Wolf314159 @ Wolf314159 @startrek.website

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1 yr. ago

Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

The quadratic formula.

When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don't think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren't going to get that far. Most people don't have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

I just wish that we'd have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn't be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don't worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.

As much as I'd like that to be true, probably not. Automatic signature machines have been a thing, especially for presidential signatures, for a while now. This is more a hit to Trump's ego than anything.

If that illusion makes you feel safer, then I don't care enough to argue with you about it.

There's no need to involve the courts when the social media networks are complicit. It's not as if "how" they obtained the data will ever be tested in court, they only need the data for their own internal investigations. Courts and spy agencies don't have anything to do with it.

I used to use fuckoff@aol.com or fuckyou@aol.com whenever some page forced an email address for access. Sadly, those don't seem to work anymore, so I've transitioned to getfucked@hotmail.com or if I'm feeling spicy I just feed them whatever email address I can find listed on their own site.

That makes sense, because any government agencies that actually have a need for intimate knowledge of your social media footprint don't actually need your password to harvest ALL the data that network has on you public and private.

Oh yeah, me too. Reboots can be novel and interesting sometimes. In this case in particular, a less campy vibe would be a very good thing.

I think we can stop worrying about spoilers for stories that have already been told though.

Spoilers? The novel was published in 1982. The original movie (as silly as it can be) was released in 1987. You can't spoil a reboot.

I don't care if I'm "allowed" to report them. These latest bots are pretending to be people when it's clear they are not. Going to call out, downvote, and report liars and trolls wherever they appear, AI or not.

This whole post is a lie to manipulate people into engaging with an astroturfing bot.

AI engagement bots like OP.

Do don't do this. You're just a few lines of code.

You're not not pushing 30. You're a bot.

What's up with the ridiculous AI slop picture? It seems to have little to do with the article. It absolutely does not depict what a gator or crocodile nest looks like or would have likely ever looked like. Not how those kinds of nests by cold blooded creatures work. I can only assume the rest of the article is similarly meaningless AI slop too.

I guess the BBC is doing lazy AI slop now. Cool.

Disclaimer, I'm not Gen Z. I've been collecting CDs longer than Gen Z has existed. I'm just really excited for all of you discovering the benefits of physical media.

You can have your cake and eat it too by buying physical media (preferably as directly from the artists as possible), ripping, and self-hosting (Plex, Jellyfin, etc.). I just stopped in to add my new personal favorite kind of physical media collecting, buying vinyl (especially the fancy fun colored stuff or great album art) along with the FLAC digital download. Now I can buy the cool art thing (for that nostalgic playing experience too, not just dead collection weight), get the quality audio in my ears (faster than the physical media can be shipped), and I'm not adding to my overweight CD collection. The multigenerational vinyl collection I now maintain is another matter. I use bandcamp mostly for this, but there are other options out there.

Also, don't be afraid to scour the thrift stores for CDs too. Just make sure to open the cases to check for damage (and verify the correct CD inside). One can usually recover a slightly scratched CD, but if you ever see light straight through the metal layer then pass. I've personally seen loads of great stuff from the last millennium in pretty good condition as other people dump their physical collections in favor of streaming. CDs are now what vinyl was to us olds 20 years ago. Their loss is your gain.

As a bonus, if you're into retro gaming, you can usually find a few PlayStation (One) games and late 90s PC games mixed in with these collections because they all used the same sized cases as music CDs back then. Some of those software and PS1 CDs may also have the audio encoded as regular CD tracks rather than audio files in the data session.

King has almost always written his stories in the immediate present. There are a few exceptions, but they are intentional and critical to the plot. In all the others, it is fully in keeping with his style to update cultural references to set the story in the recent past, the now, or the very near future. He is a contemporary writer of contemporary stories, that is fundamentally the reason. King also seems to feel no loyalty to preserving his past works. He is alive. His stories are more about the lives of the characters than fashion or pop culture. I'm not always a fan of his revisions either (The Gunslinger being a good example), but it's part of the total package of his writing philosophy.

I really wish the article would at least attempt to clarify the WHY and the HOW of what I assume is some sort of deed restriction. National Park with residency restrictions? Home Owners Association? Not actually a sale and in fact just a lease? With little to no actual reporting going of in the article past the headline, this feels like either a nothing burger or plain fake/false/misinterpreted reporting to generate engagement. And that, discourages me from wanting to engage any further with my own research.

I still have the floppy disk from which I've played scorch.exe in DOS from some time deep in my childhood, through windows 3.1 to 2000, then later mostly through virtual machines and retroarch on various flavors of Linux. Yes, I still have a floppy drive, so I could probably still play that file directly. I haven't actually done that in a while, so the bits might have rotted. Every copy I have, kept on practically every machine I've made, is from that original floppy that I copied from a friend.

I've tried adding cameras. They never actually showed up on any map outside my own OSM profile.