WTF, UW has effectively expelled a student for building their course project, a demo of a website to allow students to trade spots in classes? And the registrar refusing to allow him to register for classes... unless he agrees to work for them for free building a similar website? Do university administrators have special training on how to be evil in ways I could never have imagined, or something?

GitHub - JDKaim/HuskySwap: HuskySwap Project. | JD Kaim | 52 comments

Welp, looks I might be getting expelled from the University of Washington.   As many of you know, last quarter I built an initial version of Husky...

Whether or not they fits, they sits. #cats #catsofmastodon

A recently retired friend went to Santa School to work as a mall Santa. His diploma is signed by the Dean of Santa Clauses and everything. “So what do you learn in Santa School?” I asked. “Mostly how to deal with kids’ questions. A lot of them don’t have anyone to talk to,” he answered. “What do you tell them if they say ‘I want my parents to stop fighting’ or ‘I want my uncle to stop touching me?” Well fuck. How did we wind up with mall Santas as an essential part of our social safety net?

Just thinking about the time a university decided not to hire me because they didn't think distributed systems were an important area. ...and then my dad said "yeah, they also decided not to hire me 40 years ago because they said this new-fangled 'angioplasty' thing wasn't going anywhere". You can draw your own conclusions about academia and its ability to identify important future research areas.

Miso’s attorney has advised me that technically he is not on the kitchen counter and he will fight any unjust accusations. #cats #catsofmastodon

How my Teams calls today have been going

Please meet Muffin, one of @npub1ekj5...79v2’s unwellness calicos. Muffin had to be shaved recently to have some mats removed and she is indignant about it. #cats #catsofmastodon

@Irene Zhang posted earlier about the controversy about the UW CSE grad student skit being cancelled for criticizing the administration (

discuss.systems

Irene Zhang (@irene@discuss.systems)

Unbelievable. #UWAllen administration has cancelled the annual holiday party student skit because it (obliquely) criticizes the way that the sexual...

) and then reinstated, but I thought I would share the actual storyline behind it because it is great: The new art installation in the CSE building, a creepy robot, becomes sentient and starts eating students. Students express concern to the administration, but it brushes them off and refers them to the Title 404 office, which handles robot-related complaints. The department refuses to ban the robots from the building because they threaten to sue, and instead says "let's let this play out in the Title 404 office. Students always have the option to work from home if they want to reduce the risk of being eaten by a robot." The department refuses to hold a training on how to deactivate robots until the Title 404 investigation concludes. Instead, the students have to organize themselves to fight back against student-eating robots.

OMG, @Irene Zhang and I were just sitting by the beach on vacation when… #capybara

Miso longs for the days when consumer electronics were all transparent. #cats #catsofmastodon #mac