Yes, this is The Great Filter. We fix it or fade away.

CS grads are in the worst position ever. University is often mistaken for vocational education, however that would be a technical college.

I have spent a lot of time crossing between a practical education environment, aimed at production skills, and university, aimed at thinking ability and abstract skills.

Honestly, my experience is that students are much more capable in a production environment after a two week boot camp than after three years of university on a roughly parallel topic. However, the non-idiots in the academic case will be able to understand arguments about the context of what they are doing better.

The point is that a philosophy degree might be more employable than a CS degree in some situations. The dude who cofounded Flickr and Slack was working off of an english degree. Use your degree for understanding and some projects for knowledge.

I also have a humanities degree and work in IT, with a wide range of applied skills I learned from necessity instead of a prof.

So create the necessity for skills by making useful shit, or even just fixing things. Find friends and make a silly app. Volunteer at a nonprofit and improve their CRM database. Build a homelab that you share with roommates. Find the local permacomputing group and help them turn all those shitty win10 obsolete machines into sleek linux machines. Ignore money and employment as task criteria for a few years, or freelance IT gigs.

Solve real world problems for real experience.

Or, like, you know, they got bumped and it’s get a hotel or fly another airline.

One shitpost meme video in your downloads folder = hundreds of Word docx files. Pick the low hanging fruit.

still waiting for design fashion to circle back to gopher and tabular data… taps fingers and sighs in genX

That is a possibility with nearly any classified listing and always has been.

Situational awareness and good street sense are necessary. Bring a friend or be as public as you can, etc.

Most online scams, including phishing and tech support scams, are variations on ancient techniques.

You go! Also check for more niche classified sites, like specific to universities etc.

Yes, friends don’t let friends use Meta products.

Why did people stop using craigslist to advertise rentals?

It is just the old bulletin board / classified newspaper niche, usually there’s more than one venue in urban areas. In a lot of Canada people also use kijiji etc. I am not including fb marketplace in that, though if you can access Meta websites, too many people still use that.

Factor in an energy cost savings as part of the TCO. A M4 Mini will save considerable energy over any comparable machine.

“Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front.”

OK first, way to telegraph your crusty age: it hasn’t been OSX for YEARS. macOS 10 was a long running release but we are on macOS 15 now, soon to be 16, though the name convention is switching to years instead of sequential version. If you have a machine still running OSX, yes by all means put ZorinOS or LMDE on it.

Second, I translated your comment as “I don’t know how to use it so it sux”.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Homebrew, plus some VMs, and you get the best of all platforms in one computer.

This used to be particularly awesome when macOS was intel based, as now running an intel based machine image on apple’s ARM architecture is awkward by comparison, but hopefully that will resolve somewhat soon.

I just realized that I could have double-layered the m-dashes there, eh? Missed opportunity. Oh what the hell, I need to prolong lunch break juuust a little bit more, so

Well, full lulz as that was tongue in cheek although not wrong! And appreciation for the semicolon. Punctuators: Rise Up!

Ahem, edited for consistency.

It’s sad, because for most people the use-case for an m-dash is relatively narrow—a parenthetic interjection relevant to the topic (but not sufficiently off-topic for brackets), and needing a subtle call to authority—it mostly popped up in academic or pseudo intellectual non-fiction, or in faulknerian ponderous fiction, but also as a hapless crutch for endlesss neurodivergent layers of qualification.

So I am going to claim disability discrimination about this brutal and unjust sudden boycott, on behalf of crew #adhd.

Edit: shits and giggles

Dude just made shit up, it’s a fever dream with three dollar words.

Cobol mavens burned both ends of the candle and made bank, while making banks work.

Many were old enough to retire after that.

Did you mean Media Access Controllers, or macOS?

Hm, I guess an encyclopedia article is more relevant than a dictionary definition, so sure. I was using the looser secondary definition… in this case an elision that references a dialect in order to call up regional relevance to the opinion expressed.