Author Archives: pappp

Article note: We always semi-seriously tell the students "No one regrets having an engineering degree," but apparently it really is the least-regretted major (...possibly because of the lucre).

Article note: "The plan is to completely ignore the situation, and pretend nothing is happening" UK spokesperson Jay Blanton said. "Any discussion of COVID risks or mitigation policies threatens our bottom line, and we'd rather let some folks get sick and/or die than deal with that." (THIS IS A SARCASTIC PARAPHRASE, NOT A REAL QUOTE)

Article note: Mmyep. The hype cycle proceeds. "Scam" isn't quite the word, it's not known to be fundamentally untenable, it's just a longer time-scale and likely narrower application than the hypers are presenting.

Article note: Is it going to suck less than the bundled-ancient-version-of-chrome electron monstrosity they have now? Will screen sharing work vaguely reliably? If so, fine. Teams is actually a nice enough tool in most regards.

Article note: Ooh yeah. I've been holding on my next booster waiting for this, hopefully it'll get rolled out at scale soon.

Article note: This is a nifty analysis, it's pretty credible to my eye.

Article note: The "Consumer Computer" nomenclature for the various commercially-controlled successors to the personal computer is a good turn of phrase.

Article note: Not useful for editors, but for readers, the heuristic is "How recently was it published." The more recent, the more likely it'll be horseshit. There is, of course, some legitimate work going on in academia, but an ever increasing fraction is min/maxing the research/research artifact ratio so effectively that there isn't actually any research in it. Because that is what matches the incentive structure, and the norms have been steadily shifting to permit that kind of fraud.

Article note: The old process is an enormous, unnecessary, frustrating pain in the ass. I had my last renewal get kicked back because the picture - that I took on a digital camera, printed, stapled to a form that was filled out on a computer (and even generated a computer-readable version of the data down the side of the page), snail-mailed it, then they scanned both back in to a different computer - was printed on the wrong grade of paper. None of that paper and snail-mail loops needed to be involved.