Well put, and info hub is a great term to describe these limited purpose instances.

If game developers would launch their own fediverse instances (maybe with devs + moderators as the only registered users), to which general purpose instances could freely connect, then problems 2 and 3 would be solved for users as well. Imo that would be a far better solution than having game forums on a walled garden platform like discord. That still leaves the devs with problem 1, but they would also regain control of their data + the data would also be searchable with proper search engines. I can dream :)

Yep, french language class in a too large highschool class. If the class had been smaller, then the teacher would have definitely gone for more presentations by the students.

Keep up the good fight, I’m certain that many of your students appreciate what they learn from you.

Students and cheating is always going to be a thing, only the technology evolves. It’s always been an interesting cat and mouse game imo, as long as you’re not too personally affected (sorry).

I was a student when the internet started to spread and some students had internet at home, while most teachers were still oblivious. There was a french book report due and 4 kids had picked the same book because they had found a good summary online. 3 of the kids hand wrote a summary of the summary, 1 kid printed out the original summary and handed that in. 3 kids received a 0, the 4th got a warning to not let others copy his work :D

From what I’ve read, Zelensky as comedian made intelligent political and anti corruption criticism. Making jokes about the bad things in life, highlighting them, setting the stage for something being done about those problems. Broader than his on screen personality, he had middle class beginnings and on the back of his comedy work, he build a successful career as TV producer/executive. You probably know more about this than I do.

Trump as TV personality looked more like the most clueless person in the room, while all the actual work was done by others behind the scenes. No intelligence, no social commentary. Before his role in the apprentice, Trump had started his business career as a Nepo baby, and as a businessman he had failed every venture that he had tried, each time leaving a bloodbath of unpaid bills behind, a reverse Midas. And once his face was known from TV, he started with large scale scams like Trump University.

Those are 2 very different career paths.

He’s known for his work as an anti pollution lawyer, helping poor communities get justice from big corporations. He’s also known for believing + spreading vaccine disinformation and various other already debunked conspiracy theories. Probably a good guy to know on a personal level because he cares about people, but still not someone that you want to have in charge of policy making because he’s a gullible tool.

Traditionally promotions to leadership positions could only be selected from a small pool of men: wealthy, with good pedigree and with some kind of connections to the current top leader(s). Any top leadership positions had to be filled with people from this small pool: the aristocracy. They could be incompetent or corrupt, but that was usually not that important, as long as they had the right parents and kissed the right ass(es), they were the right person for the job.

Meritocracy is when people are selected for promotions based on something other than social standing or wealth. Merit for the job can be: getting a top score on an anonymous uniform exam, having a good track record in similar roles, having a solid plan to solve the problem at hand, … Any positive qualification that is not based on social standing or wealth. And all candidates for the job have to be weighted based on the same qualifiers.

As I understand it, the usa federal administration used to have a meritocratic system until right under the top departemental positions, who were politically appointed (appointed based on loyalty, not merit). But while those top positions were political appointees, they were usually selected from the top meritorious people, so those people were usually qualified for the job.

Trump has politized the promotions much deeper into the administrations, basically doing away with meritocracy and replacing it with a system based on personal loyalty and a willingness to break laws when asked to.

Trump and his administration might say that his appointments are based on merit, but that’s just Trump speaking, his words have no meaning.

Turkish delights, as I know them, are basically little sugar bombs, so they shouldn’t need any other preservatives to have a very long shelf life.

I’ve never had any awful tasting ones, so I can only guess how they might be screwed up. My guess would be that some overly greedy multinational(s) is (are) using corn syrup instead of sucrose.

Parks and recreation is a tv show. The clip is satire. Real American soda sized are still ridiculously large, but not this exaggerated “child size”.

What I find annoying about these memes is that it’s always about how Germany killed 6 million Jews during ww2, while they actually killed 17 million ordinary people in ethnically motivated mass killings. That’s 11 miillions victims of ethnic cleansing that seem to be forgotten.

I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.

I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:

*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.

Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.

In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.

for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*

*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.

The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.

I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.

Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/

Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.

Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.

The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.

Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.

This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.

The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.

Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.