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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • andros_rex@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldHamster
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    8 hours ago

    It would have helped if my E&M class had been more than triple integrals and geometry.

    Idk - would it kill physics profs to graph shit in Desmos so you can visualize some of these fields? Or start with simple examples? I know how to do a partial fraction decomp, but if I’m spending all of my time on tedious algebra and then fuck up the integral in such a way that I accidentally made something that looks like what Papa Wolfram gives you when you ask him to integrate 1/(x^5 + 1) - then you don’t know if you did fuck up or not, because maybe there’s some trick or this has significance and blargggggh.

    (You could get partial credit on tests in quantum by explaining that you knew your answer was incorrect because it was negative when it wasn’t supposed to be or vice versa - test average was usually about 11%.)

    I wanted to become a physics teacher specifically, just because I hated the way I was taught physics so much. (I hate the way chemistry is taught too, but I also hate chemistry. Unfortunately, I’ve only got to teach physics as a sort of concessionary “elective” that they tossed SPED students and the basketball star in…)





  • Yes. It’s an amazing video, as every single video he’s made is - most TERFs use the same rhetorical strategies, and knowing how Posie Parker’s brain works teaches you a lot about how the TERF brain works. It’s conspiratorial delusions (trans women are hiding every where in secret to try to sexually assault cis women, big pharma is pushing people to become permanent patients, therapists hate butch lesbians and masculine women so much that they tell them they have to be men) which they are attempt to use to explain their generalized sense of fear and anxiety.

    They aren’t the Serena Joy’s but the “feminist” orgs who teamed up with her. Everyone forgets one of the lessons of Handmaid’s Tale - anti porn feminists teaming up with conservatives are what start the ball rolling. (A lot of TERF bloggers celebrate state porn id laws without realizing that lesbianism in itself will be considered pornographic).


  • Imaginary numbers are best understood as symbolizing rotation. If we’re imagining a number line here, “looking back from infinity” - at a scale where Grahams number looks like the mass of an atom expressed in kilograms, i would not be in that infinite set of numbers, it would be a point above that line and creating a perpendicular plane to it.

    I hate the term “imaginary” because it’s misleading. Most high school algebra teachers don’t understand what they are either, so people learn about these things called “imaginary” numbers, never learn any applications with them, hopefully graph them at best, and then move on understanding nothing new about math.

    Students also tend to get really confused about it as possibly a variable, (it’s really annoying with in second year algebra courses, where e and logs also show up). We say “ah yeah, if you get a negative sign, just pull it out as an i and don’t worry about it. or just say no real solutions.”




  • The Nazis historically did go after universities and professors. If you ever take a class on Heidegger, it’s overshadowed by his membership in the party, and the fact he participated in carrying out the parties policy - firing all Jewish professors, including his friend Hussarl.

    Colleges are places where ideas compete, and fascism cannot compete as an idea but only through force. The crypto angle might be part of this case, but we’ve already seen Florida and Texas trying to set up their own controlled university systems - fucking with colleges and professors is on the table.



  • After calculus though, they just expect you to cope with fucked up coefficients. In Diff Eq, sometimes you do just get something like 3/111 cos (6/111 x). It gets harder to come up with examples that work out with nice integers.

    Physics can also have some really beautiful math, look at Lissajous figures. Once you understand the connections between e, the imaginary plane, and sine/cosine, you get some profound understandings about how electric and magnetic fields work.


  • It’s asinine to require me to be connected to the internet to use my computer. My work laptop was absolutely useless without the internet. There’s supposed to be a pin/password thing that lets you bypass this, but it would work maybe 30% of the time.

    I also don’t get why I have to give Microsoft my name and an email address for my video game machine. (I get steam and proton yada yada, but I’m often playing anything that you can barely get to work on its native system - has anyone actually got EYE : Divine Cybermancy to run for more than ten minutes?)

    Windows XP and 7 hit the mark I think. XP let you take it apart in beautiful ways, and had all kinds of wonderful eccentricities - which is also the problem, because XP was insecure af. Windows 7 got right what they figured out by Vista Service Pack 2 as far as security. Less aesthetics, less access to the internals, but also probably “better” for a normie.

    The rule is supposedly that every other one is good or something. Maybe 12 will be good?








  • In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.

    It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.

    I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.

    So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.

    The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.

    Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.


  • Funnily enough, in the 50’s and 60’s - parents were often more concerned with their kiddos “going steady” and preferred them to date around.

    Polyamory is definitely dicey without a lot of emotional maturity (tbh I don’t think most adults could handle it), but also teenage dating drama is silly. As long as she’s safe and happy, you should probably just be okay with it.