The usual options are live-usbkeys, dual-boot, and VM. All have their pros and cons. I’m not fond of any of them. Live keys are slow, windows updates occasionally break dual-boot. VM on a windows host is… blegh.

I’d suggest pulling your existing drive and shoving it in a drawer. It stays safe, ready for you to swap back at any time you want. Now you’re free to experiment all you want.

If you’re already comfortable with Windows, you can install that in a VM on your Linux host. That’s your crutch to fall back on until you’re comfortable with Linux. That would be my first significant Linux project if I were starting today instead of 20 years ago.

My state is one that has recently adopted age verification requirements. Adult sites seem to be complying through IP geolocation, requiring users in my state to establish accounts. I think they are requiring a credit/debit card on file as evidence of age, but I cannot say that with any certainty.

VPN servers in less-oppressive jurisdictions bypass the account-creation requirement.

Have her talk to a doctor about Demodex Mites.

That’s clearly the mocking of a Nazi salute.

Contrast with an actual Nazi salute:

Exactly.

LLMs give you exactly that. The student you describe should fail.

However, the reverse scenario is also possible. You can have perfect function, but fail entirely due to form: spelling, punctuation, etc. This student has demonstrated mastery of argument construction, reasoning. This student should succeed, but will also fail to meet the common core standards.

That’s nice, honey, but the adults are talking now.

1. “Common Core” != “Grading Rubric”. Common Core is not the entity judging the work. That evaluation is conducted by the teacher and to the teacher’s own standards. Training on Common Core and other methodologies may influence those standards, but it is still the teacher who is determining their application.

2. From your link:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.c Use words, phrases, and clauses as well as varied syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.

…

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.d Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

…

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.2.e Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

…

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.3.d Use precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.

All of these are criteria that justify attacking a paper on the basis of spelling, punctuation, syntax, structure, form. While the specific words “spelling” and “punctuation” are absent, their meaning is present.

3. Also from your own link:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information.

LLMs are a “technology”, are they not? Does Common Core not promote the use of technological aid “to produce … writing products”?

ore standards for ELA classes at the end of HS as the “goal” of what students are supposed to be able to do, it’s all about analysis and constructing arguments. There’s not a single mention of spelling or punctuation in there.

But students are supposed to write weak essays.

That is the concept I am rejecting.

It’s a necessary step to how you learn to form stronger arguments and strengthen your own patterns of thought.

I reject that such mediocrity is a necessary step.

The essential skill is critical thought. The analysis and validation of the claims made in the essay. This argument is weak, that argument is bullshit, this conclusion is unsupported, that one stretches the truth. Those are the skills the student needs to write a good essay, and they aren’t getting them by writing what they know to be mediocre crap. They are getting them by analyzing other works. Learning to identify legitimate arguments from bald-faced lies. Learning to research claims. These are the heart of critical thinking, and these skills are wasted when “mediocre” is the expectation. AI can provide a mountain of shit papers full of hallucinated claims, ready and waiting for a student to rip apart. That’s exactly what this generation of students is going to need to be able to do now that the world is completely buried in AI slop.

English teachers grade grammar, spelling, punctuation. Most pay little attention to the actual content. Weak papers with excellent grammar receive high marks, while strong, well-sourced, well supported papers are are heavily docked over spelling and punctuation. The purpose of language “arts” classes is not the function of language, but the form. “Language arts” are the arts of pedantry, and the antithesis of critical thought. And all of that pedantry has become obsolete in the past few years, just like cursive ~25 years ago. AI-era students will recover thousands of hours of time wasted on pointless machine work, and be able to turn it toward vastly more useful human studies.

The purpose of argumentative essays in grade school and high school is was to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later.

FTFY.

The purpose of cursive in grade school was to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later. Then we realized that cursive wasn’t actually needed for this purpose. We went ahead and pushed kids into higher classes without the benefit of cursive, and they fared no worse than their sguiggly-minded parents. A student handicapped with poor dexterity is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much more advanced work now. Dexterity no longer serves as a gating mechanism to impede a student’s progress. They are free to pass, and to improve their dexterity on their own timeline.

Spelling and grammar no longer requires mastery in grade school. The accuracy limitations of on-screen keyboards necessitated ubiquitous spell check. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough that spelling stopped being a gatekeeping function. Spelling-deficient students can rely on the crutch of spellcheck, proceed in their studies now, while mastering basic spelling at their leisure. A student handicapped with undiagnosed lexical agraphia is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much higher level studies immediately, and master spelling and grammar at their leisure.

AI is excellent at forming the structure of essays. It is terrible at reasoning. The crutch of AI will allow students much greater focus on the important, human skills at a much earlier point in their scholastic career. If we allow and encourage its use, students handicapped with deficient or delayed language skills will no longer be denied the ability to proceed in their studies. They can progress with much more advanced work at a much younger age. Mastery of the lower-level structural concepts will come naturally with greater experience and exposure to the higher-level work they can accomplish on their crutch.

*Epstein’s war.

Yes, it used to be that the putting of words on paper/screen was the “work” of an essay.

What I am saying is that the actual work of writing is the thought behind it. The effort of research, of developing an opinion, of forming the foundation of a complex argument. The High School English teacher’s obsessions with word count and strict adherence to grammatical rules are not “work”. They are mindless drivel. We churned out generations of morons with excellent grammar but no ability to actually think.

That will no longer suffice. Any half-assed AI can spit out a thousand words on any topic you care to name, all with perfect spelling and grammar that would have made a 1990’s AP English teacher cream themselves. And without any idea of what it was actually writing.

Don’t teach kids to do the work of machines. Teach them to be poets. Teach them how to research. Teach them how to think, not how to imitate the mindless behavior of an essay-writing AI.

build reading/media comprehension skills and learning how to self-reflect and organize your thoughts to synthesize new information.

Yeah. That’s all “research, logic, and rhetoric”. None is “spelling grammar, structure, format”. You’re disagreeing with me, while repeating exactly my point.

Did you even read my comment?

“Julia” has a point, though. Not about the facts, but about the grading of the essays. A five-year-old can now produce a high-school level essay. The writing of essays has become pointless busywork better handed to a machine.

It used to be that penmanship was considered crucial to writing. It wasn’t good enough to have an idea and write it down; your audience had to be able to read what you wrote. Cursive was an essential skill for millenia. I spent 30+ minutes a day for 5 years practicing cursive.

Now, if it is taught at all, cursive has become a graphic art, not a language art. It is important to calligraphy, not communication.

Likewise, modern language arts can place less focus on spelling, grammar, structure, format, leaving in-depth study of these subjects to the poets. Communicative studies can focus on research, logic, rhetoric.

Let’s try this a different way…

How do you want to indicate something should be retained? What is the single, physical act you want to perform to tell the operating system “this thing needs to be captured”?

The screenshot folder itself is certainly not limited to just screenshots. Any file you can save can be kept in there. To my mind, the “entry point” is “saving a file to this particular folder”, regardless of the specific method used to do the saving. The screenshot is just an extremely convenient way to do that.

I just thought of a way to improve this technique with Tasker. Tasker can work with the clipboard, edit files, and take a screenshot. So, you could set up a gesture to trigger a task in Tasker. Tasker can then take the screenshot, dumping it into the folder. Tasker can then check the clipboard; if there is text in your clipboard, it can prepend it to a single “TODO.txt” in your screenshot folder.

Linux could be configured much the same way, using shutter and xclip to capture the screenshot and clipboard, respectively.

What always got me personally is exactly that — over time I’d end up with multiple “entry points” depending on context (screenshot, chat, browser, notes…).

So long as you’re manually processing everything, screenshots work for all of that. You can take a note in any text box anywhere, and screenshot it. Chat message? Screenshot. Browser? Screenshot. Notes? Screenshot. You can even take a photo and then screenshot it to capture it into your workflow.

I have Shutter (apt install shutter) on my desktop, and I’ve changed the Print Screen key to shortcut to “shutter -s”. This lets me capture an area of my screen with one button (and a mouse drag). Bam, more screenshot.

The downsides of screenshot are obvious, of course: Extracting the text from the screenshot is a bit of a pain in the ass. If you really want to keep the same entry point, though, you could setup a script to OCR newly captured screenshot/photos to extract the text. An OCR-friendly font might make that pretty reliable.

Now I want to improve my setup…

On my phone, my Screenshot folder is syncthing’d to my desktop, so most of the time, capturing something in the moment is as simple as dragging three fingers down my screen. My Camera and default Download folders are also syncthing’d, so just taking a picture or saving something from a browser has it captured across my devices.

I also use Tududi, which has Telegram integration, for the quick note. Taking the note is just a matter of sending a message in Telegram, which is available on all my devices. Signal’s “Note To Self” feature is also useful; I trust it more than Telegram for sensitive data. In Firefox on my desktop, I have “Automatic Tab Opener” (Browser extension) pulling up my Tududi inbox every hour, reminding me to actually deal with the notes I have previously taken.

I don’t know if stretching reduces injury, but I know if I don’t take a few minutes to work my fingers, wrists, and forearms before hammering at the anvil, I end up with a ton of mis-strikes and cramps until I’m fully warmed up. Precision suffers when I don’t stretch.

Syncthing functions as a sort of decentralized Dropbox or Google drive, by keeping folder content synchronized across any number of devices. I haven’t tried the iOS clients, but android, Linux, and windows work great.

I was in real estate. We collected earnest money from a particular buyer, and held it in an escrow account. The deal fell through, and we were required to return the money. However, the buyer ghosted us. We couldn’t reach them to return it.

Our escrow account is audited by the state. We have to account for every transaction to or from that account. If we don’t have paperwork to justify the transfer, we could get fined or have our licenses revoked. We didn’t have paperwork for this buyer, so we had no legal authority to do anything with this money.

Any account with any business can potentially have the same problem: a legal obligation to transfer money to a known person, but no way of actually completing the transfer.

The solution is to transfer the money to the state’s “unclaimed funds” division. When the state audits our account, we can show that these funds are the state’s problem, not ours.

The funds I’ve found were from a couple class action suits where I was apparently a member of the class. It amounted to tens of dollars. They were apparently filed long after I had moved, but I had never updated my address with the defendants.