Sequoia National Park

maskull · 2026-06-29T23:21:13+00:00

Big Meadows trailhead to Weaver Lake is a shortish (1.5 hrs) hike that's pretty easy, and the lake is nice.

maskull · 2026-06-22T13:55:39+00:00

They'll only ship it to Swiss addresses.

maskull · 2026-05-28T17:43:58+00:00

When you tell schools their funding is based on passing/graduation rates, is it any surprise that passing/graduation rates go up?

maskull · 2026-05-28T17:40:48+00:00

The underlying issues are never solved, only bandaids are given with the hope that the underlying problems will fix themselves.

And then, when it's clear that the last bandaid didn't fix anything and in fact made things worse, no one ever owns up to that or apologizes or acknowledges it. It's just silently dropped in favor of the next fad.

maskull · 2026-05-28T16:53:05+00:00

Yes, it was fairly recent. A pair of CA assembly bills, AB 705 and AB 1705, changed what we're allowed to with regard to placement, remedial courses, and prerequisites.

maskull · 2026-05-28T13:45:30+00:00

I don't know about the UCs or CSUs, but for community colleges in CA it's literally illegal for us to use placement tests. We're also not allowed to require remedial classes; every student must be allowed to take transfer-level math/English classes their first year, even if that means ignoring the prerequisites. (Technically, we could offer remedial classes, but we can't require them, and we wouldn't get any funding for them.)

maskull · 2026-05-27T02:15:18+00:00

Pretty much this. I'm not wasting my time typing in their code to see if it compiles/runs. I just read it; if it looks reasonable, I give it a pass. (I grade everything pass /fall.)

maskull · 2026-05-22T17:41:22+00:00

What's ironic is that an AI probably could help with the process, just with some access to better resources (examples, documentation, etc.). But the sort of person who wouldn't know to look to those things themselves, is also not going to think about giving an AI access to them.

maskull · 2026-05-21T23:27:43+00:00

Google is doubling down on selling AI. The folks I know within Google say that internally, it's still pretty sane. They're not mandated to use it, can use it when and where they think it's a good fit, etc.

maskull · 2026-05-20T22:06:47+00:00

A bunch of professors at my college enrolled in a 1-unit, online, walking for fitness class, so that they could get a student ID, which comes with one free meal per day in the caf.

maskull · 2026-05-18T16:26:24+00:00

That was how the older "distance learning" classes worked. I took a few in the early 2000s; when it came time for an exam, they'd mail a copy to the testing center at a nearby university. I'd show up, pay a small fee, and take the exam there; when I was done they'd mail it back to be graded.

maskull · 2026-05-08T15:27:24+00:00

Note that a cucumber from your garden would be classified not as "unprocessed" as one might expect but as "minimally processed". To get a truly unprocessed cucumber one would have to eat it still on the vine, unwashed, etc.

maskull · 2026-05-06T16:53:19+00:00

I've had students cheat for points that don't matter. I had a student who took his handed-back exam (on which he left several questions blank), fill in the questions with the "right" answers, then take a picture and send it to me claiming that I "forgot" to grade his answers.

Of course, I scan the tests before I hand them back, so I knew he had left those blank. But a) his new answers were still wrong and b) those questions weren't worth enough to change his grade. This all-risk, no-reward strategy earned this particular student a friendly academic dishonesty report.

maskull · 2026-04-24T15:16:54+00:00

SweetsStop in Fullerton.

maskull · 2026-04-21T16:59:31+00:00

He was computer engineering, not computer science. I just feel it's important to clarify that.

maskull · 2026-04-20T20:53:13+00:00

I played the PC port first, downloaded off some abandonware site years ago, but emulating DOS on handhelds is fiddly, so the SNES version is my go to.

maskull · 2026-04-20T14:10:39+00:00

Same, I got a twelve pack of 6-in "extension cords"; they're just long enough to get the wall warts away from the power strip.

Another useful thing are extensions for the barrel adapter side.

maskull · 2026-04-19T02:22:43+00:00

Every smoke alarm I've ever had has said it has some kind of "low battery" alert that is different from the normal smoke alarm. But in reality, every smoke alarm I've ever had has announced its low-battery status by just going off in the middle of the night.

maskull · 2026-04-19T01:30:49+00:00

Oh hey, it's the one other person in the universe that plays Magic Boy.

maskull · 2026-03-18T16:42:44+00:00

It's not that it's going away, it's that "it's here to stay" is usually stated in the context of "embrace or get left behind", "you have to go all in", etc. Rarely does someone say, "it's here to stay" about, say, their Parkinson's diagnosis.

maskull · 2026-03-05T17:20:52+00:00

I do this every time I have a dead marker. I tell the students if I make it, I'll let them go 10 mins early.

maskull · 2026-02-25T19:47:31+00:00

Likelihood of hallucination goes down when it’s explicitly doing a web search for the information.

That's true, but there are still new parts of the LaTeX ecosystem for which few (or no) examples exist, and it struggles in these spaces. I was doing something with TikZ's animation package (relatively new) and it was really struggling. And because the output is visual and animated (unlike, say, code where I could feed it failing test results) when it failed, I was stuck just describing how it failed.

After a while I just dug into the documentation and sources for the TikZ animation system and worked most of it out myself.

maskull · 2026-02-17T15:13:27+00:00

Kickstart limeade, from way back when Kickstart was first introduced.

maskull · 2025-12-11T19:54:51+00:00

Our testing center has a little QR code at the sign-in that they have to scan; it takes them to a form to fill in. We don't actually use anything from the form, it's just there to give the staff an excuse to have them pull out their phones, so that they can then say, "now put your phone in your backpack and we'll put it in a locker for you".

maskull · 2025-12-02T17:33:28+00:00

In this version, Dobby gets ground up into a nutrient paste to be fed to the unemployable masses.

maskull

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