rudyharrelson

The dog on the left is such a strawman lol. Those who would say such a thing are few and far between. I know plenty of DMs and players who think the PCs' combat encounters should be challenging and even lethal.

It is extremely common for classes to require students to learn to use proprietary software. It’s a tool of the trade.

I understand that; my position is more ideological than practical. In an ideal scenario, AutoDesk, Adobe, Microsoft, etc wouldn't be so deeply entrenched in their respective fields such that they are the de-facto tools of the trade for every business which must be learned in order to be hired. I know a given student has to learn certain proprietary tools in the current academic and professional environment. My comment was saying I would prefer this not to be the case. I am fully aware that proprietary software domination in the academic and professional spaces is not going away any time soon.

In my ideal scenario, an interviewer at a company would ask, "Can you perform the following edits to a given graphic?" instead of "Can you use Photoshop?" since the former allows for candidates who can use alternatives like GIMP. I understand company pipelines aren't set up for this, either, because company pipelines are also deeply entrenched in proprietary software.

The OP's photo is specifically about professors allowing other software to be used. Which would be a good starting point for making these kinds of changes.

I'm no academic, but it seems wrong to me that any field would require the use of a particular proprietary software in order to do one's homework assignments.

May Excel or SPSS be the best tool for the job? In many cases, sure! But students should be allowed to use whatever other software can also get the job done, as long as the software exports the assignment in a data format that the professor can reasonably ingest (e.g.: turning in a CSV file, which can be understood by many different kinds of software, not just Excel).

I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don't want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that's besides the point.

I've had great results with various refurbished Dell Latitudes from eBay over the years. I have a stack of about 5 or 6 of 'em and they've all run many mainstream Linux distros with fantastic out-of-the-box support. I pass 'em out to members of the household whenever a laptop is needed and they'll usually get the job done.

I'd just type in "Dell Latitude" on eBay and filter by price and such. I suspect any model with an i5 and 8GB RAM oughta be fine for light programming work. I've found sellers with high ratings (like 97% or higher) and thousands of sales are pretty reliable (and tend to have return policies in case you get a lemon). Just test all the hardware (webcam, microphone, headphone jack, USB ports, ethernet, etc) as soon as you get it.

I've saved a lot of money over the years buying secondhand, and these machines have been running without a hiccup for years of casual use.

Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is up ~25% (despite the narrative).

What's the ratio of household income to the cost of living? I understand that's going to vary wildly from place to place, but my point is income, as a statistic, seems meaningless without knowing the cost of living to see if people are actually able to afford rent, groceries, etc on that 25% increased income.

Came here to say something similar. I always have mixed feelings on Scrubs for similar reasons to you. I genuinely can't go back and rewatch most episodes because they are incredibly dated or insensitive in many respects. The good parts are still good, the great parts are still great, but the bad parts feel really bad IMO, and it really kills a lot of rewatch potential for me, despite having loved watching seasons 1-5 when it was originally airing. It was one of my favorite shows for years.

I can definitely watch older stuff and understand it's a product of its time, but Scrubs in particular has me cringing by 5 minutes into the episode; I can't get through the rest of the episode most of the time. I end up skipping around to watch the scenes I know I like. I ain't got time to sit around watchin' The Todd harass people or Kelso make his usual "wife bad" jokes.

What a soundtrack, though. One of the better soundtracks of any show I've watched.

At my old job (tech support), I watched a new hire once highlight text, right click for the context menu, and click "copy". And then right-click to hit "paste". Every time. They didn't know a single shortcut for anything. It was maddening to watch.

I gave em a lot of help because they were clearly not particularly tech savvy, but it made me wonder how the hell they got through the interview process with such a limited skillset.

Why not? I press a button and have a cup of boiling water less than 2 minutes later.

Derivatives started making more sense to me after I started learning their practical applications in physics class. d/dx was too abstract when learning it in precalc, but once physics introduced d/dt (change with respect to time t), it made derivative formulas feel more intuitive, like "velocity is the change in position with respect to time, which the derivative of position" and "acceleration is the change in velocity with respect to time, which is the derivative of velocity"

My old boss used to die of cringe any time I started humming this song at the office.

Summer of 2020. Lockdown was in full effect and I was working from home. I wouldn't say I had a lot of extra free time (my kid was 1 year old at the time, lol), but I spent many hours that Summer tinkering with various projects, and that led me to eventually adopt Linux as my daily driver on all my machines.

I've dabbled with Linux since 2005, but was never savvy enough to completely ditch Windows until 2020.

Same, but luckily those aren't the only two options.

Torvalds' particular brand of constructive criticism tends to be insulting and demeaning rather than simply "direct". We can acknowledge that without deflecting to worse people.