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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • My perspective as a physics professor at a public university who has spent most of my adult life in academia. While there’s some true points here, it’s annoying to read such overgeneralized statement. I’m not going to generalize my perspective as truth for all universities, but I doubt my experience is far from ordinary. I doubt the OP is in academia.

    • As someone else stated, funding is an issue. Many programs, departments, and support offices are underfunded and understaffed.
    • While I hate microsoft products, it is simply less expensive to pay microsoft then all the additional required IT staff to self-host servers and email. Salary and benefits to faculty and staff is the majority of a university’s expenses.
    • My IT staff at my current institution helped me access our file system on my linux machine, even though they don’t officially support linux. But this was simply extra work for one of the staff who has a thousand other fires going on.
    • 2FA is available to those without smartphones via USB dongles. And as much as I hate Edge, stupid microsoft Edge allows access to services without 2FA.
    • At my grad school university, we had an IT member dedicated to managing unix/linux system for the physics faculty and grad students.
    • How is it the fault of a University that the majority of the public uses social media? Yes, my institution uses social media, though I don’t think they use facebook anymore… Besides Lemmy, I have zero social media, and yet I am aware of all events going on campus. Everything is notified via university email, not just social media.
    • The majority of math and physics students here learn LaTeX. As someone that has sat on numerous search committees hiring additional physics faculty, latex is prevalent in physics area of academia.
    • Campus PC labs exist all over our campus. Yes, they are window machines.
    • It would be awesome to have local faculty and student created research tools. Who’s going to do it? Between my teaching, committee, and advising responsibilities, I have zero free time. I can’t create these tools. What specific tools are you referring to? Our campus library website is pretty darn good at accessing peer-review literature for faculty and students, with no ads.

    ChatGPT and AI is a giant problem right now in academia. Nothing I do seems to convince students that using AI to do their homework harms their education. If someone knows a solution to this, I’m all ears. I’m tired of people blaming me, or the university, for things we’re trying to find solutions to.





  • I doubt debian is what you want if you want to stay up to date. It’s newish now, but won’t get updates for another 2 years.

    I’ve never run into issues updating to all short term Ubuntu releases between LTS versions when I used Ubuntu. Though I’ve now switched to Debian as I don’t care about latest updates and some snaps consistently gave me issues.

    Maybe Fedora is what you would prefer though?

    KDE is available on any distro. Just need to install it if it’s not the default desktop.






  • I have user agent set to let the app decide.

    I installed bloorp a few days ago and started using it. I’m comparing it and summit. The 400 and 500 error images simply don’t show anything in bloorp, whereas summit shows the error, so yeah, not an app issue.

    However, there are several images that load in bloorp and not summit, which gives an unknown error, getPixels failed with error invalid input.

    There is also the feed ending and not showing additional posts in summit with the 400 bad request still while I can infinitely doomscroll in bloorp. Occasionally, though not often, clicking retry will load an additional page of results.

    Edit: I tested all the user agents and none fixed the issue.





  • rescue_toaster@lemmy.ziptoMemes@sopuli.xyzword
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    3 months ago

    It’s definitely a change in thinking.  I fell in love with latex when I discovered it over 20 years ago.  Finally the software would only do things I commanded it to.  Word or any word clone makes me want to throw my computer out the window.





  • Some others have said some good things, but I’ll add a few more comments:

    Objects will continue moving in the same direction at constant velocity unless acted upon by an outside force. In the circular motion case, as you correctly state, the velocity vector is always perpendicular to the acceleration vector, which does point inwards towards the center of the circle. The object IS accelerating inwards – the water in the bucket in your example is accelerating inwards. It’s just that it is also already moving tangential to the circle and the result of the inwards acceleration is the object turning to follow the circular trajectory. It’s distance from the center remains constant instead of increasing.

    This is all the ideas of centripetal acceleration from a stationary frame of reference outside of the water-bucket system. There is no extra centripetal force. In your water-bucket example, there is a force the bucket applies against the water to give the water its centripetal acceleration. Some people call this a centripetal force, but I don’t like that phrasing, because it sounds like its an extra force. A water-filled bucket sitting on the ground also exerts a force upwards on the bucket. We typically call this a normal force, so in the spinning example, the normal force of the bucket against the water is causing the water to move in a circle. Likewise, the string tied to the bucket - the string is exerting an inwards tension force on the bucket that causes the bucket to travel in a circle, and thus have centripetal acceleration. If you cut the string, the bucket stops turning and instead goes in the straight path in the direction of its velocity vector.

    Now, think of the fictitious centrifugal force as from the frame of reference of someone moving in the circle. I like to use the example of you sitting in a school bus with those slick plastic-leather seats as the bus goes around a turn. You “feel” like you’re being pushed outwards. In actuality, there is insufficient frictional force to keep you turning in the same circle as the bus, so you are traveling in the straight line that your velocity vector is pointing. Thus you “feel” like you are being pushed outwards. The term centrifugal force arises because that “feel” can be modeled mathematically from the perspective of the rotating object, and we call it a centrifugal force. This term is mathematically equivalent to the centripetal acceleration term from the previous stationary frame of reference.