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.

Seems like you have perfectly valid concerns regarding the logistics of making such a move. Have you brought up these concerns with him? If so, does he acknowledge them or ignore them?

Ah, well that’s not ideal. I’m surprised just disabling the “Quick fixes” list resulted in ads appearing again; that didn’t happen for me. Have you tried updating the filter lists after disabling the “Quick fixes” one?

If uBlock Origin was working fine until recently, you can try this workaround (it worked for me when YouTube suddenly started showing me “Ad blockers are against YouTube TOS” messages):

Open uBlock settings in Firefox, go to “Filter Lists” and uncheck “uBlock Filters - Quick fixes” under “Built-in”.

Then click “Apply changes” and restart Firefox. Hope this helps.

Is it as interactive as Lemmy or is everyone kinda shouting into the void?

I’d say it’s a somewhat different kind of interactivity than Lemmy. Your typical Mastodon user won’t have many followers, but that doesn’t mean you’re “shouting into the void”. Similar to Lemmy, you can comment on (reply to) others’ posts and lots of other people can join in the discussion that way.

Is there an equivalent to communities?

Not really, but you can follow hashtags for whatever topics you’re interested in. Or follow an account for something you’re interested in (e.g.: organizations, weather, hobby news, content creators, etc)

If not, how do you find stuff you care about?

Follow people/organizations/tags that you find interesting and their posts will populate your feed.

And is reblogging the equivalent to upvoting? Is it like a like and share in one?

Not necessarily. Reblogging (“boosting” on Mastodon) is just putting more eyes on someone else’s post by sharing it; it isn’t equivalent to an endorsement per se. You can favorite posts on Mastodon, but I don’t think there’s really an equivalent to a “like” or “upvote” button.

Do they have memes there or what’s the range of content?

The range of content is as wide as anywhere else, memes and all. Can vary from instance to instance, though. (e.g.: code of conduct on mastodon.social may be different from fosstodon.org’s)

How does it compare to bluesky? I have used bluesky but the tone there is kinda shallow imo, rarely any meaningful interactions.

I haven’t used bluesky, so I can’t comment on this one.

I haven’t had to deal with this specific kind of use case before (accessing the local Jellyfin service while the laptop is connected to a VPN), but after some cursory research, one of these approaches may work for you:

Easy Option (only available on some VPN software):

There may be an option in your VPN client that lets you access local network addresses like your Jellyfin server. Check your settings and see if there are any options like “allow local network traffic” and then try opening up your Jellyfin server in a browser (e.g.: http://192.168.1.100:8096/)

Less Easy Option:

If your VPN client doesn’t have an option for allowing local traffic, you can open up the command prompt on your macbook and run a command like this:

sudo route add -net 192.168.1.0/24 192.168.1.1

Where 192.168.1.0/24 is the local network you want to connect to (where the Jellyfin server is located), and 192.168.1.1 is your local gateway (probably your wifi router’s address). Change both of these depending on how your network’s local IPs are formatted.

This should update your routing table to handle local network addresses without the VPN and this should persist between reboots.

Hope this helps.

That’s super neat. I still have my physical copy of this game from back in the day. I’ve booted it up in a Windows 98 VM before, but that’s way more hassle than just opening it in Firefox.

Her science-oriented methods break down when it comes to (in the broadest sense) “supernatural” phenomena - because they are, by definition even, outside science.

I only watched the first 2 or 3 seasons of The X-Files, so I there’s lots of episodes I haven’t seen, but this seems incorrect to me. Scully and Mulder were chasing unexplained phenomena, which are entirely within the realm of science. Humans tend to call things “supernatural” when we don’t know how to explain them (ghosts, monsters, aliens, etc), but those entities (in the context of The X-Files where they are actually real), once observed, can be subjected to the scientific method the same as anything else. Aliens and cryptids and such in The X-Files aren’t magic; it’s just extremely rare for humans to be able to observe and study them.

All these years later, I still can’t believe they got Tyson Hesse, the guy who did this ridiculous Sonic fan comic, to oversee the redesign of the Sonic model for the film. What a crazy world we live in.