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With one week left in the current term I'm definitely settling into a nice groove with my schooling. Up until now I've been taking one eight week online course at a time, with the first two courses being almost pitifully easy. About halfway through my third term I emailed my advisor and requested to enroll in two courses per term, so that's what I'll be doing in just over a week.
So I mentioned that my first two courses were almost pitifully easy. Not so this term, as I needed to get PreCalculus out of the way as it is a prerequisite for almost every CS course that I have coming up. The thing is, not only has it been literally thrity years since my last math course, but I stopped after Geometry and didn't even take Algebra II in high school. At the time I just wasn't interested, and didn't need the credit in order to graduate. So I took the first semester of Algebra II and then withdrew for the spring. That meant that I came into this current class without all of the requisite knowledge and three decades out of practice. But I do like a challenge. I worked my ass off the first couple of weeks and I'm happy to say that I've pulled a 3.9 in this class. I definitely learned a lot.
The thing is, in addition to me being more receptive than I was at 17, the way this course was taught was just better than what I got back then. When I was first introduced to trigonometry the word was, don't worry about how this works, just memorize it and accept that it does. That's a sure way to piss me off and make me tune out. My brain needs the why. Now that I've gotten the why, I'm finding that I actually like learning and applying the material. Who knew? I'm planning on going on at least to Calculus I, and possibly going further with the math if things go well for me there.
So I have two courses next term, which starts after a one week break. The first actual CS course I get to take is "Introduction to Scripting". I've looked over the curriculum and I'm not worried. Or impressed, for that matter. Our assignments are going to be in Python and in pseudo-code. I'm annoyed that part of the curriculum is learning how to use PyCharm. I mean, fucking teach the concepts not the fucking tools. I don't want or need an IDE, and I sure as fuck don't want to be forced to use a specific one. But I'll get past it. I'll do whatever assignments they expect relating to PyCharm and probably write everything else using NeoVim just like I always do. Anyway, this class starts at such a low level that I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do it with close to zero effort.
The other class I have is "Global Perspectives in Sustainability". Oh, fun. I've read the first chapter of the text and I can tell I'm going to have some strong opinions and a LOT to say. That's good, too, because every assignment is either a discussion board post or a paper. I'm likely going to be roasting the college and the materials pretty hardcore here as well. Should be fun, and it will be a good exercise to do so in a way that doesn't make too many enemies.
So looking at the three classes I've taken and the two upcoming courses I'm scheduled for, let me break down the things that piss me off (bearing in mind that I like my professors and I'm glad to be enrolled).
Now, one could argue that since my employer is picking up the tab for my schooling, I don't have standing to complain about things being paywalled since I've got access without paying. One could argue that, but then be prepared for me to launch into a nice long talk about how unneccessary and immoral it is to treat knowledge as property. The fucking email is Exchange, too, so I can't even access it using a client. No, I have to use shitty webmail. I get a free subscription to Office365 as part of my enrollment, but of course I don't give a fuck about this "perk" because I'm using fucking Void Linux and FreeBSD and obviously that means I'm not going to download and install either the Windows or Mac versions of the shitware that I've been given "access" to. Nor would I, because I strongly disagree with the notion of software as a subscription and refuse to participate in that ecosystem, and don't even get me started on the non-free as in freedom aspects here.
My first course, I went ahead and installed the proprietary app on my phone that was needed to access my textbook. Silly me, thinking that I was ever going to use it again after that class. No, no. Every. Single. Class. has used a different, incompatible, proprietary and shitty cloud service to access our textbooks.
What's worse is that some of these cloud ebook viewers are just BAD. They can be painfully slow to render, they enforce their own formatting which doesn't work well on the smaller screen of my travelling laptop, and in one case the CSS specifies fucking grey on white text with the world's thinnest font so I almost have to highlight it with the mouse cursor to read it. In that platform's case I am able to use Firefox and enforce my own font choice, but this will likely be the thing that makes me figure out a way to apply my own CSS as well to get readable text, and frankly I'm NOT interested in web design so this isn't a skill I care to learn and don't see myself using much in the future.
And speaking of Firefox..
The platform we used in my PreCalc class to both read the material and submit assignments has big banners everywhere warning that it is incompatible with Firefox. Fucking hell. I wanted to scream. I don't even want Chromium installed on my machines. I was able to use qutebrowser when using FreeBSD, so that was OK I guess, but the only way I could get this working with Void was to install Chromium. Since I'm extra paranoid when it comes to Google anything, this wound up being the thing that made me find an actual use case for FlatPak. Not that I really expect FlatPak's sandboxing to be effective, but that just shows how much I distrust Google, because normally I view FlatPak as Hot Flaming Garbage (TM) but I was willing to use it just to try and isolate even worse Hot Flaming Garbage (TM) even a little bit from the rest of my system.
There's a short survey at the end of each class. I'll be filling it out.
Reading the first chapter of the text for my upcoming class got me thinking about these things that I've been putting up with and how I'm having to compromise principles in order to attend college. The thing is, every one of these platforms they're using is restricting freedom and funneling more money into the hands of people who don't need it. The software itsef is a Big Steaming Pile of Javascript that I'd rather not touch with a ten foot pole, which requires fetching all of the "content" from The Cloud (read: Someone Else's Computer) every time I want to read it, when they could have just given me a fucking Epub that I could download once and read locally, saving on bandwidth and running a much more power efficient software stack than a browser tab loaded with said B.S.P. of JS. And in doing so, I wouldn't have to wait for a second for the page to render literally every time I scroll the page down, and I'd actually be able to read the text because I'd have control over the rendering. The platform used for the sustainability course let's you download a copy of the textbook, except that it doesn't. What you actually download is an html file which you can only open with a proprietary Adobe program which then fetches the book over the internet (I'm assuming it probably fetches it anew every time you open it, because why wouldn't it?). The fact that they change the file extension isn't enough to fool me, or indeed anyone who has even a passing interest in how Computers work. The only option I found where I could read the text without wanting to pound my head against a brick wall was the option to download chapters as individual PDF files and open them in Evince, with a side by side page layout.
I should also mention that my earlier writing course, and this Sustainability course, both use a platform called Turnitin for paper submission, which uses a fucking LLM to "detect" plagiarism. Ironic, at least to me, both in that their trying to detect plagiarism through the use of a tool which relies entirely on massive amounts of plagiarism in order to function, and that said tool is based on a technology that is becoming infamous for being environmentally and financially non-sustainable.
Finally, I want to address the economics of College itself along with how cozy our educational institutions are with big tech as those things relate to sustainability. I'll just give a small nod at this point to the horrific student loan crisis that we're in the middle of. Talk about not being sustainable. The thing is, there's too much to say about that subject so I'm purposely keeping my comments about it short. Part of what is feeding the crisis is the massive problem with rising costs in secondary education. Tragically, an awful lot of money seems to be getting funneled right into the accounts of the very sort of corporations that are behind some of the worst excesses in terms of inequality.
When I think of sustainability, I see a massively interlocked set of concerns - and not all of them are of the environmental sort. Let me point out that the American revolution was largely a result of the idea that we would no longer suffer a king. Then, when we actually put anti-trust legislation on the books, we referred back to it and (rightly) drew comparisons between the owners of those monopolistic monsters and the kings we would no longer suffer. Since that time, particularly in the past forty years, we've slowly eroded all of the progress that was made towards shutting down monopolies and encouraging healthy competition. For our educational institutions to be so cozy with monopolistic corporations that do literally everything they can to thwart interoperability, and for them to be using all of these absolutely horrible proprietary systems that serve no purpose but to lock you into renting the materials using their platforms, shows that they either truly do not understand the economic injustice or are actively on the wrong side of it.
Now the point I'm driving at here is that these systems are by nature of their economic injustice unsustainable. At some point the billionaires will have extracted so much wealth with these tactics that the rest of us will revolt. The best case scenario is that we do so via legislative change and actually fix our broken systems, but the worst case scenario, and the one that I fear, is that we will have a destructive civil war and tear it all down, without giving any real thought as to what we should replace it all with. That's one of the dangers that these companies have been playing with. They know that they are taking too much, and that they run the risk of pissing people off enough to spark catastrophe. I mean, they also know that they are literally raping the planet for short term goals, but that's a subject for another day. Anyway, I find it really fucking ironic that I'm about to go into class on sustainability at an institution that seems to have zero grasp on how unsustainable their own practices are.
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