As someone born and living in a country that uses the metric system, I do not understand a bit of what inches and feets mean. Tell me something has 10-15 cm, and I know what it means. I measure 173cm, I know what one meter is about. 5'10? What the hell is that?! 5 feet and 10 inches? Some people have small feet, some have larger. And what is an "inch"? :)
Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100ºC means boiling water, 40º feels summer around here..
I guess I'm saying that you understand the values of the imperial system because you're used to them, as I'm used to values in the metric system..
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that a system where the majority of air temperatures in the vast majority of the country fall between 0 and 100 is slightly more convenient than one in which they fall between -17 and 37. 0 is really cold it doesn’t frequently get colder than that in most of the country. 100 is really hot, in most places it doesn’t get hotter than that.
Feet are slightly more convent for declining human sized things because meters are just a little too big to describe human height and centimeters are a bit you
If you were designing a system to describe humans with no other consideration you’d probably pick one where 10 units was the average human height. And feet is closer to that than meters. Also you can divide 12 by 6 and 3.
I’m not saying that customary is superior just that it does has certain advantages.
Saying "I'm 5 feet 11 inches" requires about 3 digits, saying "I'm 180cm" also requires that many digits. It takes about as many syllables as well, because in practice you say "five-(feet)-e-leven" or "one-eighty" (Note that I don't know how to say US customary units out loud)
Was in Fairbanks last weekend and it was -15F. So, having Fahrenheit staying positive for weather in US, is not really an argument.
I am fine with Celsius based on water (0 freezing and 100 boiling). But I get that changing is confusing when you have adjusted your whole life to a system. If taught at school and displayed, in half a generation we could move to metric. Like others said groceries are already there.
No one is arguing that temperatures never go outside of 0-100. The argument is that a scale that generally falls between 0-100 is inherently slightly more convenient than that that generally falls between -17 and 37.
Obviously both can be adapter to.
But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.
This isn’t to say that Celsius isn’t perfectly fine and superior in most ways. I’m not insulting you or attempting to participate in some kind of culture war.
But if you find yourself unable to agree that one system has some inherent advantages over another, even if they don’t outweigh the disadvantages, you should step back and think a little more objectively.
> The argument is that a scale that generally falls between 0-100 is inherently slightly more convenient than that that generally falls between -17 and 37.
I guess it is true for us living in US, but lots of people live in places where it never goes below 0 Celsius (32 F). So I could see them arguing the same with a 0-50 scale.
> But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.
Probably, even though they might just get the coldest (-128 F -89 C) and hottest (134 F 56C) temperatures on earth, and scales it from 0-100 so everyone is covered.
You're just saying this because you're American and accustomed to it.
To you, a 0-100 scale makes sense but to me it doesn't because 0f (-17c) is way rarer of a temp than 100f (38c).
Anyway, from the metric perspective, most people look at it like... 0 is coat and boots weather, + 10 degrees is jacket weather, + 10 degrees is t-shirt weather, and + 10 degrees is hot. IMO, using "freezing" as the reference kinda makes sense...
It should be noted here that the daily high for a good 1/3-1/2 of America is below 0C/32F/freezing for a good 3-5 months each year. Our weather varies much more significantly than most (not all) of Europe. Even with Fahrenheit, it is not uncommon for places like Detroit to be sub-zero for days without getting into positive temperatures.
I've personally lived in Marquette, Michigan and now live in Phoenix, Arizona and have experience both -40F(-40C) and 118F(47.7C). To me, the 0 = really cold, 25 = cold, 50 = mild, 75 = comfortable, 100 = really hot scale makes sense having lived through those extremes. But you're right, that's largely because it's what I grew up with. And with that in mind, it is extremely unlikely America would ever transition away from it for that very reason.
Both 0F and 100F happen regularly in many parts of the US and I would not say here one is rarer than the other. NYC has seen both in the last 12 months.
If you're still working on this, you can add a "Pedantry mode" ou "Really faithful" switch that turns some of the suggestions on. It could work as a way to show that you're really aware of the shortcomings of the first implementation without messing too much with what you've got already done. And it can also work as a way to show some kind of "appreciation" for the feedback you're getting here..
Personally, I've used XP a lot back in the day, but don't remember much of the details like most users are reporting here, so I really liked to play with your website, and would definitely hire you if I was in such position.
"Pedantry mode" slightly brings down the elegance of the project.
Maybe they could have a fake "patch note" file within the virtual OS which frames it as a hypothetical service path upgrade (which showcases that OP does realize the slight variations in their design, while also showcasing that they can do technical writing)
But if he’s not a pendant, why would he add the mode? One should never have to bow to the pendants. However, should a pendant wish to implement its pedantic paradise by its pendant self it should be possible.
Nothings off the table so maybe I’ll look into that eventually! Before that id probably go the other way and allow the viewing of a basic single page basic portfolio haha
I've been working in the intersection of LLMs and Traditional Astrology, for personal knowledge, professional and personal decision-making, and mostly for fun. I'm not a professional astrologer (I'm a CS PhD Professor), but I've studied with some people (some renowned authors on the field) and always had curiosity about it.
I have a python astrology library [1] which I use to generate my astrology chart, as text, to feed it into an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro). I then ask it questions about personal characteristics (the easy parts), but, more interesting, I can also ask it to consider some scenarios and it answers back with several hypothesis and how well it fits my character, personal goals, etc. It's like talking to a friend that knows you very very well.
Lately I've been working with a technique called Primary Directions. It's a predictive technique that tries to describe events in your life by means of astrological symbols (things like "Opposition of Saturn reaches the MC by 34.5 years old", which means something "bad" for your career or social position) and use it to check if a specific scenario has worked for me previously and will work in the future, and to ask it for other scenarios that match my personal characteristics and predicted symbolic events. I find LLMs, specifically Gemini Pro, quite good at these kind of things.
I also have fun "playing" with other peoples charts. For instance last night I gave it my chart and list of primary directions to Gemini and asked it if it could find who it was. It said Kurt Cobain. Quite off! But it described a lot of events that could fit my primary directions, like for instance, that Kurt Cobain got his guitar at his 14's or the one at 27 where he died. I didn't die at 27 (but "life issues") and also got my first guitar at 14. I'm also a musician, although an amateur one.
If you're into these kind of things, I created a gist [2] that you can feed into an LLM and talk to Kurt Cobain's chart. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that it's Kurt Cobain. For fun, ask it something like "Considering the chart and the events predicted by the primary directions, in which ages will this person have some success or public visibility". In my case it answered, among others, 13-14 yo something related to "success, popularity, academic, sports or artistic achievement" (Kurt Cobain seems to got his first guitar at 14, and discovered his vocation), and 23-24 "beginning of career, marriage, or first step that puts the person on the 'map'" (release of the Nevermind album that catapulted Nirvana to the world stage). You can then ask it to match the events to Kurt Cobain, and it will find the real life events that seem to match it quite well.
I find that LLMs are quite good at generating hypothesis, multiple scenarios, and I'm still exploring their strengths and weaknesses (and of astrology as well).
Everyday I have to prepare dinner and put the plates, glasses, forks and knifes in the table, and, I don't know why, get that feeling that I'd rather do anything else (or, most times, nothing at all). So I always start everything by putting the towel in the table (don't know if it's called like that in EN, not a native speaker). It seems to click something and the rest follows.
Maybe the idea can help you starting things?
It also helps that, sometimes, when the tasks are big, I convince myself that I can finish it later. Many times I do not have to finish it later..
Is the towel for wiping your mouth? If so I'd call that a napkin. If the plate goes on top of it it's more a placemats. If serving dishes get set out on it and it runs the length the table, a runner.
Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other canned food.
All gas stations closed because they could not sell gasoline/diesel. Today there are lines on all gas stations, people filling their car tanks and bottles..
Oh, let me tell you about electric cars! Many people had to spend the night somewhere away from home because they could not charge their cars.. My sister (with her job's electric car) had to stay the night some 200km away from home, and since the ATMs (Multibanco) didn't work, she didn't have physical money to pay for food. Luckily a stranger paid for the food (yogurt and some cookies).
Petrol cars, because of their range, had better luck!
Pure fear and panic..
I can only blame the authorities (Portuguese/European) for not having contingency plans for keeping people informed, and thus letting fear spread like wildfire.
Because you're always buying toilet paper in bulk, and everyone needs it.
Toilet paper is cheap and bulky, so stores only stock what they absolutely need. If a store is supplied once a day, it'll have something like two day's worth of toilet paper on its shelves.
Some incident happens, and people start to panic. By sheer coincidence one brand of toilet paper happens to be out of stock. The shelf space is huge, so as you walk past it you immediately notice it and think "geez, wouldn't it be awkward if that were to run out". You don't know how much you've got remaining at home so you grab a pack, just to be sure. Ten people do this, and because the packs are so massive another brand has just run out - making even more people consider picking up toilet paper.
You normally buy toilet paper maybe once every month, so if only 1 in 15 people pick up toilet paper during their panic shopping, those two day's worth of stock will quickly run out!
I've asked the same question. I think people are so pampered in western societies that the worst thing they can possibly imagine is not being able to wipe their ass with a fresh piece of toilet paper.
If you are old enough to have a conversation with someone who lived through the 1930s United States Great Depression, they had to resort to tearing pages out of the Sears catalog. After that, they would hoard toilet paper. And every generation since has done the same thing. But it started with the Great Depression.
During a bad storm here many people used their electric cars to power their house. There were still places to charge it and then come back to the house to power it until the house was re-connected.
Fellow professor here, I don't think your approach would work where I teach. I teach in a Polytechnic school (Portugal), which is almost free for the students, so the incentive that they are paying good money does not work.
This semester I'm teaching a web development course (fullstack development), and my policy is that the project must be done on github classroom repositories, and I'll be asking clarification (face to face) on some of the commits. They can use whatever they want (stackoverflow, chatgpt, whatever), but they better know how to explain their commits to me. I don't know if my approach will work in the end, but I surely got their attention.
I'm doing this because it got so bad that, last semester, on my Object Oriented Programming course, even using moodle with the Safe Exam Browser on and an instance of Visual Studio code to try the code, we caught lots of cheaters. How they were doing it? By installing co-pilot plugin. How did we caught them? Some students solve all the exercises in 10 minutes, others had comments that were clearly made by AI, etc. etc. Of some 15 students we caught, only 3 came to us to review the exam.
Is it hard? What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?
I don't quite understand why higher education is acting like this is an impossible problem to solve when high schools manage to stop 13 year olds using phones and calculators just fine by virtue of having teachers watch them as they write their answers.
> What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?
Not all assessments are exams, eg: projects, and students cheat even in exams with professors present, eg: the OOP exam I mentioned before, where we had 2 teachers for 40 students.
Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam? For 40 students we would need 40 professors.. We don’t have that number of professors in out departament..
> Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam?
Does your local school bus in hundreds of professors on exam day to act as personal security guards? Probably not. When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating, in exam halls with procedures designed to prevent cheating.
Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem when it's not. What's "hard" is stopping cheating for the near-zero price universities seem to expect to pay, and the solution is to get real and change the underlying practices to prevent cheating, regardless of what it takes. If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.
CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.
The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing right now as a preview of what happens when the credibility of public sector education and research falls too low. If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?
> Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem
I am a professor, and yes, it's trivially solvable. The solution has been well known for hundreds of years (at least). If only the institutions we work in would let us *@#$ing solve it!
Where I work, administrative obstacles have been erected to make it pretty much impossible to give my students traditional closed-book, unseen, invigilated exams. I have been fighting this for several years.
But I'm hoping management are going to have to cave in before too long, because students are surely going to realise pretty soon that their degree certificates will be worthless otherwise.
> When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating..
Not here where I leave (not USA)..
> If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.
I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam?
> CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.
Do you think we are police officers or what?! There's a limit for what we are able to do, and what students are able to tolerate..
> The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing (...) If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?
Ok, I get your point now! You probably live in some third world country where there's lots of wealth inequality and the state does not help its own citizens. Here in Portugal (and I guess almost all of EU) the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year), so I wouldn't consider failed experiments for now..
I don't live in the USA nor grew up there, and "invigilator" was a job title when I went to school. Usually people who wanted a bit of part time work. Mums, retirees, students, that sort of thing. It doesn't take much time or skill and is a nice way to help out in the local community so they had plenty of takers.
> I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam? Do you think we are police officers or what?!
Nope. You have to watch them do it anyway, if you want your credentials to mean anything. Arguably they already don't, very few companies are willing to hire a software developer given just a proof of a degree exactly because universities are so willing to graduate people who can't do the work. But that's not sustainable. It may take decades but that path leads to Venezuela. Eventually, this will catch up with universities and they will be gone because they're not delivering value.
> the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year)
The price charged up front is 700EUR/year but the cost is a lot higher than that, obviously. All your government does with this policy is force everyone else to pay for the industrial-scale production of well rewarded cheaters, enabled by professors who don't care enough to stop them. It's a socially corrosive policy.
Almost 80 years has passed, some details get lost, but it is important to keep things like that alive in our consciousnesses. Even if you didn't to justice to those stories, I still read them with attention. Thanks for them!
I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut after some of these conversations. It was like history had come alive right before my eyes.
I remember having a few sleepless nights just processing the things I had been told.
I remember almost throwing up once (the night after the story about the trains). I just couldn’t believe the level of depravity was so easily able to exist with basically no questions asked.
I remember my naive younger self thinking about what I would have done had I been in their shoes. It didn’t take me long to realize that I probably wouldn’t have done much differently, mainly because their range of options were so limited (or at least perceived to be so, with detention, death, or “disappearing”being the consequence if you were wrong).
I also remember them talking about neighbors snitching on each other (probably to the gestapo, but it could have been another entity). Some neighbors with petty intentions would make up false claims about neighbors they didn’t like. This forced everyone to be on “perfect behavior”, and it sowed a lot of distrust in normally tight-knit communities. There was one story about a tattle-tale who had a come-uppance, but I can’t remember any of the details. I think that was the first time the word Schadenfreude came alive to me… it existed in that story on multiple levels.
> And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.
Been there many times, but I found that it’s best to aim for good enough, given the resources and constraints, than 100% all the time. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it’s not always easy to reach that balance, but I try it anyways. When I do not, my anxiety kicks in, and I’m forced to slow down.. I use to be able to ignore it (the anxiety) and keep pushing, but not anymore..
The sad state we got ourselves into..