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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • … I do not want to argue with you and Linux hardware support certainly is much better than decades ago (I was there, I know :-P) … but even my hardware, which was bought with Linux support in mind, I have several problems… one of my laptops WIFI card has problems with Linux sleep mode, one of my Lenovo machines has audio trouble with the microphone after being used for longer online calls and the list goes on. I hope that I am just very unlucky with my hardware picks, but when you have known hardware components in a mass produced device like Google Pixel, I hope we get Apple level support of hardware.


  • Unless you invested a lot of money and time, you are certainly already running an OS with a lot of BLOBs at the most important parts (WIFI driver, etc).

    Given AOSP and a decent smartphone, I am basically at exactly the same level I am with running Linux on my desktop. Actually, the smartphone could be better, if it is a Pixel, because at least I’ll have 100% hardware support. … and again, AFAIK one will be able to run Debian in a virtual environment.

    Long story short: I would never buy hardware with vendor lock in, but middle to high class Android smartphones are actually standardized hardware which run excellent with Linux. Total win for me.




    • Teaching math is mostly done w/o context and history, IMHO a lot of math makes much more sense when the original problem is understood, before the level of abstraction is being raised.
    • Math is a also a language and a notation. Unless one uses math regularly, there is simply not enough practice/repetition to read/speak this notation.
    • Math is a tower of abstractions, depending on other abstractions. A lot of topics in math depends on people understanding a lot of basic parts, which means if a student just got by with a prior topic, it is near impossible to catch up/understand what is currently being taught. (Compare to other topics: For example, if a student is bad in their Greek history, they get a fresh start when the topic is industrialization in England w/o any penalty.)
    • Math in the primary and secondary schools is mostly computation, ‘real math’ is only taught to people studying MINT.

    tl;dr

    • we need a better curriculum in the primary/secondary schools
    • we need more exercises in reading/writing the mathematical notation (sorry, just understanding math is not enough, because understanding doesn’t make one fluent)
    • at least in my school years, math was not repeated enough.
    • reading/understanding math is really hard, at the higher levels, understanding 2-3 pages on a textbook per day is an acceptable pace. I guess all the entertainment nowadays makes it not easier to sit still in a room and get math into ones brain

    For me the ‘breakthrough’ with math was, simply to accept that at the higher levels we are speaking about symbols (abstractions) that follow certain rules and everything else is derived by pure logic. Just accepting that one is manipulating symbols with rules to get to other symbols and learning the rules, made it click for me. Disclaimer: Was lucky with great math teachers in university, but even in my university there were people who simply could not accept the game of mathematics and were frustrated, because they wanted easy question/answer style formulas in the sense: When you see this, substitute PI with 3.14 and multiply r by r and write down the number that your calculator shows. They never made any effort to understand where PI comes from, where the radius comes from and why it makes sense.

    What is insane, is how many people studied computer science but are totally unable to apply mathematics to the problems they try to solve. Supposedly most of them learned relational algebra and discrete mathematics during their studies (and formal languages/complexity theory)… it is like something is missing in their ability to transfer what they learned in the university to basically the same problems where the symbols have different names. That is something I would love to understand.





  • wolf@lemmy.ziptoMemes@lemmy.mlFirefox is the only way.
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    2 years ago

    IMHO nobody sane hates a technology.

    The big problem is Chromes and Googles dominance over the internet. Even at this moment, there are sites that don’t work with Firefox/alternate browsers at all.

    Stating that people can use alternative browsers is theoretically correct, but in reality one is forced to have a Chromium based browser installed for the websites/services one has to access. (My main browser is Firefox and I have a Chromium backup browser on every device, not by my choice.)

    Combine this with the push of Google to prevent adblocking and centralize control of the internet at one place, and we are on our way to a real shit show.

    You can happily search for the history of Internet Explorer in the 2000s, for a taste of what is yet to come.

    In case Googles agenda has not affected you, yet, you should really ponder if

    a.) Googles agenda will never affect you negatively in the future b.) Googles agenda will never affect people you care about in the future

    In the end, I don’t hate Chrome, Chromium or any other browser based on this technology. I really don’t like the direction things are developing and I remember the monopolies of the past in IT, which were only of benefit for the monopolists.




  • I am literally forced to use Apple at work. I can life with an iPhone, because I use it just for its intended, dumped down usage and I overcame the annoyance about Apples fascism (alternative web engine). If you are not able to automate 100% of your setup on a proper UNIX machine, please do the programming community a favor and switch your line of work. Apple is such a shit show: no keyboard driven workflow w/o extensive customization, how the fuck can I automate 100% of the the setup/customization, why the fuck do I have to upgrade every fucking single program interactively with a click, why are the package managers homebrew and macports as shitshow like Linux 25 years ago, why is macOS so bloated and fucking slow on a machine, why is the development experience for mac worse than Visual Studio 6 (!), Finder is such a sad joke compared to file managers on every other OS or DE, why can I not easily enable transparent file compression when I am a grown up user etc etc etc. Seriously, macOS is nice for consumers with too much money. The literally only thing macOS does which I envy is the tag system which works. Don’t get me wrong, Linux is also a shit show, but compared to macOS it is like the best thing ever.