I am exhausted while pushing the mower. I had just asked Siri to set a reminder and she omitted the most important words in that reminder.
Me: hey siri…
Siri: uh huh?
Me: oh, fuck it. Nevermind. I can’t
Siri: ok it’s deleted.
Me. ⁉️ what’s deleted⁉️
Siri: < reads me the definition of the word “deleted “>
Me: 😭
So, I was on a long drive yesterday, and put on some pump me up music, so I didn't get sleepy. I just put something on YouTube, and I ended up in the group of music that I would call Peak Mid to Late Millenial. For perspective, I'm one of the Gappers, not quite old enough to be Gen X, but also feel too old to be a Millenial, although I suppose I technically am, just an Ancient one. ANYWAY, this music, on the surface, sounds like bubble gum pop dance music, the kind you dance in "da club" to, but as I was listening, I realized most of the lyrics had a trend that broke down basically to this:
Get your friends together, drink heavily, have sex, party, DANCE, GO LIVE IN THE PRESENT, because we will all probably die young anyway.
Most of these songs are probably between 10-15 years old, and honestly probably really caught onto the zeitgeist of the time. Hope didn't work, we are still caught in a shit conflict none of us want to be in. The world is actively burning, and no one in power wants to save it. We make less money than our parents and their parents, we'll probably never get to own a home, we'll probably have college debt forever, if we could even afford to go. Might as well party your life away. I do wonder if Trump was a pretty big slap in the face about how bad it could really go, because this Apocalypse attitude seems to be changing a bit, or maybe Gen Z is just rebelling against their sad grunge Gen X parents. LOL
Either way, that was some kind of a ramble, share your thoughts on this, and listen to a peak representation of this musical phenomenon. It's kind of a banger.
@RickiTarr Years ago I bemoaned the loss of oldies stations. Then I enjoyed it a while as I realized that the oldies stations were playing the songs I grew up with. Then I gave up as the oldies stations played songs I don't recognize.
Someone finally addressed my need. There's a "Boomer Radio" station in these parts, and I'm back to listening to '60s music. https://www.myboomerradio.com/
a network card with a cat5 connector is an octopus and it transfers data by tickling another octopus fifty meters from itself with its twisty tentacles
I love how much stuff is catering to my late 90s / early aughts nostalgia. Final Fantasy 7 is new and blowing my mind, and in the background an evil tech monopoly is about to get a slap on the wrist by the DOJ 😌 it's like I'm 10 again.
@dgar You want an earworm that just won't let go? There's a cover of Sweet Caroline that sounds like it's being performed for the Close Encounters aliens.
Tired of this: "learn C so you can understand how a computer really works."
So much of modern computers is not visible from C (pipelining, virtual memory, branch prediction, cache misses, etc).
I guess what they mean is, "you learn about pointers and consecutive memory locations"? How is that helpful for programming in other languages without pointers?
C teaches you an abstraction of computers based on the PDP-11. It's interesting, but it's not essential.
@nedbat I'll readily agree that learning C doesn't teach you how a computer really works. But when teaching how a computer really works (not really -- I still keep it relatively simple), I find C to be useful.
When discussing a model for processor architecture, I find it easier if my students have been exposed (and played around a little with) assembly. I find that C is a useful stepping-stone to make assembly a bit more graspable. The hands-on portion of the first third of my course could be taught in Java, but that would require a greater leap to assembly.
Later in the course, we talk about memory-mapped I/O -- the hands-on portion definitely isn't do-able in Java or Python.
Have I considered languages other than C? Sure, but on the balance, C seems to be the right choice for this course for these students.