I got lucky in that regard I guess. My mechanic told me that I got the one model of Subaru that doesn’t blow the head gasket. So fingers crossed!

Otherwise, yeah, Subaru’s aren’t easy to work on at home.

Best of luck!

Hey, hang in there. I hope your week stays ok. I hope you can invest some time in yourself. Have a great week!

Awesome! I’ve got a 2001 Subaru that I use to get to trails. Same thing; sometimes I have to walk, but at least I’m not beating up my main car for getting the kids around.

You don’t deserve to have people who constantly flake out. If they are always cancelling and never initiating activities, invest the time and energy into your own well-being, hobbies, and other friendships. Best of luck with what sounds like some health challenges!

Very fun, thanks for the pictures. For whatever reason the speed of your dogs jogged my memory of skiing with my old dogs. We would skin up backcountry peaks, them with booties and leg wraps in the -20f cold. Then at the summit I’d take the skins off my skis, and the booties off their feet (otherwise they get lost), slather their feet in mushers wax, and race down the mountain. I always had to watch my speed since they maxed out around 20mph, or roughly what your dog’s clocked at.

Have a great week!

I do agree with you, to an extent. I think much of the support, or at least lack of criticism from within higher ed was precisely because they/we/I didn’t want to be lumped in with the right wing attacks or give them an inch. At the same time, that is like the stereotype of the abusive couple who form a united front against a third party.

I also know that people saying that no one really cares about the research issues also isn’t true. People in higher ed care about these things. The president of Stanford resigned recently over these sorts of issues (though the data issues there were more troubling). There were also Harvard academics recording malcontent with Dr. Gay; they just didn’t go and put it in the paper.

Ultimately, it sounds like what ultimately tipped things over for her was two fold: the latest round of accusations, coupled with submitting a plan to the board that apparently didn’t convince them all that she was responding with appropriate urgency to the widening media pr issue. Which is a very common failing in higher ed leaders who are used to going slow and resisting calls to move faster. Unfortunately, university presidents need to control the narrative by at least creating the impression of frenetic energy to fix something, even if it is intractable in the short term.

You might find this NYT article interesting (gift link).

How Harvard’s Board Broke Up With Claudine Gay https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/business/claudine-gay-harvard-corporation-board.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ME0.srWq.9lxOxV9UwF1g&smid=nytcore-android-share

Ultimately, I think the board and the community wanted to help her hold out against the right wing attacks, but something about her internal plan or communications and follow up led the board to wilt in the face of persuasion from those around them.

I can’t speak to political science, but my background is computational maths. I’ve published papers in what I view as a very data driven field.

I cited every direct quote from prior work, and listed additional resources that I didn’t explicitly reference but consulted.

So it seems sloppy to me.

I work in academia and am used to these sorts of issues of primacy, attribution, intellectual honesty, etc. While there are many examples of research dishonesty or sloppiness in higher ed at large, there is also an expectation that people who take leadership positions lead by example. Faculty led institutions expect that their leaders can walk the walk. I don’t think it is unfair to expect the president of the top rated university in the world to not have engaged in this sort of sloppiness. I also think it is fair that leaders are able to “rise to the moment” commensurate with the prominence of their role. She wasn’t the president of a local community college (nothing against them, but you have different expectations).

The politically motivated and racist attacks against Dr. Gay are abhorrent. It is only unfortunate that they ended up finding purchase in very real issues of attribution, and in a leadership failing to navigate and control the narrative around their testimony and comments.

Dr. Gay was hired after the shortest search for a Harvard president in recent memory, and already had a slight publication record compared to past leaders. That there are multiple elements of sloppiness in her work just further errodes her ability to lead the worlds top university.

Additionally, it is true that Harvard is currently ranked at the very bottom of the campus free speech index, with the university of Pennsylvania second to last. At least MITs lawyerly answers were somewhat backed by the history of their institution trying to balance speech. That two ousted university presidents only felt the need to go to bat for first amendment rights now, of all times, and without addressing the potential hypocrisy of the position given their universities track record, as them leading a new change of direction, was shockingly bad judgement.

So Dr. Gay doesn’t deserve the hate and attacks that have come her way. But she failed to deliver on the promise of any president of a top, R1 university. If you can’t publish to the highest standards, and navigate the most difficult of public relations situations, you shouldn’t be in the top leadership role of these universities.

That’s good to know, thanks!

Here’s an article that summarized the claims and counterclaims.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/

It sounds like a little of EGS not being as upfront as they should have been and a little bit of running with a misunderstanding by the Internet.

I remember hearing things like the epic game store launcher rifling through your steam games and contact lists, etc. I just don’t want to install anything like that and running a VM just for that seems silly.

Edit: article summarizing the claim and counterclaims.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/

Sounds like a little bit of epic not being clear in what the software does and a little of the Internet running with a misunderstanding.

I feel this take misses the picture a bit in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of FOSS vs commercial software. FOSS is great at building tools for common or popular problems, but starts to run into challenges in solving problems that are some combination of niche, unfun, too big, or too hard.

For example, I needed to export thousands of scheduled jobs off of an IBM mainframe and onto a different platform as part of switching to a COTS ERP. Should I task an internal team of developers to write a one off? Would any open source solution exist? There aren’t a ton of zOS open source projects out there, in part because there just aren’t a lot of zOS systems programmers out there. They’ve all been frozen in carbonate to solve the Y3K problem, lol. No, in this case I light a pile of money on fire and pay Computer Associates for their commercial tool which generated an XML file almost a million lines long (just the jobs and scheduling parameters/dependencies). And it just worked, insofar as any ERP migration just works.

Another factor is the time it can take for a FOSS project to mature. No one would try and say that Octave is a 1-1 replacement for Matlab. Indeed, it wasn’t until jupyter notebooks came along in Python that I felt I really had a good Matlab alternative, and even then, some less common packages don’t have a good FOSS alternative in Python. I still remember the first time getting some of the open source convex analysis packages going on Linux. It was a nightmare of dependencies and didn’t have all the capabilities of the commercial solutions, because that type of mathematical software development is really, really hard.

Additionally, commercial software is helpful at supplying services with ongoing costs. E.g., office 365 with OneDrive would require rolling my own NextCloud with libre office or something similar to get anywhere near the functionality I get from a family Microsoft 365 account out of the box.

I’m all for FOSS, but a tool is a tool, and sometimes commercial software fills needs that just aren’t going to realistically attract a developer community. However, my favorite client tools are usually open source and I like being able to pilfer the code for my own projects.

Edit: I also wanted to add that I did commercial software development at one point, and I got to solve some really difficult, deep technical issues. It may sound really lame, but the work I did on search optimization for a commercial tool was really rewarding. Taking something that lots of people had to use and improving the execution time of arbitrary queries from minutes to seconds was a blast and important to the org, and something I was able to take the time to get right. I’ve also just had to bang out some CRUD code too, so of course it varies, but not every commercial code outfit it terrible to work for. And the hardware and OS on tools like Palo Alto firewalls just wouldn’t get made through open source alone.

I’ve been vegetarian for 22 years or so now, and the recent uptick in vegan food reminds me of the early years of being vegetarian. When I first started there were very few options to eat out where I lived (more rural area didn’t help) and not even a lot of good grocery options. Eventually places started offering in house attempts at vegetarian mains, which led to wildly variable quality, and eventually we saw some standardization across restaurants. It’s rare now to get a vegetarian dish at a restaurant that is terrible.

The article mentions mass market vegan butter being pursued, which makes me hopeful that restaurants will start introducing more vegan meals, and upping their game on that front. The more options for people the better, and as much as the article romanticizes the boutique shops with their in house versions, that isn’t achievable for most restaurants who would otherwise tuck one or two options into their menu.

I would say it depends on what you are making. Some home vegan baked goods are a fair bit of extra effort to get just right. But honestly, things like croissants are always a pain, which is why I eat them when I got out, versus muffins which I make at home.