search would just flat out refuse to show things but I could find them from my phone. I’ll try again, but to be honest, I’ve somewhat given up on google search in general for results that aren’t recent.

The search has been broken for me for a while. I get better results in the iOS mail app. Searching from within gmail will just flat out not show old results.