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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: May 23rd, 2025

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  • I guess there’s sway? none of these options entice me to be honest

    I used to use Sway. I found it tedious to configure several different things via config files. Kanshi in case you plug in a monitor, Waybar, Swaylock[1], etc. And, I may be misremembering, but you had to edit the Sway config to launch these programs at startup. There was just friction everywhere.

    I have been daily-driving COSMIC for about six months and it works pretty well, although there are infrequent crashes (less so since the beta release, I think). I like it as my tiling WM, but also occasional crashes don’t affect my workflow too badly.

    Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects.

    Would you be willing to elaborate or follow up on this? I checked out the core protocol but think I’m way too out of my depth to relate it to what you wrote.


    1. Also there was a bug that allowed people to bypass your lockscreen by mashing keys. Sort of made me hesitant to try anything Sway again, although I believe the problem has been fixed. ↩︎













  • imo academia in the us selects for self-serious mini-tyrants. people unable to sleaze their way to an equivalent position in the job market, so they go with a position where their subordinates have no agency or recourse for inappropriate behavior and are entirely dependent on them for their funding and their career progress[1]. the university system here seems to only care if a professor brings in grant money — if so, they can do whatever they want.

    e.g. a year ago a student of mine with a documented, legally required accommodation was just straight denied it by a professor in my department. this poor student had to go through some equal opportunity claim just to have his accommodation met, and the professor is still there, having suffered no consequences.

    maybe i should apply to a phd program outside of the us. i speak spanish (but slowly, y como un gringo) 🤷

    😭


    1. by standing up to my piece of shit advisor, i have left with just a master’s degree after five years, despite definitely having enough research completed under this advisor to leave with a phd. i chose to stand up for myself and try to end this cycle instead of adding an acronym to my title. arguably a mistake, idk, there is a robert frost poem about this. ↩︎


  • university where the professor physically threatened me and plagiarized my work called to ask if i was willing to teach a notoriously hard computer science class (that i have taught before to stellar evals as a phd student[1]). but they had to tell me that i was their last choice because they couldn’t find a full professor to teach it (since i didn’t finish my phd there because of said abusive professor). on top of that, they offered me a measly $6,000 usd for the entire semester with no benefits, and i would have to pay $500 for parking.

    should i just be done with academia? enrollment deadlines for the spring are approaching and i’m wondering if i should just find a “regular job”, rather than finishing a PhD elsewhere, especially given the direction higher ed is going in the us.


    1. evals are bullshit for measuring how well students actually learn anything, but are great for measuring the stupid shit business idiots love, like whether students will keep paying tuition. also they can be used to explain the pitfalls of using likert scales carelessly, as business idiots do. ↩︎