give it another 7 to 8 years

number 17 reporting in

does this mean the twitter brand is up for grabs? anyone can start up a new website at twitter dot com? musk’s letting go of it completely?

that’s not really a problem if the judge simply changes their name

the whole “there are two sides to every issue” mantra that i hear so many people use in everyday life has got to be contributing to this. i think a lot of people view the “two sides thing” as a tautology, and that enables them to more easily “pick a side” on things, assuming that both sides always have some merit to them. and some people use it to avoid picking sides entirely, because if they make something seem complicated enough then they don’t have to actually say anything meaningful about it.

i would really like to see that mantra disappear altogether, or at the very least have people stop using it as an excuse for not having a well founded opinion. it does seem like people don’t let it slide very much on lemmy though, which is nice.

i gave up on gentoo when the updates started making my laptop so hot that i had to point my bedroom fan at it in college. i was thinking of doing LFS but by that point gentoo was turning into such a headache and i wanted something simpler. i switched to arch afterwards, but now i mainly just use macos and let tim handle all that stuff for me. although i’m tempted to try arch again when im done with grad school and have more time

mine as well. it was awful

in practice, a lot of problems/equations can be approximated with so-called “linear equations”. a linear equation is something that can involve any number of variables, but no variable has any exponent other than 1. for example, 2x + 6y + 5z = 8 is a linear equation. (this is a generalization of the case when there are two variables, and you have an equation like 2x + 3y = 9. in this case, you can rearrange this equation into slope intercept form and get the standard equation of a line, hence the name linear.)

again, in practice, it’s very common to deal with multiple linear equations at the same time. say, 2x + 3y = 9, and x + y = 0. to solve such all equations simultaneously (in the 2 variable case) means finding x and y that satisfy both equations. and in the 2 variable case, it basically means finding a point where two lines intersect (if possible).

you can do some kind of advanced math to show that linear systems of equations correspond to matrices. this is “nice” because matrices are extremely easy for computers to deal with, and we also have a lot of theorems that talk about how matrices behave.

so, to summarize, we’ve reduced a real world problem into something involving matrices, with the hope of maybe having a computer solve it. in practice, many matrices can be “diagonalized”, which basically means you can factor it as a product of matrices satisfying some certain conditions, but i’m glossing over those details because it can be messy if you don’t know much linear algebra. you can think of it as kind of like factorizing a number into primes. it isn’t really the same thing, but it can be a helpful analogy maybe. (primes are easier to work with, and sometimes it’s helpful to view any number as just a bunch of primes multiplied together.)

the main advantage of diagonal matrices is that they’re very easy to work with (compared to matrices, which are already “nice” to work with). in practice, this is important because a lot of formulas, algorithms, etc only work for (or are most efficient on) diagonal matrices.

i hope this helps, it’s a bit hard to get into the details without making things needlessly complicated (a common problem for things involving matrices), but i tried to do my best to focus on the underlying concepts/real world use cases.

ironically, algebraists are currently trying to replace calculus with more algebra. needless to say, the algebra involved is pretty extreme

i think the gentoo pacman looking guy is cool

computer science exams must have been so easy for you

i chose my first linux distro based on difficulty (gentoo). needless to say it took me two weeks to get my computer to boot up and load i3 without problems.

how does one consume ancient history? do you eat the source documents?

in conclusion, remember to always curse in your comments because it will make your code better

we’ll be done with it exactly when the next fad picks up steam

with enough bombs they can blow up the next hurricane before it becomes a problem for the people living in florida

i’ve mostly given up on expecting/trying to make coffee taste good. at this point i just eat the roasted beans and carry on with my day. it’s also more efficient since you lose a fair amount of caffeine through the brewing process. at this point i only have like 8-15 beans a day.

i still go to a cafe from time to time if i want a nice cappuccino or something, but i don’t bother with any of it at home.

edit: i should mention that roasted coffee beans can taste pretty good if they’re been roasted properly (and even better if eaten within a week of roasting). and you can get a pretty decent bean roaster for like 200$, and then after that a 3 lb. bag of unroasted beans costs like 30$. the 200$ upfront charge is pretty expensive, but it ends up paying for itself pretty quickly since you save an insane amount of money from buying unroasted coffee beans. when eating the roasted beans, a 3 lb. bag can last about 6 months to a year. so thats about 30$ to 60$ a year spent on coffee. even when i was brewing coffee, i found that the roaster paid for itself in about 6 months. not to mention that it’s not that hard to learn how to roast coffee beans, and everything tastes much better when using freshly roasted beans.

i don’t ever use bottle caps or cars. but in the case of screws (and bottle caps), the choice to make them tighten clockwise and loosen counter clockwise is entirely arbitrary.

my main point is that i think it’s confusing that clockwise is negatively oriented and counterclockwise is positively oriented (in the mathematical sense). and the mathematical definition of orientation is ultimately dependent on trigonometry. and it just feels wrong that clocks are negatively oriented.

You’re the person people have to say “no, your other left” a lot to, aren’t ya?

no.

this would also be society if counterclockwise and clockwise were swapped. it’s the universal way to talk about 2d rotations but pretty much nothing (except a clock) ends up turning clockwise. it didn’t have to be this way

is she the person you’re supposed to hire when your Chief Candidates are out of control?