Well this is interesting

I was told it was NeXT because the machine was the next XT.

This may be the first time I’ve seen it as Next.

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It’s clear someone at Commodore was a very clever, and patient, troll.

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yeah, looking at the documentation-- even the early stuff, it clearly says “NeXT”.

http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/

here’s some stuff on Paul Rand’s design approach.

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Wow. That is fascinating. I cannot imagine what that must have been like for him.

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Not to be confused with Rand Paul

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Anti-spy against raspberry pi.

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Y’know, I was in the gifted programme for part of my education (depended on funding and how much my teacher liked me), and I still think they’re BS. And this is why – all knowledge and ego boosting, no ethics.

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Found the culprit.

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I don’t remember much about the program when I was a kid, but I certainly don’t remember getting much out of it. My impression, after a couple of intervening decades, is of playing games with the other “smart kids.”

And certainly nothing about ethics.

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Was it a laugh? you know
Rdrr.

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I was in two gifted programs in two different school systems. As well as CTY (Informal Logic, writing)
I quite enjoyed them. I suppose that the first can be described as how a math class would be if it was taught by Martin Gardner et al.

The second was sort of a “honors classes” system that gradually morphed into AP stuff. For instance, Geometry was taught as if everything was to be proven-- and the regular Geometry classes apparently skimped on proofs.

(I always found classes that explained “facts” not as sterile components but in terms of “how we know this to be true” to be the most interesting.)

Is it ethical to reserve the richest pedagogy to “gifted” students? I don’t know. But I didn’t enjoy being bored.

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(this is a remedial class)

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The richest pedagogy, and often the richest students. I was by far the poorest student in the gifted programme, which was one of the reasons I kept being pulled out and then put back in it – teachers who only cared about ability would put me in, and then the snobbish parents of the other kids would basically say, “what, we’re letting in everybody?” and I’d get kicked out again.

Gifted kids tended to become friends. Couldn’t have the riffraff included.

No wonder I love Harry Potter.

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Geometry was the only math subject I enjoyed, and I lived for proofs.

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Have you seen 3 blue 1 brown on youtube?

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No…It’s been 35 years since geometry, but I’ll check it out!

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I was tested for it. I didn’t make it in, mostly because my talent isn’t in fitting together twenty different shapes in a precise pattern to fill in an outline. Art, especially visual, is not my strong suit.

That doesn’t make me less talented or gifted than the people who got in, IMO, it just means I don’t think in the same patterns other people do. My high school computer teacher called it “strange logic”. He could not figure out my programs by reading the code, but it had to be logic, because the computer executed them flawlessly. My chemistry teacher noted something similar: he couldn’t figure out my equations, but I got things right far too often for it to be chance. Luckily, he recognised the validity of it, but warned me that it meant that he couldn’t help when I did get it wrong.

As long as I had teachers like those, I did great. With the prescriptivists, not so much. And to get into the program (at least the one here) you had to do things the right way, not figure out your own way.

True story: I am the kid who failed to get into the gifted program, but got kicked out of the reading and writing contests because “we want to other kids to feel like they have a chance, because they know you’ll win.”

Hence my cynicism towards those programs. Not to mention the fact that I have seen parents using that label to deny real, obvious untreated MI.

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Pretty much. Since one of the indicators of “gifted” is supposed to be creative thinking, you’d think fresh approaches would be good…

Sorry, what is MI?

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Mental Illness. "Josh is just special " say mommy and daddy, “you can’t expect him to be like the other kids. He’s just expressing himself” while we kids can recognise Josh is having a manic phase, and actually feel sorry for the teacher who is trying to maintain order.

Yes, said parents were universally white, suburban, solidly middle-class, in case you were wondering.

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