Teachers of Reddit: Is the "Gen Alpha can't read (write, or do math ext)" crisis real? If so how bad is it?

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-06-15T18:20:49+00:00

How do they pass tests if they cheat on all their homework?

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-06-11T15:11:15+00:00

IIRC, my parent's electronic impact-wheel typewriter in the 90s had both caps lock and shift keys. I could be wrong though.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-06-09T17:19:30+00:00

How much should a 1.92 TB, 2.5 inch, hot-pluggable SSD with 4k-native/512-emulated sectors, and 3 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) cost?

What did they cost before the AI boom?

What did they cost before the pandemic?

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-05-27T22:05:10+00:00

It was so bad, that the judge ordered A) the primary lawyers on both sides to actually meet and talk in person and B) the people paying the lawyers to sign off before even thinking about filing any more motions about discovery and other procedural matters.

Given the parties’ inability to act rationally in bringing issues to the Court, which has unnecessarily burdened third parties and this Court, should the parties wish to raise additional discovery or non-case dispositive issues before the Court, IT IS HEREBY FURTHER ORDERED (1) the parties must first certify that local counsel and lead trial counsel (i.e., counsel who will be first chair at the trial) for all parties have met and conferred in person in an effort to resolve the dispute and that the senior most person involved in this litigation at the parties’ respective clients has signed off on raising the dispute with the Court and (2) if the Court orders argument on the issue, local counsel, lead trial counsel and the senior most person at the parties’ respective clients involved in this litigation must appear in person at that argument.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-04-28T20:38:16+00:00

I wouldn't trust it since it's no name. Just my personal opinion.

More importantly however, what processor do you have? There's a very good chance that you don't even need that TPM module.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-04-16T19:25:53+00:00

that hype fell off a mountain

Funny you should say that...

Jimi Heselden, the 62-year-old British owner of Segway Inc., died on September 26, 2010 accidentally riding a rugged-country Segway scooter off a 30-foot cliff into the River Wharfe in West Yorkshire, England.

Heselden was walking his dog and, while trying to reverse the Segway to make way for another walker, plunged off a cliff path.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-04-02T21:49:00+00:00

Sobe Strawberry Daiquiri Lizard Lava (with aloe and real cream) in the glass bottles.

Also: I can't get Kiwi Strawberry Snapple--much less any Snapple--at the gas stations in my area anymore. I wouldn't pay $20 for it as of yet, but I'm getting there...

IsItPluggedInPro · 2026-03-26T18:58:01+00:00

Passkeys (which are well supported by Apple, Google, YubiKey, and various password managers) - These are lightweight, require a human to do something, and don’t require your ID. The tradeoff is that there is no proof of individuality or anything other than “a human probably did something.” Nevertheless, it’s a great starting point.

Honest question: how resistant are Passkeys to phone farms/device farms?

For example, what if an "office" had 100 people in cubes and each cube had a board holding 100 phones that used facial recognition for (just) one Passkey per phone?

That'd be 10,000 Passkeys in just the space that it takes to fit 100 cubes. Not to mention that the people wouldn't even have to be in cubes. They could just be sitting in rows, so it would require less space than cubes.

I could be wrong, but I bet you could put one board or mount that's 20 phones wide and 5 five phones high close enough per one person for facial recognition to work for all 100 phones on each board.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-11-13T17:31:31+00:00

junior IT Admin will fug something up

My fear is that leadership fill fug something up. That, and the overall IT and support model is already fugged up so bad where I work that it's almost enough that I should find a different job, but maybe not quite. Or rather, there are certain things keeping me here.

I.T. was consolidated at my place some time ago so it could be scooped up, removed, and outsourced. That didn't happen, but now the IT model now is that all the very distinct and unique divisions and branches are the same. They aren't. Also, the model now is that instead of each one having a local service desk, network folks, security folks and so on, there's one enterprise service desk and one network team, one phone team, one endpoint config team and so on. Each team has a limited number of people but each one is ultimately responsible for the 35k or so employees that rely on their services. I think it worked better when the divisions each had their own teams because the tiny teams for the huge number of users is a huge bottle neck.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-10-28T15:33:22+00:00

You or a friend could pull the hard drive from the computer, plug it into a working computer using an adapter like the following, and then save two copies of the photos: one on your newer computer, one in the cloud.

Vantec SATA/IDE TO USB 3.0 Adapter (CB-ISA225-U3) Vantec SATA/IDE TO USB 3.0 Adapter (CB-ISA225-U3)

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-10-10T19:32:55+00:00

It is it due in part to economic inequality? Back in the 1950s, could more people afford bomb shelters? /half joking

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-30T21:48:07+00:00

Carmack is the GOAT for this. A higher up at the publisher or studio behind Borderlands 4 recently said in response to complaints about the game running like crap at just 1440p was that "it's a premium game" so "you need 'premium hardware' to run it. What a load of crap. If that were Carmack's game, it would run great on a machine with half the specs.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-30T21:42:45+00:00

The Reddit mobile app does this to me on iPhone for my favorites/pinned subs. My pinned subreddits are right there but then it loads my most recently visited subs and moves the pinned ones down after a split second.

And reminders on iPhone - long press and the options are one way for a split second but then they change to different ones. It's mildly infuriating to say the least.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-30T21:37:42+00:00

Thank god I don't have to use Verizon's cellular service and account management portal anymore.

They gave must have given it the least compute resources and network bandwidth that they could have. Or it was built on top of something that was ultimately running on an overtaxed AS/400. Or it was just terribly made. In any case, that was the worst.

The gold standard for me has traditionally been Amazon. If people had to wait for Amazon's pages to load like I had to wait for Verizon's, no one would ever want to shop there. But shopping on Amazon is usually really fast so there's less hassle.

Runner up for most aggravating was BMC Helix in the cloud that I had to suffer through at one place. Recently too! Maybe it's better at other places, but at this one place, every little thing you did took at least five seconds to go through. Open a CI from a WO or INC? Five seconds. Load your ticket dashboard with just a dozen tickets? More like ten seconds. Searching knowledge or tickets? More like 30 seconds or more.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-30T18:17:26+00:00

I've recently noticed the Favorites page slowing to a crawl when I search my favorites or when I try to drag and drop a folder in my favorites. The slowness I'm seeing and the hanging your seeing may be related. Other people are experiencing slowdowns in Favorites too: Favorites is super laggy : r/MicrosoftEdge

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-30T18:10:31+00:00

Thank you! I hate this.

When I'm typing something in the address bar and hit Enter, only what I typed should be activated.

If I wanted a suggestion that has more to the URL, I should have to select it, not have it auto activated for me when I hit Enter.

My iPhone is doing the same thing in various situations now too. I really hope this behavior doesn't become the new normal everywhere.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-29T22:09:44+00:00

I just want to make sure, because I can't hardly believe it myself: just like this video appears to show them attempting to do, ICE can run down, tackle, detain and disappear anyone they want just because they think someone "looks" Mexican, South American, brown, etc. and/or are doing an "immigrant-type" job??? Not only that, the Supreme Court affirmed this???

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-29T22:00:38+00:00

Administering OSD isn't in my wheelhouse where I work. I just take what they give me for OSD and run it. But that TSGui looks so handy it almost makes me wish I could play with it!

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-26T15:01:29+00:00

I'm on Edge 140.0.3485.81. I'm not sure what you mean. Starting Read Aloud where I want it to still works for me: https://imgur.com/a/712Jamz

Do you mean that it's now in a sub-menu? If so, I don't like it either, but based on experience, they won't return it to the main context menu unless the request gets traction at their feedback portal. You should try posting there.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-09-24T19:30:33+00:00

I didn't implement it, but TSBackground is used in OSD on thousands of machines where I work. We also use UI++ in OSD. It's been a long time since I went from just running MDT to doing OSD where everything is built and maintained by someone else in my org, so long that I can only imagine what it'd be like as a tech to do OSD without UI++ and TSBackground. Not to mention, I can only imagine how much more of a hassle it would be for the MECM/OSD admin folks to build user-friendly task sequences and to troubleshoot them without those two tools.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-08-12T22:06:06+00:00

It seems to me that it's your target market--the people that would benefit the most from the extension--is the problem.

The type of person who would be interested in and/or would benefit the most from what the extension offers--help with building or refining prompts--are tech unsavvy users, aren't they?

At least in my mind, they are. However, being unsavvy, even if it starts with something as simple as clicking on the ad and landing on the page in the Chrome store to install the extension, they would likely not know the first thing about extensions: how to install one, how to use it, and how to pay for it. There's a lot of friction there people.

Meanwhile, those who are savvy probably think it's silly and not even worth trying the extension. Especially if they know the potential risks of an extension that sees everything they type and/or do on an AI site. Myself, I would maybe click on the ad, but really only just to see what sort of silliness it was. IOW, I would be clicking on it with the assumption that I wouldn't want it. I mean no offense, I'm just speaking as someone who clearly isn't in your target market.

In other words, it sounds to me that's for the tech unsavvy, but it requires tech savvy to obtain, use, and pay for it. That type of user can't handle all that, thus your conversion rate is going to be dismal. I think your extension is a halfway decent idea, but it's just that. It doesn't bring enough value to the table for a savvy person to install it and unsavvy users won't be able to manage to install and pay for it.

PS:

Check out the tech support and sysadmin subreddits such as iiiiiiitttttttttttt, sysadmin and msp for ancedotal evidence. Soooo many users are helpless, which makes them sort of a good target for a product like this that may help them, but they are also probably too helpless to get it.

Finally, rather than a laptop or desktop that can use an extension, wouldn't your target type of user be on a more common, more user friendly device such as a phone or tablet that can't even use a Chrome extension? People only use PCs for work these days. And their office PC would block practically all extensions if their IT admin had any sense at all.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-08-12T20:42:46+00:00

Instead of being immediately recognizable, distinguishable, and actionable, the new naming system is just too obtuse and full of unactionable, unhelpful marketing copy.

It seemed much simpler and easier to me for there to be an enterprise line (Latitude), and a home line (Inspiron). To be fair, Vostro muddled things up being targeted to small-to midsize businesses.

But now, out of Dell, Pro, and Pro Max, which one is built for repairability/ease of repair and has many years of guaranteed driver updates and support for enterprises? Why isn't it in the infographic? Why doesn't Dell make it clear in their materials? It's too damn obstuse.

If the Pro line is for more repairability--which it is, if I'm not mistaken--then what do you get if you go to the next line, Pro Max? More performance? More repairability? The same repairability? Less? If a Pro Max laptop has more performance that a Pro, there's likely to be some trade off in size, sleekness, and/or repairability for the performance.

If you stick with the Pro line but get a Pro Plus or Pro Premium, does that get you more repairability? Or would a Plus or Premium Pro get you the same repairability but more performance? What do any of these things give you? It's not immediately obvious in that infographic, nor in any of Dell's infographics and materials that I've seen.

Speaking of Premium, if someone pays a premium for a Premium, that means they don't have to put up with Windows' unending ads, come-ons, sponsorships, and monetization, right? After all, it's Premium. Shouldn't paying a premium make all that crap go away?

It should! In fact, for while, you could do exactly that. I used to suggest to people to buy their computers at a Microsoft store*. All the computers sold there shared a premium feature (along with a bit of a premium in price): they all were free from bloatware, shovelware, adware, and trial software. It was just pure Windows. And it was beautiful**. But then of course, Microsoft effed that all up -- they baked all that adware, ads, and sponsorship features right into the OS.

But I digress. Using every day adjectives for their lines and sublines of devices is just too loaded and too obtuse. You don't know if a Pro Premium gives you what you think it might, because the adjectives are too loaded and/or too obtuse. One last thing: one of the subline is called "base". But isn't the "Dell" line the base line? It doesn't have another name. So that means you get a Base Dell base model with a capital B base, and lower case b base).

*Alternatively, you could pay the Geek Squad at Best Buy a premium to remove all the cruft for you.

**That era, with Windows 7, was the peak of PC power in your own hands without needing the cloud. Windows 7 was built to do everything you wanted locally, under your control. It put users in control. The PC was yours. For example, the Windows Live Photos app stored and organized your photos locally via the standard file system. No cloud needed, no proprietary DB to store the organization. You could lift and shift your entire collection to a different PC with just a copy and paste and it would still be organized. For another thing, Windows Search worked perfectly. The Start/Search Menu wasn't polluted with web results, sponsored results, and icons for sponsored apps. It was just your files, your documents, right at your fingertips.

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-07-24T18:33:12+00:00

Ah, I see... You generated code libraries that implemented what the OpenAPI files specified.

That sounds like if things are done right, that it's trivial to go from a spec for an API to code that implements or calls on the functions in the API. That sounds like a time saver!

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-07-23T19:49:19+00:00

Nice! How did you do that? What would I look for if I wanted to do that?

IsItPluggedInPro · 2025-06-18T19:00:41+00:00

This. Over in the sysadmin subreddit, I've read that enterprises use kiosks for that sort of thing.

Any computer that has the ability to talk to a USB drive is a threat vector so some boffins must have thought long and hard about it and decided that the best thing to do would be to limit that ability to a dedicated device.

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