affiliate

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

affiliate,

don’t forget the $1k monitor stand or the $700 wheels for the mac pro

affiliate,

only the genius bar is qualified to handle something as complicated as screws

affiliate,

i’d be a math teacher. hopefully in the commune i’d be able to avoid the rigidity and tedium of the regular math curriculum, instead being able to focus on the fun stuff and foster people’s curiosity.

affiliate,

at the higher levels you start to see all kinds of crazy stuff, here are some examples:

  • mathematicians abstracted the idea of measure and then found out not everything can be measured
  • we know there are different sizes of infinity, and we know what the “smallest” infinity is, but it’s impossible to “know” (ie prove in ZFC) what the “second smallest size of” infinity is
  • we took the regular number line and made it longer just to see what would happen
  • The Hairy Ball Theorem, which says “you can’t comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick” (quote from source)

but as with any discipline, a big part of how much fun it is to learn has to do with how it’s taught. i think it’s possible to teach middle school/high school geometry in a way that makes it fun and engaging, but it’s often not taught in this way. there’s a great article/paper that talks about this. it’s written to be very readable and accessible, although it is a bit long (but you can get the basic idea in the first 5-7 pages). he talks about how terribly math is taught in school and how it’s no wonder so many people hate it as a result.

he also talks about how learning math could be much more fun if it was taught differently. he gives a really great example of this when he discusses something as simple as the formula for the area of a triangle (on the bottom of page 3 to the end of page 4). i tried to summarize it for this post, but i don’t think a summary would do it justice, so i strongly encourage you to read it if you’re interested.

affiliate,

sorry for your loss

affiliate,

it would probably take most people 15 minutes to do their taxes if they were tax advisors. unfortunately for most people, the directions and wording of the forms is very confusing.

affiliate,

self fulfilling prophecy

affiliate,

they should seize twitter while they’re at it too

affiliate, (edited )

Outside the pub, tenant advocates were having conversations with passerby who disagreed with the protest. “Wouldn’t it be bad if we were celebrating landlords losing their homes?” one protester (left) said.

what a strange thing to say outside an event where landlords are celebrating being able to evict people again.

edit: i misread the article when i made this comment

affiliate,

oh it looks like i misread it. i thought the people who disagree with the protest were saying that it’s bad to celebrate landlords losing their homes. thank you for clearing that up

affiliate,

you have to be a horse to do the tour de france

affiliate,

maybe a horse operating at 1/15th of it’s power would also work? i’m not really sure anymore

affiliate,

this is a surreal thing to read right after watching the barbie movie

affiliate,

completely agree. people can have their decorations whenever and whatever else their heart desires, but i draw the line at christmas music

affiliate,

in 2060 the iphone will be the only piece of technology still using USB 2.0, a functioning reminder of the past

affiliate,

O(n^2^) means that as the input n grows, it takes exponential time to process.

this is really pedantic, but O(n^2^) is quadratic, not exponential. the exponential runtimes are things like O(2^n^). when n gets even modestly big (say n=100), youre looking at a difference of 2^100^ ≈ 1.26×10^30^ vs 100^2^ = 10,000. this is just to say that exponential runtime is really in a class of its own.

but otherwise i think this was a pretty good explanation of the concept

affiliate,

i can’t wait until it’s possible to charge my phone by conducting electricity through an apple card

affiliate,

it’s a huge morale boost

affiliate,

this looks like a drawing in a patent application

affiliate,

i don’t want to bet my ass :(

affiliate,

nooooo!!!

affiliate,

you need to solve a captcha to turn on the vpn

affiliate,

i don’t think i’ve ever used a microsoft product that didn’t feel like it was still in beta

affiliate,

i wish they would take the edge off my computer

affiliate,

he’s not even able really kill it either. everyone i know still calls them tweets. even in the articles i read, the authors all say twitter or “X, formerly known as twitter”. it’s such a stupid branding decision that no one is buying into it

affiliate,

depends on how far up you go

affiliate,

if i’m half a light year from earth i’m not going to be falling back down

affiliate,

sucks that they own pretty much every radio station. they’re now creeping into podcasts as well

affiliate,

i will be keeping the money in my thoughts and prayers

affiliate,

i wonder how you would file taxes on that

affiliate,

is there a good reason for javascript to work like that? python also isn’t typed like C and it sorts integer lists in the “normal” way, so it seems avoidable. (i don’t really know what im talking about here. i’ve never used javascript and i’m not familiar with how typing works under the hood.)

affiliate,

thank you for the explanation, that does clarify things

affiliate,

this is so sad. i hope he’s doing okay with it. i feel like if i loved writing enough to be a writer that having to do this kind of work would break my spirit.

affiliate,

with proper funding i promise i could make spaghetti for way more than $1,000,000

affiliate,

i promise to appropriate all i can

affiliate,

a horse is also a cube and a pyramid

affiliate,

calculations become a lot easier when you use pi=0

affiliate,

and we mustn’t forget that a smooth horse must have at least one cowlick

affiliate,

gas prices are so high because biden ate all of it

affiliate,

but at least it can connect to wifi

affiliate,

everyone needs to take a break from time to time

affiliate,

incredible that the modding community can make something like this within a week of launch and yet bethesda couldn’t make it in 7 years

affiliate,

must’ve not been so great after all

affiliate,

the pedantic answer is that, from a rigorous perspective, 99.9999999999999% isn’t the same as 100% because the decimals don’t repeat forever. but a more practical answer would be that they are the same number. because of how computers (usually) round numbers, the stuff showing up after the 8th decimal place is (usually) junk that can be ignored.

an interesting example of this idea in practice has to do with the irrational number π, which nasa only approximates to 15 decimal places because that’s more than enough for most of the calculations they do (the linked page gives a better and more detailed explanation).

affiliate,

maybe 5120 x 1440 support will be available through creation club

affiliate,

this would be very helpful during the times where the $500 emergency is the need for a pizza party

affiliate,

the problem is that not enough people make “good decisions”, partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life. for example, there are lots of people who don’t want to switch to linux because they think its tedious to pick a distro, learn a new operating system, and find replacements/workarounds for software that doesn’t work out of the box on linux. now imagine having to do that for every single aspect of life. how do you pick your toothpaste and deodorant? do you carefully examine all the options each time you go to the store, or do you have a brand you pick without thinking about it because it works fine enough?

another problem with free markets is the inherent progression towards monopolies. this can be seen most readily with the so called natural monopolies (monopolies that emerge because of an extreme barrier to entry). how much choice do you have when it comes to your electricity provider? if they do something you don’t like, what can you do other than complain to a politician or move to a new region? aside from natural monopolies, we also see a progression towards monopolies because of inherent efficiencies of producing at scale.

there are other problems as well, such as corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people (link may not be the best source on the subject).

something that i personally find to be a great example of how the free market works in practice: rupert murdoch (among several others working at fox news) knew the 2020 election was not stolen, but pushed the narrative anyway because they didn’t want to upset their viewer base.

affiliate,

i appreciate the well thought-out reply. i disagree with some of the things you’ve said but respect your reasoning and level-headedness. i’m going to (generally) quote the first line of each paragraph so you can more clearly see what i’m replying to, but my responses are intended to address the whole paragraph.

And that’s solved with trusted sources. I personally don’t analyze what toothpaste I get, I ask my dentist or look for the support by the American Dental Association.

you may be a bit of an anomaly then. this page gives an overview of consumer behavior and how companies are able to influence peoples decision making. it also links to this page listing ways in which consumer behavior tends to be irrational, often being influenced by their moods, what their friends buy, and also by marketing techniques.

putting that aside, let’s suppose that everyone did behave rationally and only bought things recommended by experts. wouldn’t this be much more work for everyone than simply letting the experts pass regulations on which products can be sold? wouldn’t it be nicer if you didn’t have to consult an expert each time you bought something? if instead, you could have some faith that anything on the shelf was a good option?

It’s often a lot easier to figure out who to trust than it is to figure out which products to buy. And with a free market system, there’s a lot of competition both at the product variety side, as well as the product review side, so bad products tend to die and good products tend to succeed.

i’m not so sure it is easy to find out who to trust. this article you linked is a good example of that: 40% of people had a hard time finding out who to trust in regards to the 2020 presidential election, something that arguably is way more important than something like which brand of toothpaste you buy. it might be tempting to write those people off as unreasonable, but keep in mind that would mean saying 40% of the population is unreasonable.

next, i’m not sure i agree that bad products tend to die. i understand “good” and “bad” can be subjective, which makes this topic a bit more complicated, but you yourself have said fox news is relatively untrustworthy. i think it would then be reasonable to say they are “bad” news organizations. despite this, they were the most watched news network last july and i dont think they’ll die anytime soon. there are many other examples of this: companies like EA, comcast, nestle, etc, who many people have disliked for years, continue to do well economically and show no signs of dying.

This is almost exclusively due to cronyism.

this is actually part of my point: cronyism is part of the free market. if companies are incentivized to compete with each other britannica defines the free market as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal”. in an unregulated system with minimal interventions where companies are supposed to make money above all else, why wouldn’t they influence legislation, sue other companies out of existing, and all the other things you mentioned?

in a free market, cronyism is just playing by the rules. this is probably the biggest reason why i don’t think free markets work. you can say that’s not right or it’s not supposed to happen, but it is what happens. it’s why we need regulation. another famous example of this was the book “the jungle”, which led to the creation of the FDA.

In your example about electricity providers, that’s because the deals are made between the power company and cities, not between individuals.

i’m not sure about electrical grids (texas comes to mind but that arrangement seems much different the situation you’ve outlined), but from what i’ve read, britain’s current arrangement is (at least a bit) similar to what you’ve outlined. we can see how that’s going. but i want to make clear that i understand you expressed apprehension about applying a private model to the electrical grid, so this is more of a minor point.

Capitalism works best when you expect selfishness and have the government set and enforce rules. If something cannot feasibly be offered in a competitive fashion, the government should step in and provide it as a public good.

this is something i agree with. i would add a few more things to your list (such as housing, all parts of healthcare, public transportation, among others), but i can acknowledge that certain things could work fine if they worked in the private sector with government regulation (eg video games and movies). i also agree with you that we need much more action when it comes to enforcing antitrust laws.

It happens a lot in autocracies, democracies, and everything in between. It seems to happen less in smaller communities, which is why I prefer to have each level of government be as small as possible while remaining effective.

i completely agree. it’s something that can happen in government as well as the private sector, and does seem to happen less in smaller communities. this is a very hard problem to solve, and i’m not sure it can be completely solved. i think having a good education system reduces the risk of corrupt people coming into power, but that only helps to reduce the problem. that being said, things are very bad in the current system. this kind of corruption and manipulation is allowed in the private sector: most of the time it’s either legal or it’s illegal but the consequence is a very small fine.

The only overlap with the free market is that we have a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources.

the overlap with the free market is that news organizations are incentivized to pander to their viewers, which is what the thing about fox news showed. they played the election fraud narrative because they didn’t want to upset their base. this is because from an economic perspective, the viewers aren’t the “buyers”. the advertisers are the “buyers” and the viewers are the product. in the context of this example, this means that it’s “bad” to say the election wasn’t stolen because it could result in fewer viewers, resulting in fox news having a “worse product” in the eyes of advertisers.

Just think how much worse it would be if the government were in control of the media.

don’t get me wrong, i completely agree that things can get very bad when the government is in control of the media. controlling the media is one of authoritarians’ favorite pastimes. my goal in bringing up that point was to show how free market principles can be inherently at odds with journalistic integrity. in a capitalist society, journalistic integrity will take a back-seat to economic pressures.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines
    •