In the 90s and early 2000s, we had lots of “smog days” in southern Ontario. Of course those were mostly from coal plants in Ontario and Michigan, not forest fires. I wonder if its related.

Its just propaganda. The most effective of which seems to be false explanations and distraction conspiracies. Anything but allow people to see whats going on and who’s doing it.

A stretch goal might be 24/7 running a pi zero or openwrt router next to it so you can turn the machine on remotely.

The benefit of doing your work or learning on that machine, even if your laptop is faster, is that you can offload heavy or long running things and save your laptop battery when mobile. Want to compile something? Run some local llm job? Build a new docker image? Start it, close your laptop and go about your day. Open it later to see the thing is done and your laptop still has 99% battery. (This will require, at minimum, learning about SSH, tmux, networking, wake on lan, and probably VPNs like wireguard or tailscale, or maybe dynamic DNS - lots of fun).

You do need something running all the time to do remote WOL because those packets don’t work over the Internet, but there are lots of Linux computers that use less electricity than your typical bedside alarm clock. Even an old phone might work.

Most BIOSes have a wake on alarm setting so you can very easilu set it to start every day at a specific time, run your jobs on boot, then your last job could be a shutdown command. No need for fancy wake on lan configuration.

Other way around. Taxonomy qualifies the relatedness of two organisms based on the evidence of historical common ancestors. Games don’t have a lot of levels of relatedness except the studio that made them.

You have the right attitude and I hope you are able to successfully shop around. Some institutions are paying below living wages to overworked and precariously employed instructors. Of course they phone it in. Those places are not worth your money and just trying to cash in on the “diploma” ==“job ticket” mentality.

Find a place that actually gives a shit about education and you should find professors interested in actual education that will see your attitude as refreshing.

40 years of telling kids a degree is a job ticket rather than explaining the value of a liberal arts education.

Every time I see k12 education discussion focused on “preparing kids for the job market” I cringe. Its the cart before the horse and just as agile.

Maybe we stop calling them “moderates”?

A paper notebook is basically the same fundamental as a password manager but with a different tradeoff. You trade cryptographic security for a reliance on physical security. Its probably a great option for a lot of older people who only log into things from home. But its just a password manager. An analogue one.

Flashcards are dumb for this. If you are going to write it down, just secure it. Don’t have them out all the time to try to memorise it. Jese. The worst of both.

I can’t tell if you are self deluded or really are an interesting case. I do question using a screensaver to help memorise a password rather than a password manager.

Plenty of research on the topic. Humans cannot remember a unique, high bit random password for each service. Using your brain means one of the following. Low bit passwords that can be cracked, memorable passwords that can be guessed via social engineering, and/or password reuse where one breached service breaches many accounts.

The only known solutions are all based on some sort of actually random generation of passwords, combined with storage of some sort for all but a very small number of extremely important examples (typically just your password manager vaults password). I actually think a paper notebook and dice or card system is an under appreciated option for a lot of people, which falls under the above.

There is one weird alternative, and that is deterministically generated high bit passwords (via a cryptographic hash function). Unfortunately it doesn’t work well with stupid snowflake sites that have their own “good password” rules, and falls completely flat when you have to change passwords for just a single or few sites for whatever reason.

Convenient app UX, password sharing between users and in groups, and the ability for passwords to be updated on multiple devices simultaneously or while offline without collisions. It has a few other features that are probably rarely used, like secure send, that some people may use.

VC funding is the enemy. I’m beginning to think it matters as much as the libre/proprietary software distinction.