10/10 device - it’s a solid laptop though I worry about longevity (they’re a bastard to repair because the arts are all hard to find).

Upside is it’s the perfect machine for travel gaming!

Ehh… Application of a addiction model is somewhat controversial for pornography (the ground seems divided on whether it’s a compulsion or an addiction). Social media, however, is no less controversial (it’s just the media likes to hype this more).

I will say - the point of a porn site is to sell user data and deliver ads, whereas the point of social media is to keep the user scrolling by any means possible. By its design, the latter cultivates addiction as a clear goal (the goal to scroll is artificially imposed), whereas the case for the former is less clear (the goal to masturbate isn’t something porn created). In essence, one creates a drive and then sates it, whereas another sates an existing drive.

Honestly, I think, at the moment, we’re on the “violent video games cause violence” stage of the research. In other words, not enough data to decide so the media has decided for us.

Fishing boat where it shouldn’t be - prosecute and fine.

Addressing the migrant comment - if you catch a small boat, your government gets to pay to settle or remove the occupants; if it sneaks through your government has to pay nothing. The game theory says “I saw no boat”. Shift the reward mechanism, have the boat’s departure nation pay half the costs, suddenly the reward mechanism says “boat spotted”.

Depends what you want kids to learn.

Propaganda, yes; everything else, no…

That’s the real joke behind it all, the use of AI is such a problem because we’re turning education into a stamp dispenser - everyone needs an A* to get anywhere.

AI has given every student a path to this - however if industry stopped demanding that universities train their damn staff for them, and instead insist we teach their future staff how to be trained (as well as giving them subject specific knowledge), then we’d see the misalignment vanish. Once the need for an A* to land a good job is gone, then so is the misalignment.

Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.

The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).

The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).

If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum ^_^

Truth is proof - I can neither prove the number of gods is >0, nor prove it is =0.

Thus cautious agnosticism (since the evidence suggests, if there is at least one god, then they really hate us).

I’ve got this move coming up - my plan is to dual boot and slowly wean over.

Game crashes in Linux, try for a fix and if I get frustrated, boot into windows and enjoy the game.

Might be a rocky year, but the dual boot will likely take the stress off!

I’ve seen a lot of fedora-based distros pushed for gaming (mint is Debian based), apparently these can work better. Still looking into it, but no definitive answers there yet!

[Removed] - a little too inflammatory on reflection.

Tricky one to weigh up there. It might not be that you’re lazy, you may well just be burned out, not working effectively (i.e. overworking yourself), or it could even be imposter syndrome. On the other hand, yes you could just be lazy, or you might just really hate your job. Hell, there have been times where I’ve felt unmotivated because our leadership team were just arseholes - sometimes a lack of motivation goes beyond just your own choices.

There just isn’t enough data in a short post.

Take some leave, go get checked out by a doctor, talk to a friend/partner, take a look at job ads to see if anything sounds better than where you are.

Either that or medication!

I abandoned hope long ago when I learned that excel was turing complete.

The darkness has already consumed me, there is no salvation from this sin.

Worse - pulling data from a web page, then using the power of pure jank to parse this input, and then invoking a sheet of reference string builders to construct formulae and execute them using too damn many @indirects nested into vlookups before finally adding in date aware data reveals, because no excel abomination is complete without trying to parse dates.

Or false regret, either or.

I’ve done things in excel that are an abomination in the eyes of the divine.

I have absolutely 0 regret.

It’s a sad world. I keep meaning to run a code club for my students (thinking we just work through lazy devs’ shmup tutorial together), but I keep getting sidetracked by trying to deal with department politics -_-

Antinatalism is a mistake - I think I agree there, mostly because it’s a path to a narrow gene pool and increases the probability of extinction.

Highest aspiration being parenthood - hard pass there, the highest aspiration in life is the seeking and sharing of knowledge.

The purpose of an education is to learn how to think, not how to work.

A lot of universities are being treated as training centers for the world of work - and this is not ok.

Or, and here me out here, the UK and EU arrange the most passive aggressive reconciliation ever by removing trade tariffs from one another, then slap a huge tax on any assets owned by the ruler of a foreign nation in their territory.

The key concept they’re missing a lot of the time is that software sits within the file system and not the other way around.

This is largely because apps hide this and data is generally stored in one place on your phone (the downloads folder).

Best way to fix it - have 1–2 lessons entirely devoted to finding shit on their computer. My favourite activity is “ok, save your word file, close word, you now have 10 mins to find that file without opening word”.