Monthly Archives: November 2024

Article note: For the "Stallman was Right" file, this is straight out of Right to Read.

Article note: Broadly, agreed. Much of it is because a swath of the edtech industry are carpetbaggers telling impossible lies ("You can scale individual attention by a factor of 10 if you just use our tool! Decimate your teachers and buy this!") to steal public funding. I appreciate the distinction between "adding computers to everything" being a bad idea and "Teaching computer skills" being a separate concern; we really do need to teach (responsible) computer use, the "Digital Natives" thing failed horribly, the devices and their vendors are in charge, and that's a big problem. I also appreciate that they were nuanced about places where tech use does go well; _if_ you can get students to engage in content on their own time in the form of videos or the like (which, due to students being acculturated to it, works better now than in the past), that's more time learning that is more self-paced than almost anything else we can do, and that's a win. It tends to have fairly superficial engagement, but priming operations like "Hey, I'm going to ask you to use X next week, and I've prepared a tutorial video on X to prepare" often works well.

Article note: As ever, a backdoor for anyone is a backdoor for everyone.

Article note: That's a fascinating machine, of a species we rarely get to hear much about.

Article note: ...Students moved en mass to a cheating tool that is both cheaper and harder to detect. News at 11.

Article note: I like the balance of this review. Grim Fandgo is absolutely one of the most beautiful, aesthetically interesting games of the early 3D era. The setting and story are deep and compelling. And... it's almost too frustrating to play in places. The third act drags. The controls fight you. Some of the puzzles are the most egregious sort of adventure game bullshit. It's one of the few games I'd say is absolutely improved by just playing along with a strategy guide.

Article note: Ooh. That's some serious geopolitical news.

Article note: Hasn't QNX opened up to varying degrees several times before, eventually followed by a pull back to more restrictive terms? QNX is nifty, and I have fond memories of that cute QNX demo floppy that booted a responsive graphical desktop with networking, but with Moore's law gains and RTLinux finally getting mainlined this year, I suspect the appeal of a freeish small Unix with RT features is reduced.

Article note: Lost this article in my tab forest the other day, just found and read it. It's a good narrative read for a somewhat complicated story.

Article note: Please let it be true! I've been waiting for us to move back toward tactile interfaces for like 20 years, before we even got to the worst of it.