christian [he/him]

  • 11 Posts
  • 318 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: September 13th, 2020

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  • Oh shit, are you in the Dearborn area too? One of the flyers we got in the mail was like this:

    Show

    It was like a full ten seconds before it hit me that they really shouldn't be dumb enough to send this and it's possible it was mailed by a Trump association, and another minute before I decided being mailed by a GOP affiliate was actually the more likely case. Looked up the super PAC listed on the other side and it's a Trump-linked PAC.

    As someone who does not want Trump to be president, it's at least relieving to know how easy it will be for the democrats to counter these dirty tricks. All they need to do is have their candidate make a clear public statement about what she finds wrong with this.

    It does kind of upset me that you texted the republicans back the thing they wanted to hear though. I get that the dems deserve every bit of the scorn, but the republicans don't deserve a drop of the satisfaction.


  • HyperbolaBSD and its kernel HyperBK (derivative of the BSD kernel) are expected to be in alpha soon-ish. This is heavily principled, everything remotely proprietary straight to the trash stuff, so the end result is you're sacrificing access to a lot of common software.

    https://www.hyperbola.info/

    A few years back I tried Hyperbola on the linux kernel for maybe a year. Essentially all of the issues I had were with not having access to software I wanted. If I'm sticking to software in the repositories I had no real problems with it.

    What basically every issue boiled down to was: Common software X has some issue in its licensing (I never understood the technicalities of any of this stuff, so please don't ask) that maintainers of common distros are fine ignoring because they consider the the licensing issues minor and lots of things require X as a dependency. Software Y is much earlier in development, but can functionally replace most of the features we want from software X, and has no problems in its licensing. We'll use software Y and adapt the software in our repositories around that. But even if those adaptations are generally not big changes, as you get more and more software in the repos, the effort required from maintainers adds up. Because they're limited on time and funding, the end result is a lot of repository pruning.

    I would bet someone with a little technical knowledge could get a lot of software outside of the repos working without a lot of effort, but I am not that someone. Honestly, it was a good OS, I did okay with what software they had available until texlive was removed from the repos. I type up math notes, so that was a backbreaker for me.

    I will say that their firefox derivative, IceWeaselUXP, was maybe the best experience I've had with a web browser, but I've read from a few people that getting it working on other distros is too much effort.


  • Unless you've left something out, I feel like you're being unfair to the instructor here by assuming malice for giving oral exams. Have you voiced this concern with her? My reaction is that this instructor is putting enormously more effort into her students than she's being paid to, I'm not sure you realize how much more of a time investment that is.

    I've had students come to me about test anxiety and if I trust that they have a decent understanding then I'll offer an option to test orally instead. A lot of students do much better with oral exams. It allows me to say okay, you can't answer this particular question, but I can probe adjacent things to give partial credit. I can see you do have some understanding of what the question is meant to test for, I realize that this specific detail is tripping you up and you would do fine with a question that didn't involve that one hiccup. With a written exam, I'm just grading on how well you answer the one question. It's not reasonable to take stabs at how much better you might do with a slightly different question, because that would be massively influenced by the biases of what I'm expecting out of you before the exam starts - it's hard for that not to end up at better grades for students I like more. I can't look beyond how well the steps you've written on the paper lead towards answering the question you were given.

    In a better world I would offer them for everyone, but it's a massive time investment. I'm reluctant to make that offer unless I already have some confidence they're decent with the material, because if I give an oral exam and they're struggling it might be hard for me to not leak frustration with having two hours of my time burned for no benefit, and if they read that on me it won't help with test anxiety and won't be better for anyone.

    Seriously, just start a dialogue with her about this in private.






  • I'm not going to look myself, but does JohnTitor17 begin every comment with that same first paragraph, just with the dates changed? Because that could actually be a good bit.

    Sorry for the levity when the main topic here is....that. It's one of those things where my reaction is that there's nothing to say here except just look at it.