At my school, tomorrow is the last day of exams. Most of the students have left campus. There's no time or mechanism to schedule an(other) exam.

We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide shutdown" and "cybersecurity attacks", no further detail). I don't get a sense that they know much more than that, not that I would expect them to.

A perhaps telling detail: they're instructing us to have students email us directly with any work that had been submitted via Canvas. That suggests that they have no particular confidence that it will come back up soon.

I personally am only slightly affected; as a CS professor a lot of my students' work is done on department machines, and submitted that way, and I do the actual exams on paper. More importantly, I've never liked or trusted Canvas's gradebook, and so although I do upload grades to Canvas so students can see them, my primary gradebook is always a spreadsheet I maintain locally.

But I have a lot of colleagues for whom this is catastrophic at a level of "the whole building burnt down with all my exams and gradebooks in it"---even many of those that teach 100% in person have shifted much or all of their assessment into Canvas (using the Canvas "quiz" feature for everything up to and including final exams), and use the Canvas gradebook as their source-of-truth record. We've been encouraged to do so by our administration ("it makes submitting grades easier"). For faculty in that situation, they have few or zero artifacts that the students have produced, the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas in the first place, and they have no record of student grades or even attendance (because they managed that all inside Canvas). I guess they have access to the advisory midterm grades from March, if they submitted them (most do, some don't), but that might be it.

My gut feeling on this is that this is either resolved in hours (they have airgapped backups and can be working as soon as they can spin up new servers), or weeks (they don't). Very little in-between. And if that's true and we wake up tomorrow with this unresolved, I really have no idea what a lot of professors at my university and across the country are going to do to submit grades that are fair and reasonable. In the extreme case, they may have to revert to something we did in the pandemic semester (and before that, at my school, in the semester that two major academic buildings actually did burn to the ground a week before finals): let classes that normally count for a grade just submit grades as pass-fail. Because what else can you do?

(Well, one thing you can do is not put your eggs all in one basket, and not trust "the cloud" quite so much, but that ship's already sailed. I do wonder if in the longer term, anybody learns any lessons from this....)

UPDATE: As of 11:45pm EDT, my university's canvas instance is up and running! Here's hoping it stays (but I'll be downloading some stuff just in case...)

What are the enforcement mechanisms here if the states in question---MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and VA---just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building? I'm not saying they should but at this point rule-of-law has fallen apart so badly that I literally don't know what happens when the government invents a new rule and people just... disregard it. (Particularly if state-level enforcement decides not to play along.) Do they bring in the FBI? Military?

Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.

Also, as noted, I'm sure part of it is that they gave me a heat pump that's rated to 5°C or whatever instead of -15. Probably because they expect that everyone around here has a backup heating system, and it doesn't get Sweden-cold (or Chicago-cold, for that matter) in this area. Cool cool, but that just reinforces the message that heat pumps can't hack it and if you're buying a heat pump system you really need to also buy a second system—which may not be entirely true but there's other people on this very thread with a kind of dismissive "everyone knows" attitude regarding backup heating that fundamentally undermines the original message (which was my whole point).

I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.

My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.

Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)

Bug, I think: the critter definitely can cross some of the paint lines, which was a little unexpected. It slows down but then it's on the other side of it.

As someone who regularly teaches intro programming using Python, I assure you that students learning Python need to worry both about types and about syntax, and the fact that both are invisible does them less favours than you might think. Type errors happen all the time in Python, but they aren't caught until runtime and only when given the right test cases, and the error message points somewhere in the program that may be quite distant from the place where the problem actually is. Syntax errors are less common for experienced programmers, but newcomers struggle just as much with syntax in Python as they do in languages like C++ and Java (both of which I've also taught intro programmers using).

I fully expect to be using my current Android phone into the 2030s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745

and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539

EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:

    3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
    2 eggs
    ¼c. water
    ⅓c. vegetable oil
    and the included packet of Hershey's syrup

As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.

So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.