Not sure if this hack has a name, but usually once someone in a comment tree makes a joke about downvotes — e.g., clowning on an edit complaining about a downvote — rules are suspended for all comments that follow, and you can accrue lots of downvote salutes FOR FREE.

(Maybe not my comment since I’m late to the downvote party, but here you go;)

Edit: why the upvotes? :(

Edit edit: 1v1 me irl

That requires a lot of drugs, in my friend’s experience.

deleted by creator

rabbling intensifies

Is it? There seems to be widespread agreement on that point, here on Lemmy, that expecting the worst of everyone is critical to motivate the Americans to go out and vote.

It’s a strong enough consensus, reinforced with absolute certainty over and over in our political communities, that I’ve been forced to ponder it myself many times. Because I also have an instinct that it’s quite possible to demotivate and even deactivate would-be voters by making them feel that theirs is a lone flame in the wind, or that the insurmountable forces of evil will make their efforts inconsequential.

As a counter example, here in New York, that wasn’t what brought people out to knock on doors and vote for the new progressive mayor. People participated because they had hope for change, or maybe just to be a part of a something new. They weren’t voting against Cuomo as much as they were voting for Mamdani, if that makes sense.

Are we confident that our all-in commitment to motivating people through fear of their neighbors’ inaction is a winning strategy?

The funnier interpretation IMO is that they’re all trying to be either wagons or minivans while maintaining plausible deniability.

No it’s an SUV! Right right…

Dear colleague,

By qualification I meant explanation. My doctorate is irrelevant to the truth.

Since you asked, my larger point was about the unhelpful nature of this content, which makes students of math feel inordinately inferior or superior hinged entirely on a single point of familiarity. I don’t handle early math education, but many of my students arrive with baggage from it that hinders their progress, leading me to suspect that early math education sometimes discourages students unnecessarily. In particular, these gotcha-style math memes IMO deepen students’ belief that they’re just bad at math. Hence my dislike of them.

Re: Dave Peterson, I’ll need to read more about this debate regarding the history of notation and I’ll search for the “proven rules” you mentioned (proofs mean something very specific to me and I can’t yet imagine what that looks like WRT order of operations).

If what riled you up was my use of the word “conventions” I can use another, but note that conventions aren’t necessarily “optional” when being understood is essential. Where one places a comma in writing can radically change the meaning of a sentence, for example. My greater point however has nothing to do with that. Here I am only concerned about the next generation of maths student and how viral content like this can discourage them unnecessarily.

Dear Mr Rules,

I’m not sure what motivates you to so generously offer your various dyadic tokens of knowledge on this subject without qualification while ignoring my larger point, but will assume in good faith that your thirst for knowledge rivals that of your devotion to The Rules.

First, a question: what are conventions if not agreed upon rules? Second, here is a history of how we actually came to agree upon the aforementioned rules which you may find interesting:

https://www.themathdoctors.org/order-of-operations-historical-caveats/

Happy ruling to you.

To anyone reading, “destroyed permanently” refers to the murders and suicides, not the survivors. That is never the language we use for survivors, no matter how atrocious the particulars, because it reinforces the same purity culture that purveys (1) a great deal of the associated suffering, trauma, and stigma, and (2) the obsession with defilement that many rapists share.

Tell me about this Trump class! Is it couth? Is it debonair? I must know more.

Old internet thing. Hotly debated at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

I’ll add the contextual link above for others, since it’s been awhile.

Right, and that clue IMO unravels the more troubling aspect of why this content spreads so quickly:

It’s deliberately aimed at people with a rudimentary math education who can be made to feel far superior to others who, in spite of having roughly the same level of proficiency, are missing/forgetting a single fact that has a disproportionate effect on the result they expect.

That is, it’s blue-dress-level contentious engagement bait for anyone with low math skills, whether or not they remember PEMDAS.

Honestly that’s my pet peeve about this category of content. Over the years I’ve seen (at least) hundreds of these check-out-how-bad-at-math-everyone-is posts and it’s nearly always order of operations related. Apparently, a bunch of people forgot (or just never learned) PEMDAS.

Now, having an agreed-upon convention absolutely matters for arriving at expected computational outcomes, but we call it a convention for a reason: it’s not a “correct” vs “incorrect” principle of mathematics. It’s just a rule we agreed upon to allow consistent results.

So any good math educator will be clear on this. If you know the PEMDAS convention already, that’s good, since it’s by far the most common today. But if you don’t yet, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you’re too dumb to math. With a bit of practice, you won’t even have to remember the acronym.

It’s a user-friendly wrapper for existing fake quantum. It’s not a “physics shortcut” and it doesn’t “tackle quantum problems.”

Also no quantum problems have ever been “reserved for AI.” Some quantum solutions borrow optimization techniques from machine learning, but classical machine learning algorithms aren’t designed to leverage (or even consider) quantum effects.

I’m putting this out there because there’s a tendency to lump together all the buzzwords, like AI and quantum, into one big category of powerful-technologies-I-don’t-understand that results in hyperbolic projections and magical thinking that thwarts progress.

Edit: I wasn’t actually disagreeing with the comment above. You should downvote me too.

Board of directors

Correct. The board defines the company, not the CEO.

CEOs are usually puppets. Whatever role they play, you can bet they were hired specifically to play it, and were incentivized to stick to the script.

Their job (legally, their fiduciary obligation) is to maximize shareholder value, to take the credit or blame, and fuck off.

The board (typically key stakeholders) are so pleased when the public focuses on their CEOs, even if it’s for their shitty opinions, behavior, or obnoxious salaries.

Because the worst thing that could happen to them would be for the public eye to actually follow the money, and it’s easy to see why.

If the rabble truly fathomed just how many of those “golden parachutes” stakeholders stockpile with every disgraced CEO, however ceremoniously disavowed…

Accountability would shift to more permanent targets yes but, more importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge that, all this time, there were in fact more than enough golden parachutes to go around.

Wait, is this happy tree friends?

New York or Disney World

Got me

For example the tools for the really tedious stuff, like large codebase refactoring for style keeping, naming convention adherence, all kinds of code smells, whatever. Lots of those tools have gotten ML upgrades and are a lot smarter and more powerful than what I remember from a decade ago (intellisense, jetbrains helper functions, various opinionated linter toolchains, and so forth).

While I’ve only experimented a little with some the more explicitly generative LLM-based coding assistant plugins, I’ve been impressed (and a little spooked) at how good they often were at guessing what I’m doing way before I finished doing it.

I haven’t used the prompt-based LLMs at all, because I’m just not used to it, but I’ve watched nearby devs use them for stuff like manipulating a bunch of files in a repeated pattern, breaking up a spaghetti method into reusable functions, or giving a descriptive overview of some gnarly undocumented legacy code. They seem pretty damn useful.

I’ll integrate the prompt-based tools once I can host them locally.

I’ll admit, some tools and automation are hugely improved with new ML smarts, but nothing feels dumber than hunting for problems to fit the boss’s pet solution.

It seems like the US patent system today is rarely anything but a solution to its own problem. In most cases a patent is little more than an expensive troll ward or a way to demonstrate due diligence to investors. What’s taken its place is time to market. If that’s true, the patent system should either be replaced with something that serves its intended purpose or that office should stop accepting applications.