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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn’t going to help you learn what mitochondria are.

    That sounds like it’s an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they’re not judging the kids on what they know or don’t, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they’re going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn’t need to do it, I don’t think it’s stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.

    Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren’t, though.



  • The sense I get is that it is more lazy than anything. The verbiage feels like the fact that designs were public documents was tacked on last minute to satisfy some desire for market segmentation or to create a parts and design library to draw traffic. It would make sense that the company hosting the software would not want the headache of being unable to use your stuff commercially or even of parsing what they could use, since in some sense they always are using everything commercially. Refusing the to thread the needle with their verbiage, though, has left a situation where the Terms of Use say clearly that (1) a design is Content, (2) a free user’s Content is a public document, (3) a free user cannot use their own public documents for commercial use, and (3) a free user grants EVERY OTHER USER a license to sell their public documents.

    1. “End Users’ files, designs, models… (collectively, “Content”).”
    2. “All documents created by a Free Plan User, and all Content contained therein, is made public and therefore considered a Public Document.”
    3. “If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service.”
    4. “For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User… Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.”

    The only possible wrinkle is that the ToU distinguish between a “Customer” and an “End User,” so maybe you the customer can grant you the End User the same commercial rights that Joe the slightly shady CNC machinist in Peoria has when he downloads your widget to fabricate and sell. Something tells me that PTC’s license compliance folks don’t interpret things that way, though.





  • I’ve had a fairly decent one with a Canon small-office B&W laser. It needs to be reset every so often, and it doesn’t seem to like my wife (though no printer ever does), but its apps and drivers are mostly business related, so while they are more than happy to help you buy supplies, they don’t force the issue, and the printer doesn’t care what brand of toner you shove in it. 99% of the time it’s just sitting there quietly on its LAN address, ready to print something successfully.

    She just got an HP multi-function from work, and dear god that thing is annoying. It kept claiming that its own demo ink was counterfeit. Also fairly mediocre color prints.




  • I normally use that same coffee in an Ikea French Press and while I won’t say it’s gourmet, it meets my needs for “not particularly bitter caffeine juice”. Honestly, I slowed it down the next time I did a single cup pourover and that took most of the battery acid notes out of it.

    I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palate and still want some sugar and milk in there; I just don’t like Starbucks very much and hate paying a premium for a product that I like less than my homemade half-assery. :-)



  • So it’s not a lawsuit (yet), it’s a complaint to the state attorney general of Washington accusing Starbucks of unfriendly consumer practices related to their gift cards, in part because they can recognize unspent gift cards as revenue, and also because it’s instant cashflow for them even if the accounting revenue lags behind. The need to come up with a calculation for how much deferred revenue to recognize can be abused by execs to nudge the revenue higher (and with no additional costs associated with it, profit as well) and thereby improve stock price and trigger bonuses and whatnot.

    The actual complaint reads as a bit of pearl-clutching (“involuntary subscription” because customers don’t want to leave a balance OR talk to a real human at their local Starbucks!) , but on a the “death by a thousand cuts” model, yeah, I suppose Starbucks is being kinda dickish. The app doesn’t give you as many rewards if you pay with CC, buries the other payment options a couple of layers deep in a menu, doesn’t let you reload gift cards in increments equal to a purchase, doesn’t let you split payment methods, and sets a high default reload so (on iOS at least) it isn’t immediately visible that you even could scroll up to reload in smaller amounts.

    It’s sort of garden variety asshole app design meant to soft-lock customers in, but it’s not really fraud in any meaningful way if someone is motivated. You add money, you get bitter overpriced coffee that your partner really likes for some reason. I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL. Still, maybe worth a public scolding or some fines to get them to modify it so people can save a few bucks without diving into the finer nuances of their coffee app.



  • Maybe I’m a little pollyannaish, but I tend to think that the generations growing up with this stuff will grow around it and configure their social expectations and will settle into rhythms that work as well for them as older generations’ environments did for them. It will look weird to olds, but I always wonder if we’re looking back at the “good ol’ days,” and projecting our own reactions to the changes onto the generations that will take them in stride and make sarcastic wanking gestures at us when we complain.

    Pamphlets/Newpapers/Films/Radio/TV/Video Games/Internet/Social Media will all rot your brain and subject you to misinformation and leave you depressed at how you must interact with the world, depending on when you were born and when you are speaking. Not to say there are not unique challenges to each in turn, or that some periods don’t end up worse than others, but I just don’t think our kids are going to treat the world and each other THAT much worse than all their ancestors have, and if they do I’m not sure it is uniquely social media’s fault. There are many things worth knowing about the social impact of new tech, and perspectives that the experienced can offer, especially in transitional eras while it’s new. I just don’t think think doomer handwringing or trying to put genies back into bottles is a good use of anyone’s collective time.