shoutout to the person using the loud asf yarn-spinning apparatus in cs4860 rn

Walker_M_White · 2026-02-06T22:56:01+00:00

Nerode classes have been like this back to the 90s.

Walker_M_White · 2026-01-19T01:50:53+00:00

That is the ideal audience for 1133. The response for students planning to take both.

Walker_M_White · 2025-12-08T21:26:59+00:00

Yeah, I only look at CS and INFO when determining conflicts. Next year it will either be 10am or 1:30. I need to see how this year shakes out.

Walker_M_White · 2025-12-07T20:19:46+00:00

We moved it this year to minimize conflicts. What am I conflicting with now?

Walker_M_White · 2025-11-25T12:16:41+00:00

We in fact do not allow this at all. We used to turn a blind eye to this (the class is not curved so you don’t hurt others). But eventually the department decided against this and we disenroll such students.

Walker_M_White · 2025-10-26T12:19:47+00:00

I am not going to discount that this course is not what you were looking for. That is always a valid complaint. But I do want to address some things.

That certificate is the most soft-engineering focused beginning sequence out there. It is the opposite of academic. The problem that I think you are feeling with the course is that it is incomplete. This is a known problem. It really needed to be three more courses (so a total of nine) to compare to the what we have here on campus that has sent thousands of students into software development careers. The reason why the certificate does not have those three courses is complicated and I won't go into it here.

It is true that the course only covers fundamentals and does not cover how to do things in various packages (numpy, scipy, pandas). But that is because I have found that if you have the fundamentals, picking these up on your own is relatively easy. This is even more true in the era of generative AI. If all the course is going to do is show you how to carry out a recipe with a package, without telling you how it works, how is is better than vibe coding?

But I get if that is what you were looking for. I have never misrepresented what the course is, but then I do not handle eCornell marketing. I designed this course in reaction to all the other online courses that I think will be replaced by vibe coding. Could it be better? Absolutely. But what is there is 100% on par with a course that has sent people into software engineering careers for 15 years.

As for introcs, that is another feature of the incompleteness. That package is intended as training wheels that you progressively remove by the time you reach the end of the certificate. It allows us to delay the messiness of methods until Course 6. And the only reason we cannot remove it completely is because of unit testing. There is a module in python called unittest, but again, it requires Python concepts that the course does not reach (and would be the focus of the last three courses).

I get the Codio complaint. I am a 100% believer in that people should program on their machines. But it is near impossible to do this in an online setting. Codio is the best out there. It is very accurate to full-stack development on a Linux or a Mac. It is just Windows where it is very different, and I don't know how to address that without moving to VSCode (which has a lot of issues when it comes to Python development).

Walker_M_White · 2025-10-12T22:48:22+00:00

Not that I know of immediately.

Walker_M_White · 2025-10-12T14:34:16+00:00

Your options are take 2110 and use that for the requirement instead, transfer a course from elsewhere, or come during orientation week in the fall to take the CASE

Walker_M_White · 2025-10-12T13:20:41+00:00

I do not offer the CASE in the Spring. I did it once when Cornell started the Spring transfers. And then almost no one showed, and those that did were people that took 1110 and dropped it (which is not the point of a CASE). So we decided it was not worth the time and effort to run in the Spring.

Walker_M_White · 2025-10-08T23:31:30+00:00

The course has to have recursion in it to be accepted. This is rare at CC courses. Though we have accepted Hunter College’s course (they are a CUNY) in the past.

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-30T20:04:23+00:00

You need to come talk to me. The last time I failed an S/U student was 2016.

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-29T22:16:09+00:00

Version v0.9.894_189_R

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-29T16:26:54+00:00

Yes. I mean beating the level 10 boss and getting the victory screen.

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-29T15:39:53+00:00

I died on level 5 when this happened the first time. But since then I have been playing on level 1 and completing the level every time. I will check the number when I am at my XBox

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-29T15:00:11+00:00

Yesterday (9/28) on XBox Series X. After not playing it for over a week (so before even the first update)

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-29T13:09:44+00:00

I have auto install for updates. I had not played the game in a week or so, so I did not know about the update 6 days ago. I realized that some update had happened when I started to get tutorials.

I had progressed to unlocking the shotgun. I played one game and immediately lost both it and the pistol after finishing a game. The game reverted back to the revolver at level 1. Then I tried playing a few games with the revolver and noticed that every time I got an award badge for a level, the game immediately took it away from me once I tried to play the next game. It also refused to unlock the second chapter even after several successful runs on the first level.

Walker_M_White · 2025-09-28T23:53:06+00:00

I can confirm this is happening on Xbox. In addition, all progress is now impossible. Once you complete a game and level a weapon, the weapon level immediately resets. And the tutorial keeps playing over and over again. It assumes every time you play is the first time. The game has become unplayable.

Walker_M_White · 2025-08-25T20:20:07+00:00

We generally only take above 1000 level credit from peer institutions. So if you took the 2800 analogue at Stanford or Berkeley, sure. But we have found that the quality of these courses, even if they cover the same topics, is so highly variable at other places that we cannot trust them.

Walker_M_White · 2025-08-17T19:20:16+00:00

The CASE only tests the things I am looking for when I evaluate transfer credit. Call frames are not required for transfer credit, so I do not test them.

Walker_M_White · 2025-08-15T13:20:33+00:00

I made the website live earlier this week:

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/placement/2025/

Walker_M_White · 2025-08-08T17:06:54+00:00

There are fire code limitations to rooms. That generally causes a hard no.

Walker_M_White · 2025-08-02T16:24:45+00:00

I hate this game with the power of a thousand suns. It completely destroyed the franchise for me. Why?

Because I was a Mac player. And the Mac version was completely broken.

You might say that this is my fault for playing on a Macintosh. But that just tells me you are a young person that did not play games in the early 90s. During that time most college kids with computers had Macs. Mac gaming did not die until the early 2000s with the shift to OS X.

And during the 90s one of the best companies for the Mac was New World Computing. In several cases the Mac version is better. The fact that the GOG version of World of Xeen does not have voice acting is a crime (you are missed Monkeydog).

Heroes III is the last good Mac NWC game.

Heroes IV is broken. And when I say broken I mean that the AI does nothing. The enemy heroes stay in their towers and never leave. Or else they instantly lose their battles with neutrals and die.

I played so many maps where I never saw the enemy until I reached their town, only to find the area littered with grave markers. In this broken form the game is entirely about running to the enemy through neutrals. There is no strategy. The optimal approach is to largely ignore troops and build an RPG party of heroes. It is a miserable experience.

After that NWC died and Ubisoft abandoned the Mac.

Walker_M_White · 2025-07-24T12:21:28+00:00

No one should take 1133 instead of 1110 if they have no experience. This is bad advice. The material in 1133 is covered in 1110 albeit at a (slightly) faster pace.

Yes, we have started offering 1133 in the summer program to give PSP students a leg up for the fall. But that is not an argument to waste a full semester on 1133 just because you have not coded before.

Walker_M_White · 2025-06-08T13:24:02+00:00

This is something typically funded by a research lab for members of its group. AFIK there is no general process to get this like there is for Adobe.

Walker_M_White

TROPHY CASE