smiletolerantly

I'm actually hosting it public-facing, because in theory, gaining access to the VM and the vault shoult be unproblematic - since the vault is only decrypted client-side

Agreed.

You can also selfhost bitwarden/vaultwarden for even better privacy.

Interesting. I always loved how they fit the musical entries into the story in a way that it makes sense that everyone is singing all of the sudden, lol

Iain M. Banks' Culture.

I'm deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about "superhuman AI" or the like, then went "ah, got it, I've seen Terminator".

In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They'd not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as "...with a dark secret / actually dystopian /..." tones.

It has to have the same energy though. Dong have to be the same characters, doesn't have to feature Brakebills for Fillory, but needs the same "we're broken and magic doesn't make it better, but hey, here's a canonical musical" feeling

Computer Science (at a rather "prestigious" university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that's a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I've studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I've never seen any prof take attendance.

A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don't see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.

In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.

Hi, I have been to lectures fewer than 10 times throughout my entire master's. No AI, no textbooks, just lecture slides and doing the (ungraded) weekly assignments.

It probably wasn't a smart idea (incl. for my social life), but it also wasn't hard to do.

YES!

The books are also good, but very different. The show creators made an excellent adaptation of the world and its energy and feeling, but changed characters and plot to something more suitable for a show. Both are great though.

No, mate. I don't need a guide, or a tour. Just a single clarifying sentence.

"My product does x". Right now, x could be:

• help you scam people
• provide a meditation partner
• help you learn how to code in Cobol
• give travel tips
• ...

What does your product DO? And dong you dare answer "it helps you make money", that does not explain anything.

I have clicked every link on that site and I still have exactly zero clue wtf this is.

Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.

It sucks that these people exist, for many reasons. One of these reasons (surely not the worst one, but the one I want to focus on) is that it muddies all criticism of a project. Your comment implied that this was the sole, or main, reason that The Acolyte was canceled, so I want to jump in here to say:

Having more women, people of color, and queer characters was the only refreshing thing about The Acolyte, and I wish more Star Wars projects took notice. Other than that though, the show is an utter disaster. It was incompetently written and directed, its story and characters make no sense, and the effects can be jarring.

Characters either have no defined motivations, or their motivations flip flop at the drop of a hat. Scenes dealing with the Jedi order and the republic fuck with established lore and do lasting damage to the Jedi order (not in the sense that they are shown as morally gray, but in that they are utterly incompetent and seemingly don't remember the appearance of the Sith during living memory, for example).

Speaking of which, yes, the show tries to portray Jedi/Sith as a gray area, but

a) that has been done to death at this point, seriously, every other SW project tries to do a "ooooh but maybe Jedi not completely good!", and b) The Acolyte is probably the most incompetent version of that I have seen (so far!).

I hope I have demonstrated that this show can be critiqued bar any bigotry, and I think it should be acknowledged that that, together with the giant sum of money it ate, are the reasons it got canceled - I am sure Disney also does not like the bigotry, but sadly, they get that with every project, even those that do not get canceled....

In any case, there is no comparison to Andor to be made, SMH.