Path objects also override the / operator to join paths

This is both cool and gross… gives me C++ vibes (operator overloading abuse).

According to #243 Chatting COSMIC Desktop Alpha With The CEO | Carl Richell, they are planning an alpha release on the last thursday of each month. This means that Alpha 3 should be out on October 31, 2024.

Likewise, Carl hopes to have a Beta 1 in January 2025.

Old School Runescape.

From what I can tell, Pop!_OS does not ship their own version of timeshift. Instead, it comes directly from Ubuntu. So if there is a change in maintainers, it should be reported to Ubuntu:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/timeshift

I used to use VLC for music, but these days I use Symphony to play local files on my phone. VLC tended to struggle when scanning or indexing large folders (which it did all the time…), while Symphony is a bit better at that. That said, I still use VLC for video and for casting things from my DLNA server (VLC supports Chromecast).

For ebooks, I’ve used Librera FD and that has been mostly OK. I’ll checkout the two you mentioned though. Thanks!

All my servers moved to 24.04 and I wanted my desktop to keep in line with them (so they all had the same packages). Likewise, I’ve been following the development of GNOME and I really liked what they have done with versions 45 and 46, so I wanted to try a more modern version of that desktop environment (Pop 22.04 is still on GNOME 42 and is now missing out on some cool features like the quick settings menu).

Finally, I wanted to try out Wayland and the experience on Pop 22.04 is not great with Wayland, especially since it is missing out on the more recent fixes and updates in Ubuntu 24.04.

If you are happy with Pop 22.04 and willing to wait for COSMIC to stabilize and become feature complete, then that is what you should do. For me, I used this delay in releasing Pop 24.04 as an opportunity to try out something different and for the most part, I’m pretty happy with the experience.

Unfortunately, there will not be a release of Pop 24.04 with GNOME before COSMIC is released. In fact, System76 has stopped development of Pop-shell as referenced here:

https://reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1eo59wj/will_xorg_still_be_an_option_in_2404/

Once, Pop 24.04 is released, you will be able to install gnome-session to get GNOME, but it will be the version from Ubuntu and not Pop-shell (though you can install the unsupported extension yourself).

Basically, the development of COSMIC is delaying the release of Pop 24.04… which means the whole distro update probably won’t come until 2025 as the desktop matures.

For this reason, among others, I’ve decided to switch to Ubuntu until COSMIC matures and Pop 24.04 is released.

If you are using Pop!_OS 22.04, then you are using gdm. You can just create the file if it doesn’t exist.

If you are using gdm as your login manager, you can put the command in ~/.xprofile… which is sourced by gdm3.

Hi! Did you read my reply in the other post you made in !system76@lemmy.ml?

Was is this article How to install the Rust Cosmic Desktop environment on Pop!_OS?

Either way, if you want to use the new COSMIC login screen, you can install the cosmic-greeter package:

sudo apt install cosmic-greeter

Once that is installed, you should be able to switch back and forth between cosmic-greeter and gdm3 with:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3

and selecting whichever login manager you wish to use.

I’ve been using Weechat-Android to connect to my self-hosted Weechat for over a decade. This is one of the killer mobile apps that keeps me on Android and I love it.

I also have a couple instances of thelounge that people use on mobile via the PWA (progressive web app).

Oh. I’m sorry if this was discussed previously… I only returned to lemmy a few weeks ago and didn’t see the story covered yet.

Hmm. Why is that?

I’m not 100% sold on sailing… then again I’ve played OSRS < a year, so I still have a lot of other content left to explore.

First off, 10 is an integer square root. Of 100.

Right, what I was trying to say is that 10 itself is not a perfect square. You cannot take the square root of 10 and get an integer (ie. 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, etc.).

I was told by multiple English teachers (including the head of the department) that I was a math student and should never attempt to write because I saw through the regurgitation assignments, didn’t agree with teacher assessments of what Dickens “was trying to do” and had zero interest in confirming their biases.

I think that is unfortunate and probably inappropriate. I try to avoid classifying students as particular types and generally try to encourage them whenever possible to pursue whatever their interests are (even if I disagree or don’t have the same interest myself).

College coursework on the whole is a waste of time reinventing wheels. I don’t need to spend a couple of weeks working up to “Hello, world!” in C and as such left CS as a major my first quarter at uni.

There is a reason for reinventing wheels; it is to understand why they are round and why they are so effective. To build the future, it helps to understand the past.

That said, perhaps the course was too slow for you, which is understandable… I frequently hear that about various classes (including ones I’ve taught).

But teachers do this shit every day, year after year, and we blindly say they’re doing important work even as they discourage people from finding their path and voice, because god forbid a 16-year-old challenges someone in their 50s.

Again, I think you’ve had an unfortunate experience and I think it’s a good thing to challenge your teachers. I certainly did when I was a student and I appreciate it now when students do that with me. I recognize that I am not perfect nor do I know everything. I make mistakes and can be wrong.

I wish you had a more supportive environment in secondary school and I have a better understanding of your perspective. Thanks for the dialogue.

Sure, some people acquire the capability through repetition. But all that matters in the end is if you are capable or not.

I guess the question is how do you develop that capability if you are cheating or using a tool to do things for you? If I use GrubHub to order food or pay someone else to cook for me, does it make sense to say I can cook? After all, I am capable of acquiring cooked food even though I didn’t actually do any of the work nor do I understand how to well, actually make food.

The how is relevant if you are trying to actually learn and develop skills, rather than simply getting something done.

No, the point is to get an irrelevant piece of paper that in the end doesn’t actually indicate a persons capabilities.

Perhaps the piece of paper doesn’t actually indicate a person’s capabilities in part because enough students cheat to the point where getting a degree is meaningless. I do not object to that assessment.

Look, I’m not arguing that schooling is perfect. It’s not. Far from it. All I am saying is that if your goal is to actually learn and grow in skill, development, and understanding, then there is no shortcut. You have to do the work.

Sure. If you do enough basic math, you start to see things like how 2/8 can be simplified to 1/4 or you recognize that 10 is not a perfect square root or how you could reorder some operations to make things easier (sorry, examples from my kids). Little things like that where you don’t even think about it… it becomes second nature to you and that makes you a lot faster because you are not worrying about those basic ideas or mechanics. Instead, you can think about more complicated things such as which formulas to apply or the process to compute something.

As another example, since I teach computer science, a lot of novice students struggle with basic programming language syntax… How exactly do you declare a variable? What order do things go? How does a for loop work? Do you need a semicolon or parentheses, etc. If you do enough programming, however, these things become second nature and you stop thinking about it. You just seemily, intuitively, know these things and do them naturally without thinking, even though when you first started, it was really complicated and daunting and you probably spent a lot of time constructing a single line of code.

Once you develop a foundation however, you don’t need to worry about these low-level things. Instead you worry about high-level issues such as how to organize larger pieces of code into functions or how to I utilize different paradigums, etc.

This is why a basketball player, for instance, will shoot thousands of shots in practice or why a piano player will play a piece over and over for many hours. It’s so they don’t have to think about the low-level mechanics. It becomes muscle memory and it’s just natural to them.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource.

I generally agree. That’s why I’m no longer banning AI in my courses. I’m allowing students to use AI to explain concepts, help debug, or as a reference. As a resource or learning aid, it’s fine or possibly even great for students.

However, I am not allowing students to generate solutions, because that is harmful and doesn’t help with learning. They still need to do the work and go through the process, AI assisted or not.

This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that’s always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because ‘you won’t always have a calculator’ or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it’s one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill.

I disagree with your specific example here. You should learn to do math in your head because it helps develop intuition of the relationship between numbers and the various mathematical operations. Without a foundational understanding of how to do the basics manually, it becomes very difficult to tackle more complicated problems or challenges even with a calculator. Eventually, you do want to graduate to using a calculator because it is more efficient (and probably more accurate), but you will be able to use it much more effectively if you have a strong understanding numbers and how the various operations work.

Your overall point about how a tool is used being important is true and I agree that if used wisely, AI or any other tool can be a good thing. That said, from my experience, I find that many students will take the easy way out and do as you noted at the top: “blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results”.

The how is irrelevant.

What I usually tell students is that homework and projects are learning opportunities. The point isn’t for them to produce a particular artifact; it’s to go through the process and develop skills along the way. For instance, I do not need a program that can sort numbers… I can do that myself and there are a gazillion instances of that. However, students should do that assignment to practice learning how to code, how to debug, how to think through problems, and much more. The point isn’t the sorting program… it’s the process and experience.

How do you get better at say gymnastics? You do a bunch of exercises and skills, over and over.

How do you get better at say playing the guitar? You play a lot songs, over and over.

How do you get better at say writing? You write a lot, some good, some bad, over and over.

To get better at anything, you need to do the thing, a lot. You need to build intuition and muscle memory. Taking shortcuts prevents that and in the long run, hurts your learning and growth.

So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted. Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.

Maybe. It is true that people who would have cheated in the past are now just using AI in addition to the previous means. But from my experience teaching, the number of students cheating is also increasing because of how prevalent AI has become and how easy it is to use it.

AI has made cheating more frictionless, which means that a student who might not have say used Chegg (requires some effort) or copied a friend (requires social interaction) in the past, can now just open a textbox and get a solution without much effort. LLMs have made cheating much easier, quicker, and safer (people regularly get caught using Chegg or copying other people, AI cheating can be much harder to detect). It is a huge temptation where the [short-term] benefits can greatly dwarf the risks.

According to this post on reddit from about 5 days ago:

There is not one yet. – ahoneybun (s76 happiness architect)