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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Tbf, you could use portable / user installs (if everyone would actually do their apps right), you can (now) use a package manager and you can (sometimes…) get an official, verified version of an app through the store and even if not, installers are (usually…) signed these days (although criminals do apparently get signatures too…)… And then this all falls apart, because you need a random driver from a random website. Security 👉👉




  • As others have mentioned, how much and what kind of math you need depends heavily on what you do. And while I wholeheartedly encourage you to do what you enjoy, be it with or without maths, I would like to offer another perspective: A loveletter to maths.

    Math in general gets a lot easier and more fun the longer you do it and the more interest you can build. Often the people that teach math are extremely good at it, and maybe because of that they suck at explaining it. There is a lot to doing it right.

    First of all, I think you need to build excitement. Math strives to describe the world! Math is the foundation of science, math is history, and many of the concepts and techniques arose out of necessity… Or sometimes spite! There are many funny stories or interesting people behind the formulars and concepts you encounter. Learning why the hell some math was even invented and how the guy or gal got the idea is 1000x more interesting than just getting an example for the application of it. It helps you remember stuff.

    Then there are a dozen ways to explain every single concept and then some. You will find some much more intuitive than others and the sum of them will sharpen your understanding of them. Looking for different explanations for the same thing can be a great help. Did you know many things in maths where discovered multiple times? That happens a lot, because even brilliant mathematicians don’t properly understand each other, or even themselves.

    Another thing you should do is to always develop your vocabulary for every domain/concept you encounter. People will throw around made-up words and symbols like no tomorrow. Often, there are simple concepts behind them, hence they are casually abstracted away. You need to understand the concept and then translate it into your own words and then draw a connection back to the made up stuff. Maths is a lot like programming. 1 + 1 is just a function, returning a result. So are integrals, formulas in vector algebra, and every single damn other thing in maths. Just follow the chain!

    And finally, there are also some amazing insights hidden in maths. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems might send a chill down your spine once you grasp their implications. Computability and information theory will shape your view on the world and yourself.

    I went from getting Ds to Bs to advanced theoretical CS courses and you can do it too. You don’t have to, but you can.








  • Tons of people making Python comparisons regarding indentation here. I disagree. If you make an indentation error in Python, you will usually notice it right away. On the one hand because the logic is off or you’re referencing stuff that’s not in scope, on the other because if you are a sane person, you use a formatter and a linter when writing code.

    The places you can make these error are also very limited. At most at the very beginning and very end of a block. I can remember a single indentation error I only caught during debugging and that’s it. 99% of the time your linter will catch them.

    YAML is much worse in that regard, because you are not programming, you are structuring data. There is a high chance nothing will immediately go wrong. Items have default values, high-level languages might hide mistakes, badly trained programmers might be quick to cast stuff and don’t question it, and most of the time tools can’t help you either, because they cannot know you meant to create a different structure.

    That said, while I much prefer TOML for being significantly simpler, I can’t say YAML doesn’t get the job done. It’s also very readable as long as you don’t go crazy with nesting. What’s annoying about it is the amount of very subtle mistakes it allows you to make. I get super anxious when writing YAML.



  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlRule
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    3 months ago

    Make a habit of reading takes (from reputable / serious sources) that you think you’ll disagree with.

    Even if it doesn’t change your mind, you will understand other people’s POV. This is very important for understanding your own stance better and finding flaws and uncertainties in it.

    It also tends to humanise “the other side” (whoever that is for you), which makes it easier to have a constructive argument rather than meaningless fights.