Reflecting on my own experience on both sides, I can tell a generational difference.
As student, research-focused professors and some old timers made you feel unwelcome in office hours, a mixture of “you are wasting my time” and “you should have put more work on this, I’ll just give you some hints so I can send you away quick”. Many had in common being from a generation and country where university access was not so normalized and accessible to all social strata, just graduating came many times with some sense of entitlement.
Some years later and I’m the one assisting students during office hours. I could already sense some generational change, with younger professors and assistants treating students more like equals. They were exceptions of course, we had younger assistants cargo culting the worst attitude parts of old timers (fun enough they were usually from kind of privileged background, families with ties to the field or even de same department). The result was students from other groups kind-of/secretly attending my office hours and the ones from other nice colleagues.
The Internet seems like a small place, and lately, I always find you talking in a demeaning way about the South of Spain and/or its people. :-)
I usually wouldn't engage further (as most people don't when faced with your harsh statements), but as a "hick farmer from Andalusia" myself, and your history on this topic, it hits too close to home.
You probably think you don't need to, but maybe consider checking how you are perceived and how you come across to people when you write the way you do.
This is my last interaction with you here or in any of the other platforms where we cross paths.
> Basically plants evolved Lignin (wood) but there was nothing in the world that could break it down so it rapidly accumulated along with a hyperoxgenated atmosphere due to the extensive growth.
That was my understanding too until recently, when I have read in a couple of places that things might not have been like that. Checking the Wikipedia article about Carboniferous [1] it seems there is not consensus yet:
"There is ongoing debate as to why this peak in the formation of Earth's coal deposits occurred during the Carboniferous. The first theory, known as the delayed fungal evolution hypothesis, is that a delay between the development of trees with the wood fibre lignin and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading fungi gave a period of time where vast amounts of lignin-based organic material could accumulate. Genetic analysis of basidiomycete fungi, which have enzymes capable of breaking down lignin, supports this theory by suggesting this fungi evolved in the Permian. However, significant Mesozoic and Cenozoic coal deposits formed after lignin-digesting fungi had become well established, and fungal degradation of lignin may have already evolved by the end of the Devonian, even if the specific enzymes used by basidiomycetes had not. The second theory is that the geographical setting and climate of the Carboniferous were unique in Earth's history: the co-occurrence of the position of the continents across the humid equatorial zone, high biological productivity, and the low-lying, water-logged and slowly subsiding sedimentary basins that allowed the thick accumulation of peat were sufficient to account for the peak in coal formation."
One way or another, I find fascinating how different the planet has been along its geologic periods.
You may want to turn it on and check how it is doing, just in case. That model is infamously known for its bad capacitors and their tendency to bulge and die.
As a side note, I find OpenBSD the best modern OS for those old PowerPC machines. The main "problem" is the lack of modern web browsers, but it is not like the CPU can handle the modern web anyway :-)
I really like the form factor, if only there would be some off-the-shelf options for a mechanical keyboard version ..
I know there are plenty DIY projects for this (and the cyberdeck scene is a rabbit hole that I do not dare to go down), but it would be nice something more easily available.
I am a big fan of thin clients as servers. It is true you lose the "built-in console and UPS", but they usually come in very nice and compact form factor, many are fanless and consume 10~15W tops while being acceptably capable (in general much more than a RPi but with much better memory and storage specs)
The main complain in my environment (composed by both doctors and dropouts) is not about "it being hard" but "it being disappointing", specially when you are interested in doing actual science but you find that will be a small part of the process and many times not as rewarding as expected. You add department politics, personal differences with supervisors or the whole publishing business to the mix and it can get really ugly really fast.
I opened the link mostly to see which thin client model the author chose, to discover it is a HP T520, a machine it happens I also own an unit.
I cannot comment on TimeMachine, but regarding hardware + Linux, it has been a more stable server than equivalent RPi or Odroid SBCs while not consuming much more power and just having a bigger size.
It looks like a powerful combo. Back in the day I went the LaTeX path, nowadays I’ll be tempted to follow your approach.
I have tried Obsidian a couple of times, but it never stuck with me. For some reason I cannot go back to “regular editors” after years of vim (and now neovim), it is not only the modal editing (IIRC Obsidian has a decent vi mode), I guess it is more about having all your editing in the same tool (and the terminal).
Nowadays I stick to neovim plus Telekasten plugin, not as polished as Obsidian, but with enough features.
Zotero was key to finish my long delayed thesis, reducing the toil of managing a lot of references on a topic that I disliked more and more by the minute. Unfortunately back in the day they did not have yet the embedded PDF reader and highlighting features, but still was super helpful (I decided to stay away from Mendeley for license and affiliation reasons)
I still keep Zotero around for some projects that require more serious bibliography management. Glad to see advances in the note management direction, even if it is a add-on. While serviceable, the default note options always felt a bit rough to me.
I utterly dislike Zabbix (enough to login here and complain). I guess that if it fits your needs is all good and fine, but as someone that has been in charge of defining and feeding it with LLD rules and registering multi-dimension metrics with Zabbix Sender, I feel scarred by it.
I cannot find my way around the Zabbix web interface neither and most of the templates, rules and macros system confused me, deeply.
On the other hand we have a Prometheus + Grafana stack for another system and the model makes all the sense to me. I guess that there is something in time series and graph plotting that just clicks with me.
I have a soft spot for Window Maker and I have been using it until recently , when I moved to Wayland-based environments.
I also really like its dockapps (I even wasted some time writing one to display and control screen brightness), the only weak point for me is the systray dockapps, probably because it is a concept “transplanted” from other desktop paradigmsthat does not fit great.
I watched the original interview (2020) and I found it interesting, most of the things sounded plausible.
At some point during the second interview he starts to digress about current society, inter-human relationships (or lack of) and technology, the "dangers" of the meta-verse and so on. This is ok, but it is more of an informal conversation between two individuals that are not experts on those fields, and it has to be put in perspective as such.
It also shocked me quite a bit when he went into details about his financial situation and I felt a bit disturbed about his vigilante-like statements regarding his hacking activity to "protect" the people that needs protection.
At some point in this second interview I was not sure if he was talking about actual concerns regarding society and technology or if he was just projecting his own personal struggles and worries about human relationships, isolation, and meaning of work, life and everything else.
As student, research-focused professors and some old timers made you feel unwelcome in office hours, a mixture of “you are wasting my time” and “you should have put more work on this, I’ll just give you some hints so I can send you away quick”. Many had in common being from a generation and country where university access was not so normalized and accessible to all social strata, just graduating came many times with some sense of entitlement.
Some years later and I’m the one assisting students during office hours. I could already sense some generational change, with younger professors and assistants treating students more like equals. They were exceptions of course, we had younger assistants cargo culting the worst attitude parts of old timers (fun enough they were usually from kind of privileged background, families with ties to the field or even de same department). The result was students from other groups kind-of/secretly attending my office hours and the ones from other nice colleagues.
Academia is its own kind of hell :-)