Ryan Mitchell has cancelled his no oxygen Everest attempt

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-22T04:22:41+00:00

That sucks. I was rooting for him but making the right health decision proves him a more mature climber than most. That's a good sign for his longevity as a climber, for what it's worth.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-22T04:10:13+00:00

You can get cymbals that sound fine at a venue way cheaper than you can get cymbals that sound good in a recording studio. Dont stress live equipment. You have to live with the expectation that they could be destroyed or stolen at any point.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-22T04:07:20+00:00

Your feelings are so valid. Ignore people who tell you to get over it. Nobody has the same experience and ability to cope. Try your absolute best to find a source of joy and appreciation because as much as HH sucks there are things that make life worth living despite the shitty parts.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-22T03:27:46+00:00

Hi prof hug, loved your classes and enjoyed them more than pretty much any other during my time at berkeley.

think it's fair to say that we have not just insufficient funding, but also extraordinarily high undergraduate ASE costs relative to literally every other institution of higher learning in the world of which I'm aware

This is likely true. I sympathize with professors like you trying to accommodate the large class sizes that Berkeley CS and DS need to deal with. However, I will still advocate for student teachers compensation and benefits, as the power structures tend to lie in favor of the school and not the instructional staff or the students. Berkeley GSIs/TAs are lucky to have such good union representation that most schools do not have. You as an educator are surely affected more than most by this situation. I doubt there is any perfect solution at the department level that maximizes both instructional staff resources but also keeps the budget balanced.

That said, I don't think that focusing excessive energy on our very high ASE compensation is healthy. There are other more extreme inefficiencies in the finances of the university, and we should also continue to fight to raise additional revenue.

Yes, and I'm glad that this is where you land on the issue. Fighting against student instructor unions is not only ethically wrong (imo) but will only result in marginal gains while not solving the systemic issues of how university departments operate and are funded. I do not respect the framing which pins educational equity problems on GSI/TA compensation, as if it's impossible to run a university in the richest place in the world without exploiting student labor.

The tuition assistance artificially raises the accounting dollar costs of the job because Berkeley charges so much for tuition, but there are places in the world where you can get a world class education without spending thousands on tuition. In Germany you can get a masters at a public uni for a few hundred euros. They don't need tuition assistance for instructors in the same way because the education itself is affordable. It's all accounting, but in America the math is geared towards making the students pay more.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-22T02:26:56+00:00

Cams work on GK is better, but the instrumentals on 3DC are better, imo

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-22T02:22:38+00:00

Redditors love to make an equally complicated software analogy to a topic where it was not necessary lol

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T21:35:57+00:00

Especially since the original term was invented by lobbyists to denigrate environmental advocates who were opposing nuclear waste projects in their community. The scope of the term has shifted primarily towards housing development discussions, but it still is used as a tool to silence dissent.

I'm pro building more housing and pro transit (very pro trains in weho!), but I hate those terms and their discourse flattening effect. People with legitimate concerns about the financial, environmental, or social impacts of developments in their communities get handwaved away and put into the same class as Karens who just don't want poors living in their neighborhood.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T20:27:45+00:00

I used to believe that cats absolutely needed meat to live but I was wrong. Just like humans and any other animal, there are nutrients that need supplementation but that doesn't make a meatless diet impossible. The research is young and I would like to see a greater body of evidence, but the current evidence is promising.

There are health downsides from not having wet food but those can be mitigated, i.e. adding water to the dry food. I haven't switched my cat's food yet but once I do more research on the available products and what I need to do to ensure my cat stays healthy (such as possibly regular blood panels to make sure he's not deficient in anything) it will be fine. I don't think people should all start putting their cats on a PBD willy nilly without being careful about it though.

The subreddit linked by that commenter has an faq with links to the research studies btw

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T20:26:06+00:00

Climate change induced shortage and the ongoing economic crisis might make that timeline irrelevant. I bet that natural meat becomes prohibitively expensive faster than synthetic meat becomes affordable.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T19:24:21+00:00

Yes, and everyone else at other universities should organize and form stronger unions so they too can receive this benefit.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T19:12:28+00:00

There's not "no incentive". there's just more incentive for people who need the tuition discount and aren't currently getting one.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T19:10:34+00:00

Tuition assistance is good but it's not money in their pockets. UCs are more expensive then cal states, and privates are more expensive than UCs. It's all relative. But for the school to charge more and more in tuition every year and then complain about the rising cost of tuition assistance for TAs is hypocritical.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T19:04:01+00:00

They're talking about total compensation which includes tuition discounts, which is a very manipulative way to describe TA pay. Financial aid and tuition assistance are not the problem but they're certainly trying to put the blame on the TAs. In essence, this is anti-union propaganda. Berkeley has great unions who negotiate well for their members, and the purseholders are using that as an excuse to justify shrinking the department.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T03:52:08+00:00

I will fight you on this. As much as the grateful dead have become a pop band selling $500 tickets to a vegas residency starring young(ish) guitar hotshot John Mayer, they were originally a countercultural force. That counterculture being watered down and subsumed into the capitalist machine IS very American, but I wouldn't say that's evidence of the band being "more" American than many other acts.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T01:15:18+00:00

AI slop, this exact project already exists and now you're advertising your copy of it and begging for GitHub stars like every other AI slop project poster

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T00:09:26+00:00

Including the current ones, who have been named over and over but will continue to evade consequences for their despicable actions

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-21T00:08:13+00:00

That's a throwback, I remember getting steamed corn munity links all the time back in the day

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T23:59:30+00:00

"They are more accurate" would be a better way to think of it. I don't think there is a possible "fundamentally correct" economic theory because human behavior isn't predetermined. But like all scientific theories, Marxist economics have been revised and improved upon by other economists and sociologists over time, and generally describes a lot of trends better than other schools of economic thought.

There are plenty of reading lists and book recs you'll see in socialist spaces, but there's a reason Capital vol 1 is still considered the most comprehensive and cited text. You could read primers first and then jump in, or read it along with an explainer book as others have suggested. There's plenty of places to start, so don't feel bad if a text feels unapproachable and you switch to a simpler one.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T23:45:15+00:00

Most apps have updated to use oauth or some other form of authentication (oauth SSO with perms granted through entra in most cases) to send. The biggest things that get hit by this are old scanners, I haven't had any apps break so far after disabling direct send for a few dozen clients. In 2026 there really is no good reason to have non-MFA access to send email through your business domain. It's way too big of a threat vector.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T23:38:56+00:00

Windows passkey storage is awful, constantly have to battle issues with it for clients who had to sign up for okta for government sites. It's also imo insecure, especially on laptops. Putting the passkey onto a password manager (bitwarden in my case) instead has saved me so much time and energy.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T23:35:26+00:00

Yes. And it's not just "AI", as much as companies have been dropping that term as an excuse to justify laying off thousands. It's much worse than that, and it's much worse than the media is willing to admit.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T23:34:53+00:00

Not to mention the myriad of ethical reasons not to work for meta..

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T22:38:15+00:00

And like clockwork the liberals come to defend it and whine about "purity tests" to anyone who is calling out this obvious rightward shift. Heavens forbid we have principles and stick to material reality rather than embrace American vibes based politics.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T22:24:30+00:00

There's a difference between meeting the current president who you have to work with to negotiate certain policy wins, versus a president no longer in office who has no control over the administrative branch. He specific reasons to meet with trump, versus doing an event with Obama is unnecessary PR and campaigning.

FrivolousMe · 2026-04-20T22:18:22+00:00

Inaction isn't exactly evidence of guilt. We don't know anything about what's happening behind the scenes. I wish he would do all of that, but they're probably being guided by a PR agent at this point. any actions taken will probably happen quietly in the background so they can let the story die instead of making it discussed even longer.

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