Author Archives: pappp

Article note: They have a plan for bringing the towers down now. Aside from student complaints about the isolating design of the things they've been putting up (and possibly-related wave of acquaintance rape type sexual assault situations), on-campus housing is ridiculously expensive, someone really should start harassing the administration about affordable housing and make them commit to having an inexpensive low-end option as part of the next phase, on the whole "public institution serving the people of the state" basis.

Article note: Internet of Shit: Not just stupid, also a threat to society.

Article note: Security theater with dire side effects? Training children to tolerate ubiquitous invasive surveillance? It's like they're boiling down all the most defective things about the U.S. and cooking the children in it.

Article note: There are a couple interesting points in here that I harp on frequently. The utter, absurd, (and arguably unnecessary and undesirable) complexity of modern computing systems such that no one actually understands the stack. The staggering conditioned helplessness and inability to perform procedural thinking most people have. It's a hard and very fundamental problem.

Article note: Academia. ML bullshit might be the bullshitiest, but from where I'm sitting, the goodheart-artifact behavior is the rule, not the exception.

Article note: No, it's worse. The more fragmented and incomplete each service becomes, the more piracy becomes an attractive option. If they spend their energy squabbling for exclusives, they all lose.

Article note: Bahahaha. The value-add model being used to evaluate teacher performance from student scores correlates just as well with student _height_ as student test outcomes. That's a lovely way of demonstrating the model is bullshit because the premise is bullshit.

Article note: Hah. They have a set of very similar "real" landing pages for their various pitches at different one-word paths, plus a spectacular parody-of-their-industry-and-selves fake landing page at the path "/anxiety." I respect that self-awareness. I have no need for SAAS collaborative project management tools, but it actually looks pretty nice.

Article note: I was setting up a slightly-obstinate machine (a Braswell Chromebook flashed with a UEFI Coreboot payload) over the weekend and was trying to search from it before I bothered to install X (...still haven't), and ran into this. It was quite annoying.

Article note: I've been following this one, awesome to hear that they found so much of the right help to move and house the thing.