When you’re cultivating a relationship with a real person their wants and desires also factor into your choices, assuming you aren’t a psychopath. They will want different things from you, and keeping that to themselves and never pushing back just makes them miserable and builds resentment. Similarly, you don’t want to impose unreasonable expectations on them. Whether that’s related to their behaviour or their appearance, no one can reasonably expect to get exactly what they want 100% of the time, and that’s part of a healthy relationship.
…but if you’re constructing an artificial partner from a blank slate that’s completely bespoke to you, to choose anything other than an idealized match for all your desires is frankly insane, and to pretend otherwise is simply disingenuous.
In a world where magic exists and anti-magic countermeasures are a thing do you think any reasonably powerful person wouldn’t have them in place? It seems like you’re trying to come across as ridiculous but all of those sounds like pretty reasonable precautions in a magical world.
What’s especially wild to me is that even the position of “it’s ambiguous” gets almost as much pushback as trying to argue that one of them is universally correct.
Last time this came up it was my position that it was ambiguous and needed clarification and had someone accuse me of taking a prescriptive stance and imposing rules contrary to how things were actually being done. How asking a person what they mean or seeking clarification could possibly be prescriptive is beyond me.
Bonus points, the guy telling me I was being prescriptive was arguing vehemently that implicit multiplication having precedence was correct and to do otherwise was wrong, full stop.
Linguists would tell you the job of a dictionary should be to describe how the word is used, not rigidly stick to some theoretical ideal. I think calculators and tools like Wolfram Alpha should do the same with maths.
You’re literally arguing that what you consider the ideal should be rigidly adhered to, though.
“How mathematicians do it is correct” is a fine enough sentiment, but conveniently ignores that mathematicians do, in fact, work at WolframAlpha, and many other places that likely do it “wrong”.
The examples in the video showing inline formulae that use implicit priority have two things in common that make their usage unambiguous.
First, they all are either restating, or are derived from, formulae earlier in the page that are notated unambiguously, meaning that in context there is a single correct interpretation of any ambiguity.
Second, being a published paper it has to adhere to the style guide of whatever body its published under, and as pointed out in that video, the American Mathematical Society’s style guide specifies implicit priority, making it unambiguous in any of their published works. The author’s preference is irrelevant.
Also, if it’s universally correct and there was no ambiguity in its use among mathematicians, why specify it in the style guide at all?
To be clear, I’m not saying 1/2x being 1/(2x) rather than 0.5x is wrong. But it’s not right either. I’m just pretty firmly in the “inline formulae are ambiguous” camp. Whichever rule you pick, try to apply it consistently, but use some other notation or parenthesis when you want to be clearly understood.
The very fact that this conversation even happens is proof enough that the ambiguity exists. You can be prescriptive about which rules are the correct ones all you like, but that’s not going to stop people from misunderstanding. If your goal is to communicate clearly, then you use a more explicit notation.
Even Wolfram Alpha makes a point of restating your input to show how it’s being interpreted, and renders “1/2x” as something more like
<span style="color:#323232;">1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">- x
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2
</span>
To expand on this a bit more, bits are used for data transmission rates because various types of encoding, padding, and parity means that data on the wire isn’t always 8 bits per byte. Dial up modems were very frequently 9 bits per byte (8-n-1 signalling), and for something more modern PCIe uses 8b/10b encoding, which is 10 bits on the line for each 8 bits of actual payload.
You’re completely correct, but I want to explore it a bit more.
It’s not like YouTube didn’t also need to do these things, but they had the advantage of being more or less the first to even try, therefore had the fairly substantial benefit of being able to grow gradually as their traffic volume increased from the late 00s into the early 10s.
Any YouTube competitor entering the scene needed to hit the ground running and didn’t have the luxury of being able to gradually scale up. They need to match YouTube immediately, or be considered an inferior platform.
YouTube was first, and everyone else needed to play catch-up with a headwind.
It can certainly be both. A worse service might be worth a cheaper price. And people will pay extra for good service. That’s literally the airline ticket business model.
It was also 100% a payment issue back when I was a broke student and paying for things simply wasn’t an option. The fact that Steam offered a more convenient service than the pirates at the time was irrelevant because I couldn’t afford it.