refactor

src/content/meditations/suck-less-or-suck-more.mdx

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+---
+title: "suck less or suck more"
+date: "30/05/2025"
+---
+
+I love [suckless software](https://suckless.org/) and the suckless philosophy. I've been using [dwm](https://dwm.suckless.org/), [st](https://st.suckless.org/), [dmenu](https://dwm.suckless.org/), and [slock](https://tools.suckless.org/slock/) for years. You can see my code [here](https://git.barrettruth.com).
+
+Simplicity is always better and I love being able to understand why things are happening. It's fun, it's quirky, it's cool.
+
+Except when it doesn't work.
+
+After years of use, I've found that suckless software is not built to be compatible with other less-sucking software. It is not compatible with running 40 ROS nodes at a time, nor 3 Chrome instances with a plethora of tabs and jobs open. I've had my st terminal go blank and my dwm crash on me consistently.
+
+Maybe this is the point. But I can't avoid [foxglove](https://wiki.ros.org/FoxgloveStudio), I can't avoid bloat to work for school and research-related projects. Most importantly, after spending half of my day patching st and having it crash on me, I don't feel like fixing it any longer. **Sadly, suck-ful software is here to stay and I don't have time to fight it right now.**
+
+I've switched to [spectrwm](https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm) (essentially [this](https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm)) and [ghostty](https://ghostty.org/).

src/content/meditations/the-problem-with-cs-curricula.mdx

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+---
+title: "the problem with cs curricula"
+date: "16/05/2025"
+useKatex: true
+---
+
+Edsger Wybe Dijkstra's ["On the cruelty of really teaching computing science"](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html) perfectly sums up my gripes with how Computer Science is taught at a university level (at my school, at least).
+
+Succinctly put, my time learning computer science at my unnamed college exemplified nearly everything he (and I) believe a CS curriculum should _not do_:
+
+- Ignore the existential questions about computer programs (what are they? why do they exist? can they want? what should they be used for?)
+- Ignore the notion of program behavior, i.e. provability (this is set aside as an advanced core class, counterintuitively reserved for a third or fourth year).
+- Excessively simplify and frame new technologies with analogy, effectively instilling maladaptive thinking patterns that fail to extend to more novel problems
+- Give up on doing the inverse of the above because it is too hard for young students.
+
+Walking out of my third year, I left with the sad realization that I got by the majority of my classes by only understanding things as they pertained to assignments and exams. **And by "got by", I mean straight A's**.
+
+I always knew something was wrong with how my school taught computer science (despite it being the biggest major as of 2025). As of late, though, I realized the gargantuan amount of damage it caused to my reasoning abilities. Damage that I have to reverse by, essentially, doing everything all over again.
+
+My [competitive programming journey](https://barrettruth.com/posts/algorithms/competitive-programming-log.html) epitomizes this point: to this day I struggle with reasoning, argumentation, and understanding program behavior. I know how a segment tree works but can't formalize the constraints of a problem. I can do dynamic programming on trees but I can barely manipulate and work with primitive mathematical concepts such as the $gcd$ function. I cannot think of a more useless skillset.
+
+Nearly all of this is my fault. However, _it should not be possible for this to happen in a computer science curriculum_. In other words, Djikstra is right.