pathartl

I think that writing projects should be done in school while students have access to their educational resources, yes. This is purely my own experience so there's a huge grain of salt, but I have to believe that learning how to compose an essay should be iterative with the educator instead of being reactionary. The concept of writing a paper and handing it in for a grade only to be told you haven't met the criteria is wild to me. I can't remember any good paper I wrote that I actually wrote at home. Most of the time it was in class with the ability to ask the teacher questions.

I agree for things like writing papers having access to a computer for research and word proccessing is a net positive, but I still believe that this is better handled by shared equipment contained within the classroom or lab. I may be a bit biased as I'm still not convinced that homework actually provides a ton of benefit, and I'm even more not convinced that homework should require a computer to be completed.

However, to further your first point even more, having one laptop per student is a great way to bring computers into the home of those that might not be fortunate enough to purchase them. In the school district I worked for (very rural Wisconsin) we were able to secure hotspots for households that couldn't afford a broadband internet service. However, even though I've been out of the education sector for a number of years I haven't seen a real uptick in computing skills so I wonder how effective these devices actually are.

I have nephews that entered the system about the time I started in the education sector (and actually worked in their district), but I can't confidently say their skills match or exceed the average student from the era of mid 2000's labs. Simply put without sounding like an old man, I'm questioning whether constant exposure to tech is replacing quality education about it.

By "proper equipment" I mean traditional laptops/desktops that are spec'd to be shared by multiple people and have quality components, or even repairable components so we don't end up with these mountains of e-waste.

The immediate rebuttal I can think of is of course you need a Chromebook; your school is now vendor locked to Google's platform. They did this by offering deep discounts to their cloud offerings.

The point about writing is a good one that resonates with me. I grew up in the age where typewriters were dead, we would outline on paper, and then do drafts/final revisions in the computer lab. I can absolutely see why going straight to digital removes a lot of inefficiency... but I'm just still not convinced it couldn't be handled by shared machines. Having robust dedicated machines, even still in the form of a laptop, could be part of the classroom.

There's something core to this discussion that I feel like everyone misses. Yes, kids annihilate computers. Yes, Chromebooks have an expiration date that's pretty arbitrary. Yes, Chromebooks generally have lower end hardware that doesn't last as long. Yes, making them last longer could mean you cycle through 8,000 Chromebooks in 4 years instead of 16,000.

My question is, do we really need 1:1 programs for kids? I absolutely think it's important to have computer skills, but I think that's more of an issue of class offerings rather than available tech. I'm 30 now, so well removed from when I went to school, but the amount of schools offering comp-sci related classes is embarrassingly low. Wouldn't those classes in labs with proper equipment provide better computer skills than a Chromebook?

And yeah, this is ignoring benefits that Chromebooks have like potential to a learning environment at home. I've worked in schools in various IT positions and I still just can't see the justification in having one laptop per child, especially if it's a Chromebook.

Group chats are fine as long as other people in the group are using Android.

Yes, this is how ridiculous the Apple ecosystem sounds from the outside.

I moved to Outlook with a Microsoft 365 subscription after I found out you could have a custom domain tied to your email (via GoDaddy only, but you can still do it with the right DNS entries) and then made my Google account a free Gmail account.

I got way too sick of getting features months, or even years later, than consumer Google accounts. I wish they would offer a paid tier for Google/Gmail accounts that would allow one custom domain for email.

Too bad it's unwanted tracking instead of an industry standard for Tile-like trackers.

Yeah, there's quite a few smaller municipalities that hold a hazard day or a e-waste collection day. But yeah, they're normally crazy. I wish there were more common collection areas, especially for batteries. Post offices or libraries with collection boxes that are "safe" would be great. Boxes that won't melt, will vent pressure, and maybe filled with a bunch of sand that the batteries get buried in.

Also there's a ton of e-waste that's still usable! e-waste days at regular intervals where people could trade could result in a lot of stuff being reused.

I think they're missing the point that the ban is for New York. You know, one of the most densely populated areas in the country?

Yes, but natural gas isn't pure methane and CO2 isn't good for the brain. Burning something without a vented hood in a closed space can be incredibly dangerous. Especially if you're talking about high rise apartment buildings where... well... hot gas rises.

I drive regularly from Milwaukee to Kenosha county and I have a Mini Cooper. I love it. It's not super comfortable for passengers and it's hard to do long road trips due to lack of storage space, but whenever we need more space we take my SO's 2 door Civic. I know many, many people who have multiple vehicles and they could absolutely get away with half of their vehicles being on the smaller side.

At this point it makes the language/platform a complete non-starter for me. var_dump or echo or print is just not proper debugging. Especially once you level up your debugger skills and utilize more of the functionality rather than just setting basic breakpoints.

I went from a WP/Laravel dev to .NET Framework and now .NET 5+. For me PHP has always suffered from two primary camps: ancient codebases that people don't dare touch, and poor tooling.

The former came mostly from the PHP camp. The lack of OOP where it was pretty desperately needed was unproductive at best, and at worst yielded a codebase that was so unmaintainable we had to double any time estimates for backend work.

For tooling Laravel, at least the last time I touched it, was pretty good with its scaffolding. Relying on Composer was also very welcome. Using IDEs like PhpStorm was pretty good, but took a lot of configuration.

The one thing that really burned me, however, was the amount of effort it took to get a debugger actually working. I am certain the climate is better now, but at the time almost no emphasis was put on actually using a debugger for development. You could get Xdebug running, but you have to know how to configure your local dev hosting environment properly. If you used a prebuilt package like your WAMPs or XAMPPs or whatever you, you got 90% there, but it's so bloated and didn't reflect your production environments. Vagrant was great... if you spent the time to configure your Vagrantfile with a lot of testing.

These days it takes about 30 minutes to reinstall Windows, install VS, clone my project, hit the run button and I'm off to the races. Is everything frictionless? No, of course not, but I can get to actually building my application without pulling my hair out.

Agreed, it's good in small chunks. Sometimes I'll feed it a prompt to generate new code to double check my approach is valid. Sometimes it's shown I am the better architect, other times it's made me aware of parts of an API that I did not know about. Ironically, it's helped me the most in writing recursive code.

I'd suggest checking out "Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar" to learn about their design process. It's fascinating. There can absolutely be visionaries out there... Miyazaki, Kojima, Miyamoto are probably the top three right now. But there's a ton that are kinda went out with a whimper such as Molyneux, Wright, Carmack, Romero, the Housers, Schafer, Sweeney.

I think abstraction is key. There's gotta be a happy medium between absolute control or almost a sense of worship and not allowing a singular person to guide the ship.

Powershell has grown on me. Over time I've worn down and started utilizing my Windows install in the Windows way. I think Powershell is a well overlooked feature of the platform, to the point where I now have moved a lot of my scripts/automations on my home server (Linux based) from bash/js/.NET 7 binaries to Powershell Core.

Big asterisk, my day job is as a .NET/C# developer. So much of Powershell does feel like a .NET wrapper or C#-lite, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It lends itself very well to feeling like a traditional programming language. Hell, it even has a debugger! My only real complaint about it and adoption thus far is the release management. Windows 11 _still_ ships with 5.1, and 7 is leagues ahead in terms of performance and features.

The only point I would raise is that #1 isn't reliable on any system that has stdout/stderr. For most of the MS-created modules this is implemented correctly. You also have the ability to catch and throw exceptions... foreign to people who live in scripts but essential for people who have programming experience.

I might be an outlier, but I'm extremely attached to the Half-Life series and while it's difficult to not get HL3, I'm also not currently disappointed in any game in the series. If the only thing I have to be disappointed in is the release cadence, then I'm probably okay with that?

Someone in a Reddit thread pointed how Valve's structure reduces the fragility of a product by not basing it on one vision and that their games are based on a pretty pure collaborative effort. A writer becomes inherently less influential on the final product, but their individual contribution is more passionate and worked. One could argue for hours about the approach, but I think the results speak for themselves.

They've been taking the shotgun approach for a while. Their product isn't any individual component, it's the platform as a whole. Why people want a company that sells: - Phones

- Computers

- Tablets

- Headphones

- AR headsets

- Cars

- Watches

- Streaming boxes

- Speakers

- Email

- Video streaming subscriptions

- News aggregation

- Fitness routine subscriptions

- Music streaming subscriptions

- Video game subscriptions

- eBooks

- Apps

- Cloud storage

- Credit cards

- BPNL

is completely beyond me. Yes there's stuff in there they haven't announced. Yes there are a lot of accessories and services not listed.

I'm probably a Microsoft shill at this point, but I am a .NET dev running Windows and I have a Microsoft 365 family subscription and bought an Xbox. All of my hardware is from other manufacturers. My finances are not tied to MS. I can't think of another company that has gotten the amount of blind trust that Apple has.

These people I'm referencing generally lean more towards libertarian or anarcho-capital.

There are a few people in my circle that are overburdened by conspiracy theories to the point where they think that humans are corrupt and everyone is out to get them. It's exhausting to live like that. My goal is to be my 13 yr old self's hero. Do cool stuff, be in a good relationship, and fix things that bother me to the best of my ability.

I only know a bit about color profiling, but I don't understand why you'd want a color profile on a per app basis? I see it for device-level... like a printer would have a profile, a camera would have a differently calibrated one, and multiple monitors with different color profiles to make sure they're uniform.

I mean if they have that feature and it's used for something big I'm not privy to, cool, but otherwise it's something that most large OS's handle.

I didn't say that? I was saying that any platform without good third party support could affect sales of that platform. Apple decided to take on this large architecture shift and they decided to go all at once instead of doing it piece meal. e.g. nobody asked Apple to make their own GPUs, graphics APIs, etc. These types of things create a lot of friction that puts a lot of work on third party devs.

Nope, just continuing your thought process. "Most don't" should probably be "Most [work] doesn't."

Hell, the Adobe suite still lacks a bit on Apple Silicon. Entire industries are built on the marriage of Adobe and Apple products. I'm not going to say that Apple Silicon sucks or that it isn't the better choice in a lot of workflows, but shifting the blame to third party developers is incredibly short sighted. The platform is in its infancy.

How is it a clickbait? He bought an M2 Mac based on the advertising and reports from other users. He did some pretty in-depth research into if the machine will work for his workflow. He decided it didn't because of a lack of performance for the price.

Most don't. Some audio workflows require it, and if you're locked into a certain applications like... uh... Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Xcode?

Then you have articles like these: https://techjourneyman.com/blog/great-macos-exclusive-apps/

> Despite having a version of it in Windows, there’s a good reason why people preferred using Photoshop / Illustrator on Macs. First and foremost, Photoshop was developed on the Macs first. Color is more accurate on the mac out of the box than on windows. macOS is more stable than Windows. These reasons make Macs the preferred platform for graphic illustrators around the world.

wut?

Color is more accurate on a Mac if you don't pay attention to the display you purchase with/attached to your device. Yes, Photoshop was first developed on the Mac... 33 years ago.

I get if you like macOS, but the marketing behind it has done a really good job to paint it as if it's the only option out there. It's insane.

Ah yeah, I had the year off. At the time it knocked out my SO's entire company for a couple of hours.

The iPhone 7 had a flaw in its assembly where the radio IC was not epoxied to the PCB correctly. Overtime due to heat stress the chip would get fractures in its solder joints and the phone would lose the ability to get on cell networks.

I took my 7 to the Apple store in 2019 with this issue after giving it to my SO. I was told by the store rep that it was an issue with "the third party manufacturer" (Qualcomm) but Apple would do the repair for free. I learned from some independent repair communities that this was actually a really common issue and Apple was doing some silent recalls.

> A few years back there was this issue of MacOS apps launching with a delay because the OS was checking with Appe if you are allowed to use the app. IIRC, this was just a bug.

If you're talking about Nov 2021 when Apple's Gatekeeper servers went down, apps weren't just delayed, they were unable to be opened _at all_ unless you blocked DNS requests to the server or completely disabled your internet connection.

I believe the only apps that were allowed to be opened were the built in macOS apps. Why this verification is done on every single load is completely beyond me. After this and the whole iPhone 7 radio debacle I won't be buying their products for a long time.