goku12

> I'm actually planning on doing abstract algebra because I've enjoyed proof writing a ton!

That's interesting! I started with abstract algebra (on my own) because I don't know the proper sequence of learning it. I guess I will give proofs a try now.

> I did try teaching myself calculus through 3blue1brown, who has super cool visualizations, but also isn't rigorous enough to apply it to complicated problems. On the other end, I also tried Khan Academy, but found it too abstract and hard to follow.

> I wish there was a way to have the rigour of set theory with the intuitiveness of visualization

Agreed! Intuition and rigour are equally important in Mathematics. The hardest part is making these two meet at some point.

One such moment in my life was when I created a visual model of 3D vector calculus (divergence, curl, gradient, etc) and developed it far enough to explain all its rigourous treatment that I learned in my engineering class. Things just flowed from there. I suddenly gained the superpower to imagine up the explanations for phenomena like the skin effect, and then effortlessly derive their mathematical models.

> The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?

Lemmy seems to do a decent enough job at global searches. It's most likely just a mastodon problem.

Word of mouth: What if it's just some random script a guy created in a weekend? I have my code used by others in such a manner.

Package managers: Same problem as above. You missed the point of free software.

Search engines: They do a disastrous job of indexing anything on a forge. You might as well yell at the clouds instead.

LLM of choice: I'm not taking this seriously.

> Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?

I don't even understand the point of such questions. None of the solutions you proposed are any better solving what I described than the insufficient method I wrote about.

Do you hang around every forum or mailing list that discusses the solutions to problems that you may potentially encounter in the future? The type of problem I'm talking about isn't one that can be foreseen years in advance.

> but yes, so many open source advocates, yet they literally depend on Microsoft, a bit too much.

I have abandoned github and even gitlab for all intents and purposes. But there's another side to consider in this.

It's always risky for the FOSS community to depend on a service that doesn't offer interoperability and freedom of migration. Ironically, Github is such a service built on a tool (git) that's built for maximum interop and migration. But the popularity of Github among the developer community isn't an accident. They worked really hard during their early stages as a startup, to gain the trust of community. Nobody foresaw Microsoft buying them at that stage (though you should really just assume that it would happen eventually).

The reluctance of a lot of them to abandon the platform can be attributed to lack of principles - IF it was an isolated incident. But we see the same story repeating with several development platforms. NPM is an example. PyPI and crates.io are still independent, as far as I know. But they aren't free of corporate influences either. No matter how much we try to avoid them, the companies just buy their way into these platforms when they become popular enough. I'm not happy with this. But I don't know a solution either.

Not to contradict you, but there's another important aspect to 'community' besides the bad contributors and the entitled complainers. That's discoverability. How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there? Searching each one individually is not a viable proposition. The search often ends on the biggest platform - Github.

I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).

> HEAD is "the thing we're editing now" but that's not terribly useful when rebasing since you're repeatedly editing a fake history.

You got two things wrong here. Firstly, HEAD isn't 'the thing you're editing now'. HEAD is what you have already committed. If you want to edit the HEAD, you have to either amend the commit or reset and redo the commit. (To make the situation even more complex, the amended or overridden commit remains in the repo unchanged, but orphaned.)

The actual thing being edited is a 'patch' that will eventually be converted into a new commit (snapshot). If you're doing a rebase and want to see the next patch in the pipeline that you're editing now, try this:

  git rebase --show-current-patch

Secondly, rebase is not editing a fake history. Rebase is creating a new (and real) history by repeatedly cherry picking commits from the old history based on the rebase plan. HEAD is the tip commit of the new history under construction. On completion of the rebase, the branch ref of the old history is switched to the new history, where HEAD is now at. Meanwhile, the old history remains in the repo unchanged, but again orphaned.

All the orphaned commits are still visible in the HEAD's reflog. You can use it to undo the rebase if you wish.

I agree that the entire thing is confusing as hell. But I have a bunch of aliases and scripts that show you the process graphically in realtime. You can use that awareness to make the right call every time. I'm thinking about converting it into a TUI application and publishing it.

I was thinking about creating a TUI application that points out what each part in the conflict indicator corresponds to. This idea is primarily meant for rebases where the HEAD and the ID of the updated commits change constantly. Think of it as a map view of the rebase process, that improves your situational awareness by presenting all the relevant information simultaneously. That could trivially work for merges too.

First of all, comparing a locked-down smartphone with a fully capable smartphone is different from comparing a smartphone with a 'landline phone'. That's like apples to apples compared to apples to oranges.

Secondly as far as I understand, you need the same type of phone at both ends to communicate with each other. Looks like the tin-can and other similar devices are designed to talk only to each other. While that is a restriction, it eliminates the avenue for a comparison. The friends are all on equal ground.

Thirdly, you're talking as if parental controls, especially unequal parental controls are a bad thing. Parental controls aren't like government or corporate restrictions. There is a necessary assumption that parents act in the best interests of the kids, unlike the other two.

Some parents are irresponsible and may allow their kids to consume alcohol or drugs. Will you allow your kids to do it too, because it may end up in comparisons? You have to talk to your kids about why that is a bad idea. It's wrong to assume that kids won't listen at all. Don't most kids refrain from drinking, smoking and driving till they come of age?

If this sort of control seems unfair or unethical to you, you're basically exposing your kids to serious dangers. And brain rot is a very serious problem that HN doesn't talk enough about. It ruins even the seniors. But for kids, it wreaks havoc with their IQ and personality.

Thank you for your life account and the suggestion! Smart dedicated parents play an unseen and underappreciated role in the success of their children.

My parents didn't know any of those - they were not in STEM professions. I think my questions exceeded their capability when I was quite young. That forced me to seek out resources and professionals. But they didn't let their modest earnings or lack of specialist knowledge prevent me from persistently pursuing interests. The lifestyle they provided me was a richly fertile ground for ideas and growth. I'm also extremely grateful to my parents.

Yes! Vacuum tubes seemed much more predictable than semiconductor devices. I don't remember exactly why, but perhaps it was that the tubes had more linear behavior than the SSDs. Regardless, I'm also happy that I learned about those amazing things. It's such a shame that they were dropped in all cases where SSDs replaced them.

There were some efforts to create ICs with vaccum tubes of micrometer sizes. At those sizes, they don't need heating or vacuum hermetic sealing like the traditional large tubes. But they retained one big advantage over SSDs - they have superior fault resistance and survivability against radiation. That makes them prime candidates for space and nuclear applications. This was like 15 years ago. I thought that they would hit the market for sure by now. I wonder what happened to them.

> Now that I'm taking calculus, I feel like I always have a corresponding application for each topic we cover. It's very exciting!

Mathematical concepts need not necessarily have any practical or real-life applications (pure mathematics), but it's a worthy pursuit on its own. However, every maths concept we learn outside of specialized mathematics courses have some application (applied mathematics). That's how these courses are designed.

It's funny when some people lament that much of the mathematics they learned at school or uni/college have no real-life applications! I wonder what they think about why they learned it. It also shows a big problem with math education and pedagogy. Many people are sailing without a destination in mind, hoping that they'll just hit some land in the future. The academic practice of mathematics has turned into the drudgery of endless symbolic manipulation.

But at the same time, people like you who lean into creativity, hit the limits of their mathematical knowledge early. For them, the problem isn't that the mathematics they learned have no applications. It's that they don't know where to look for the mathematics they need. Here is the failure of math education. If everyone was taught about the different branches of Mathematics, how they relate to each other and where they're applied, I can guarantee that many students will learn those on their own before they're formally introduced to them. That would enable the talented and interested students to shape their own destiny.

Interesting! That didn't turn up when I searched it. I must have typed it in wrongly. But I learned something new today. Thank you!

People do take those absolute maximum ratings quite seriously. I had friends in my undergraduate engineering class who used to connect components directly to the AC mains to observe what would happen if you exceed those ratings. I have to say - the demonstrations using electrolytic capacitors were quite remarkable, though admittedly a little messy.

> He requested that age requirement,

Who?

> it makes him looking like an etatist.

Pardon me, but what does that mean? Is that a typo, or am I simply ignorant?

> Some kids use to solder earlier than at 10y.o. so the intended audience is wrong. If the kid has not learned what is a transistor by the age of 5 yet, they are not an intended audience.

I don't know. I can't speak for anyone else, but I do have a history related to that. No one around me knew anything about transistors or soldering. I learned those myself by referring books from the library and few others that I convinced my parents to buy me. But it was well after I was 5. The learning was rapid once I got started.

That's why I confidently said that the age is a guideline and that it may vary between individuals. Learning in children is quite chaotic and it's difficult to establish hard and fast rules.

Agreed on all counts.

> They shouldn't teach calculus like they taught it to me and my peers. Basically we just one day started "differentiating" equations. We learnt a completely mechanical process.

I had a similar experience and it did ruin the fun in Calculus for me. It took me a long time to derive a bare-minimum mental model that I was satisfied with. It was at this point that I could 'feel' (imagine) how the general second-order linear differential equation (of two variables) works, without the need to 'calculate' or derive anything. This equation is the fundamental model for countless phenomena in the universe. It's such a shame, because that equation is easy to explain in words, without doing a single step of derivation.

Don't get me wrong. Formalism and rigor do have very important roles in Mathematics. But ignoring intuition and emphasizing formalism doesn't get you anywhere. Intuition isn't always right, but it shows you the 1000ft view of the problem when it does get it right. Formalizing the solution gets easier from there.

I have noticed that even professionals are taken by surprise when I convey the descriptive explanation. It shows how badly these things are taught. (I don't know if this is the situation everywhere.)

> The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.

Yes, that is exactly what I was suggesting. However, that 'intuition' is also part of Mathematics. Many practitioners call it the 'Mathematical sense', as opposed to common sense. You might have seen a rare few gifted individuals who find the correct answers to unintuitive and confusing problems (like the infamous Monty Hall problem) in their first try. They're employing this mathematical sense while the others revert to common sense. Who knows? Even you may be using it and surprising others without realizing it.

Unfortunately, our educational systems have reinforced this misconception that Mathematics is all about manipulating numbers and symbols (for many, even the idea about symbols are missing). This is a very sad situation that just sucks the life out of mathematics. A long essay (book) by Paul Lockhart, named 'A Mathematician's Lament' explains this problem splendidly.

PS: Funnily enough, I always struggled in and hated mathematics! Others were so good at applying long sequences of operations to get to the answer, while it was Chinese to me! (No offense intended here). But I was good at science. I relied on countless diagrams, tables, concept graphs, signal flow graphs, etc in place of equations and formulae to achieve this. I just converted them to equations and formulae whenever I needed to reproduce those. I thought, "Who needs mathematics when you can reason your way to the answer?"

It was close to the end of my formal education that I realized that every reasoning that I had done in my life was proper Mathematics! I had strong autistic traits and following numerous steps in sequence and in parallel was near impossible for me. But where I made up for that was in spatial intelligence. I had created book after book of Mathematics described in a visual language that I could digest. I didn't really hate mathematics. What I hated was the way in which it was taught and represented.

Learning Mathematics has become a whole lot easier and enjoyable after realizing it and embracing the fact that I needed my own ways of doing it. But honestly, I wish that so much time wasn't wasted in needless frustration.

There ought to be something similar for calculus too. While a detailed and formal treatment of the subject can be delayed till the age at which it's introduced now, I feel that the intuition and feel for calculus can be formed more efficiently at an earlier age.

If nothing else, it may help them understand where to seek solutions for the common problems they encounter. I started learning Electronics at a fairly young age using undergraduate level textbooks that I found lying around. The need for and relationships between concepts in calculus, logarithms and trigonometry were a recurrent problem for me.

PS: If anybody is wondering, those books were from an earlier generation engineer. They were very interesting, to say the least. All the circuits (amplifiers, rectifiers, oscillators, multivibrators, mixers, various RF Txr and Rxr designs, etc) were using vacuum tubes! Diodes, triodes, pentodes, thyratrons, magnetrons, TWTs, etc were used liberally in them. It had a description of an early form of the Instrumental Landing System (ILS). There were also descriptions of some early generation semiconductor devices and their similarity to vacuum tubes. I don't think ICs were in much use back then, because the book had no mentions about them.

I used to spend hours at a time with those books when I was a child. Later I graduated in Electronics engineering and went on to work on the avionics for a satellite launcher. Vacuum tubes were museum pieces by the time I was born. But I was the only one in my undergraduate class who had seen or knew anything about vacuum tubes, when we had lessons on CRTs, magnetrons, etc. I can't stress how deeply those books influenced my education and career. Sweet memories!

It's only a recommendation, not a strict instruction. It's the age group that the author is targeting and is assumed to have the requisite background knowledge and reasoning skills required to follow the material. It's understood to vary between individuals.

This is similar to 'intended audience' section of technical books for adults. Do you find those insulting?

I don't get the exact point you're making. Chrome forked WebKit into Bling a long time ago. How does it fit into what I said?

Could you say the same about the Chrome browser? Google is using it to EEE the web (Embrace, Extend and Extend it till it's a monstrosity that nobody else can manage). That's pretty antagonistic. But did people change?

> If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

Isn't that the same for the obligations under BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a different one from the problem of AI copyright washing. It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while debunking another point.

Technology is not a form of control at all. Technology is the practical application of things you know, to achieve things that don't happen naturally. Here's what the wiki says:

> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.

By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.

It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.

We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.

Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.

Would you trust Palantir if you're I'm the US?

> But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home.

There is an open source service named gpodder.net (web app, not the client app) that does this for podcasts. It doesn't just sync post read status, it can also sync added podcast feeds across supported clients on all devices.

Since podcasts are based on RSS feeds, this shows that what you seek is possible with regular feeds too. I don't know yet how gpodder does it, but that should be easy enough to find out because the web app seems to have good documentation in addition to being open source.

However, looking at the RSS and Atom feed formats, they seem to include some variation of a uuid per story. This is like message-ids in emails and should be useful in cross-device post status sync. This could be what gpodder uses for sync. A similar service for regular feeds would be easy enough to make. But it would need support across feed readers too, like how several podcast clients support gpodder.

> It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.

I'm considering deploying an aggregator too. So I'm curious. What made you settle with miniflux?

A token attempt is not enough.

> This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed, and any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project.

It sounds serious and strict, but it applies to content that's 'clearly labelled as LLM-generated'. So what about content that isn't as clear? I don't know what to make of it.

My guess is that the serious tone is to avoid any possible legal issues that may arise from the inadvertent inclusion of AI-generated code. But the general motivation might be to avoid wasting the maintainers' time on reviewing confusing and sloppy submissions that are made using the lazy use of AI (as opposed finely guided and well reviewed AI code).

> Most people are getting seriously concerned about how the internet affects children. It's as simple as that.

I'm also extremely concerned about what social media is doing to children's brains and how that manifests in their adulthood. I'm also concerned about how they affect adult brains, because I see it negatively affecting the decisions of even seniors.

But it's not "as simple as that". These sorts of solutions have serious consequences on civil liberty, privacy, security, affordability of general purpose computing, fair-use access to uaeful information, restrictions on state-sponsored information control, etc. This isn't a black-and-white problem.

> it's hard to just say "well, the cure it worse then the disease, suck it up".

Just as the problem is not black-and-white, the solution isn't either. There are a lot of steps to try before that. One is to try an awareness campaign among kids about the dangers of social media. It's a bit arrogant to believe that kids don't care about their own safety. Another is to assist parents with supervision and parental controls. Instead, they just jumped directly to the nuclear option. This kind of rhetorical framing of the opposition hides the likely nefarious intent behind such despotic measures.

> A lot of people assume politicians are just greedy for power and are conspiring to give the government more surveillance power, but the simplest explanation here is that politicians are being screamed at to do something, and this is something.

You paint both parents and politicians as naïve individuals. There are plenty of parents who can see the problem, since they're Gen X and millenials who grew up observing the change. Meanwhile, assumption of incompetence among politicians is defeated by the fact that much public debate about it is missing here. And the fact that multiple states are coming up with similar bills, indicates the influence of lobbyists. Besides, the US politicians are not exactly known for defending the citizen's rights against corporate interests. They deserve a heavy dose of skepticism and criticism, not the benefit of doubt.

Automated access control is even worse. Kids explore technology a lot more than their parents do. They will find a work around and share it among their peers. The only real solution is to make them aware of the dangers and hope that it works when combined with parental attention.

That's a disingenuous false equivalence comparison. Checking ID at a store comes with no extra burden. Not so for computing devices. You're talking about everything from fully locking down the boot loader to adding age verification interface on most of the applications. Why do you think people are so worried only about the latter?

Another difference is that internet access has potential advantages for children. There are ways in which they can derive immense value from it. On the contrary, there is no justifiable reason why a child should be allowed to drink.

Please don't rationalize such draconian measures and help them claim legitimacy.

This comment is probably going to be unpopular. But these questions need to be asked. Why did anybody think that Americans were NOT going to be targeted? While the regime claimed that they were going to round up and deport only 'the worst of the worst', they were also arresting illegal immigrants who had clean records otherwise, asylum seekers, legal immigrants and those who were made illegal by retroactive repeal of their residency permits, from the beginning itself. Why didn't enough people object at the time?

The opposition to ICE and CBP saw a massive upswing after the executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I respect and grieve for them, because they were brave human beings who stood up and died for the less privileged people who were in danger. But they were hardly the first casualties of this regime. Nearly 40 had died by that time, in ICE's concentration camps (aka detention facilities), including at the El Salvadoran CECOT. And nearly a hundred men were blown up at sea, based on the unsubstantiated accusation of trafficking drugs. We will never know if they were actual drug traffickers, because they were never tried.

But the protests were relatively feeble until Good and Pretti were killed. There are two differences I see in them, from the other victims. They were white, and their death were caught on camera. (The assassination of the Venezuelan boaters were caught on camera, but it wasn't as clear.) If those prior extra-judicial executions generated as much outrage as the Good and Pretti murders, perhaps the latter two would still be alive.

Here is the problem with that line of thinking. Once a regime starts to violate constitutional and other laws, it's only a matter of time before they expand it to all demographics. Contrary to what they claim, they absolutely won't observe any boundaries. Why would they? They're the ones in power. This is the basis of the age old adage beginning "First they came for the Communists ...". It isn't a fancy poem. This is how autocrats behave. They're using your prejudices to silence you. It should have been taken for granted at that point that the American citizens were going to be in the cross hairs soon.

This is why such atrocities must never be downplayed or normalized. This is why prejudices must not be allowed to override justice. Where did all this go wrong? And why are you still making the distinction between Americans and non-Americans? Isn't it clear yet that everybody gets justice, or no one does?