...all expendable to free up money to bring in people from corporate world to "innovate" (where corporate innovation always seems to mean "back around the loop of laying more people off and enticing more corporate people", plus whatever this year's buzzword is i.e. expensive AI "collaborations")

Sorry, you did say that (thank you), which I did not acknowledge clearly enough! And sorry for using your post to vent about things you didn't say.

And yes, senior mgmt has such contempt for workers of all stripes with domain/institutional knowledge, which they'll throw away at the drop of a hat...

(To be clear, it is very good that those days are over, it is very bad that the crisis in universities is now so bad the mass redundancies have come for the academics, and my heart goes out to everyone affected. I hope some way can be found out of the crisis before it gets even worse - but what?)

...or as if it's still the 60s, nobody needs IT infrastructure/online course materials/disability support/etc and we can put students in wifi-less rooms with a curfew & no night visitors like it's boarding school, but still tell them not to expect help or pastoral care because they're a grown-up now

I agree with the 2nd part (though shortsighted govt policy doesn't help) and thank you for the 1st part.

Support staff redundancy waves come every few years & it's been rare to hear more from academics than "unis have too many non-academic staff nowadays", as if we're all senior bean allocators...

I was thinking the Rad Cam might be a bit round for Lego, but it looks like they did manage to Lego-ise the Colosseum (and the Death Star), so we can dream...
www.lego.com/en-gb/produc...

This page has mysteriously appeared on the internet from someone who messed up by giving 4 files the metadata for 1 of the files but isn't going to fix it now because they have to get up in <6 hours
archive.org/details/univ...

Well as a library employee responsible for understanding copyright and upholding the sanctity of the book I definitely did not download 4 PDF manuals from some unknown website 15+ years ago so I definitely couldn't pass any on. Right.

(Possibly if I had they'd be the same as the law firm's anyway?)

Or accidentally printing 300 pages of data you thought you were exporting to disk but you forgot to set your "line printer" to file I/O.

Thanks to Manny Neira for this amazing website, still there 20 years later. I'd have been lost without this:
mannyneira.com/universe/

Sometimes I still miss having multi-value data fields without spawning a whole new linked table.

Mostly I do not miss editing things with a weird version of ED, or having 1 & 2-letter commands for everything so that you were always one 1-letter typo away from destroying something.

Great pic(k), [so terrible they're] great software names.

In a past life (but not as far past as you might think - even at the time it seemed arcane & anachronistic) I worked on the backend of an instance of another telnet-based library system running on another variety of Pick database, UniVerse.

“I’m not worried AI will take my job. I’m worried some executive or management person is going to *think* it can.”

-Random YouTube comment

Jo Cox was killed by a far right terrorist. Brianna Ghey was killed by transphobic classmates with violent and dehumanising obsessions. Neither murder had anything to do with being more civil or the victims’ presence on social media

Is it time for this classic @theonion.com infographic from late in the whale song & Magic Eye era?

*nods*

"Japanese
Noun
化ば (ba⸱ke)
1. transformation, disguise
2. monstrosity
3. deceive"

Checks out.