Posts

Using AI in Education I’ve read quite a number of articles recently about the use of AI in education. Specifically, there’s be a good bit of discussion around whether students should use AI in completing assignments. Strangely, it seems there’s a fair number of folks that believe that it’s perfectly fine for students to do this. I disagree. School work, whether homework or in-class work has one goal: to help the student to ingest and process information in a way that aids them in recalling and using that information later in life or in other situations. In order for this goal to be acheived, it is imperative that they use that information, recalling it, applying it to different scenarios, looking for links to related information, and so on. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, in their book make it stick (ISBN:978-0-674-72901-8) points out that using information in ways that matter is the key to effective, long-term learning. Using AI to complete a task bypasses that process so that in the end the student learns nothing, despite earning an “A” in the class. ...

Why Would Anyone Choose to be Attacked? I don’t remember now, what prompted me to think about this topic. It’s one that I actually jotted down some time ago in response, probably, to a news article or some other reading I had done at the time. But the question that I wanted to explore a little bit (this may be more a micro blog post rather than long-form) is in the title. ...

Learning Emacs Part 1 Emacs, if you’re unfamiliar, is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It was originally designed for editing macros in early computer systems. The most popular version, and the one that dominates the space today is GNU Emacs which was developed by Richard Stallman somewhere around 1976. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of its history but knowing that it has been around for nearly 50 years and remains a very popular editor, particularly among developers and others, like me, who are interested in exploring different technologies and appreciate the extensibility and utility of the program gives you a sense of why you might want to consider it. ...

Rural vs Urban Living For most of my life I’ve lived in more suburban areas. And, since this is what I’ve known and am comfortable with, this is often my “go-to” when looking for a home. In fact, my tendency has always been to lean rural. I once went looking for a home that I could “sit on my front porch buck naked and nobody would know or care.” I wanted that privacy. I wanted that distance from others. I am not a terribly social person so being out in the sticks where I don’t have to deal with neighbors has always had an appeal to me. ...

Toggling the Touchpad in OpenBSD on Lenovo X250 to Address Palm Rejection Issues. So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be. After some digging around I found a solution: How to setup OpenBSD in i3 to toggle touchpad Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh” ...

Learning in Public Probably a couple of years ago, while doing some researching on learning, I ran across numerous articles and blog posts that touted the notion of learning in public. In general, these were associated with Personal Knowledge Management software such as Notion, Roam, or Obsidian (and a whole bunch of others!). This topic piqued my interest then and I played with it a bit. More recently, the topic was brought back to my attention so I wanted to explore it a bit more. ...

Do You Have a Passion Project? I’m always fascinated when I hear or read about someone who devotes significant time and effort into what they call their passion project. I mean, how do they come up with those ideas? What makes something a passion project? Dictionary.com defines a passion as an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. So someone’s passion project is borne out of their intense enthusiasm for whatever that project is. But how do they find that? I mean, I have a lot of interests. I spend inordinate amounts of time on some of those interests (computers and related technology, for example) but I would not call those passion projects. Nor would I even say I have a passion for technology. There are many in the open-source community that are quite passionate about the philosophy of open-source. Some to the point of being extremist. I appreciate the open-source philosophy and try, whenever possible to support it. I use open-source software and generally look for open-source options when looking for software. But am I passionate about it? No, not really. Am I going to go out and proselytize for it? Nope. Nor am I going to look down on those who choose not to prioritize open-source software. ...

Senior Socializing If you’ve read any of the literature on aging engaging in social activities with others is one of the most commonly cited contributors to an overall sense of well-being, maintaining cognitive function, and even to longevity. As a rule, I’ve always been a bit of skeptic on that front believing that while this may be generally true, it really depends on the person. I am not a social person. I have always been a bit of an introvert. No small part of that is because, as I discussed in this essay I believe I may have some autistic tendencies that show up through social awkwardness. I’m never really comfortable in social situations because I really don’t know how to make small talk, a necessary skill in most social situations. My skepticism comes in the form of wondering if the stress and anxiety that comes from being uncomfortable in most social situations counteracts any benefit of those situations. ...

Revisiting OpenBSD Roughly six months ago I documents my efforts to install FreeBSD on a Lenovo X250 that I bought for that purpose. In that post I noted that the one problem I had with FreeBSD on that device was that the suspend/resume feature did not work. Since this was a laptop and my plan was to use it as a dedicated writing machine that I could take with me on the go, the inability to suspend and resume the device made the whole process a no-go. Yes, I could shutdown and reboot as needed, but I’m lazy and that just didn’t work for me. Moreover, often times I’m just shutting the lid for short periods of time and so the shutdown and boot up for those short periods seemed a bit much. ...

Learning Emacs For some time now I’ve had a preference for using plaintext files where ever I can. I explained in this post why that is, so I won’t repeat it here. But in order to begin using plaintext it is necessary to have an editor that will support it. Now, over the past few years I’ve preferred using nano, a simple, easy to use plaintext editor on linux (and other devices e.g. mac). Nano is just a basic editor and while it served its purpose, I was looking for something a bit more flexible. Prior to nano, I periodically turned to vi or its more recent incarnation, vim. Vim (or vi) is so deeply rooted in the unix-y space that, unlike nano, it does not need to be installed. It is part of the OS. The problem with vim, though, is that it is a modal editor. Modal editing has its charms and its benefits but also creates a few, not obstacles, per se, but frustrations. Modal editors have different modes (hence “modal”) and in order to accomplish different actions you find yourself frequently changing modes. Once you’ve worked with a modal editor for a while those actions become more or less automatic and I am slowly getting there. Still, it’s frustrating to have to stop and think about what mode you need to be in in order to accomplish some action. ...