@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha. It could have been worse, though. I’ve heard stories from others that were many levels crazier than what I experienced. And I’m glad that I was very, very lucky with almost all of my teachers throughout all of school. One of my maths teacher, who was also my computer science teacher then, is the reason I do what I do for a living. It’s all his fault! ;-)

Ja, possibly a BaWü thing. The ministry of education and cultural affairs changes the rules, curriculums and details every one or two years, anyway.

Said teacher had to fight real hard that he was allowed to teach CS in class 12 and 13. As a real subject, that is, not just an extracurricular activity („AG“). At first, the ministry refused, because we’re just am „allgemeinbildendes Gmyi“, not an „informationstechnisches Gymi“. It’s insane, you’ve got super motivated (and technically as well as humanly excellent) teachers and then forbid them to offer a class. What the hell!? (Fun fact on top, he had a doctor in CS and was also teaching at the university of applied sciences.)

Eventually, they granted permission to only have a two hours a week class („zweistündig, wie Nebenfach“). One or two years later – too late for me, unfortunately – they allowed four hours a week („vierstündig, wie Hauptfach“). But each pupil had to sign upfont that they will not take CS class in the Abi. That was still exclusive to ITGs only. Completely ridiculous.

I reckon, you can talk to any random teacher and they will endlessly tell you about very dubious decicions from the ministry. :-/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, this screenshot. However, not the Dutch but rather the German version, no wonder it looks so crazy!!1!11

It’s been a hot minute or two since I last used KDE, so I don’t remember exactly. I just vaguely recall that I found myself thinking multiple times that the KDE application categories were better matching or there were more or something like that. Most of my classmates were on Windows and had one giant long list of all sort of stuff in there. You even had to scroll in the menu. Sure, they installed all kind of garbage, which didn’t exactly help. Where in KDE, they were actually grouped by Office, Internet, Graphics, Multimedia, Games, etc. In Windows, applications usually hid themselves in a sub folder named after the software vendor. At least in the later (?) days.

I only used Win 95, 98 and XP at home. For maths class with computer algebra system (Maple), we had a Cassiopeia with Win CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_Cassiopeia At school, there was probably also Win 2000, but I don’t know anymore for sure.

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely 😅

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”?

No, children still need to learn. That will never change. What they learn however will over time.

Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework?

Yes, frankly I am. Why? Because much of what we teach them in school is utterly pointless.
For example, learning to read Shakespear never taught me anything useful in my life. I regret much of my school years to be honest.
I leanred to read and write, sure. But I learned Math, Science, Computing and how things work on my own by being very curious.

What sense will it make?

That assumes I answered “no”, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said “Yes”, which I did :D It will be an itneresting future that’s for sure. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in teh sand and pretend it’s all going to go away, It will not. It will make things very interesting for sure, as we’re already starting to see what’s possible and what’s changeing. For example; ordinary people are using these LLM(s) to write their legal suit and defense in courts with varying levels of success.

Even if AI were to become omniscient, what will it be of the human race then?

I’m not convinced it ever will. In fact, I am not convinced we know how to create true intellience at all.

What would we do?

What would be so different from say an Alien invasion from far superious beings?
What would we do that? Band together and defend humanity?

Serve the AI? Maintain the AI?

That assumes that “AI” will become intelligent and omniscient, which I don’t believe it ever will.

Would we have found the true meaning of life then?

If the meaning of life is to create our own sub-species liken to ourselves, sure, maybe. But is that even a reality? not sure, I doubt it. We barely understand ourselves at the best of times, let alone how our minds works.

To care for AI, Is that it?

How would this be different to caring for a friend, a family member If we could ever truly reate an actual sentient being with real feelings and intelligenace, is there any reason to worry? Could we not be freinds and have mutual goals and form relationships?

Je pige pas les maths derrière, mais apparemment il est maintenant […] 🔗 https://yom.li/notes/20260428123534 🔖 https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it/

Apples
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

what do you call an accountant who is bad at math? an economist.

Thanks to @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz and her shelf I finally spent several hours in the woodshop. I wanted to build two drawers for the workbench and thought that I will complete this project in no time. I’ve been so wrong again. ;-)

I didn’t draw any plans, just measured a few times and then went to cutting a bunch of particle board leftovers at the table saw. I routed rebates on the sides, fronts and backs to lap the boxes and sink in the bottom. It turned out that having no plans was a stupid idea. I cut exactly on the lines as I calculated and measured, however, the math in my head fell apart when it eventually met reality. The bottoms are too short, so I gotta glue on some strips. Also, with the longer fronts, the sides won’t work either, I have to fix them as well. :-D

Finally, the lid of my cyclone bucket broke when the negative pressure got too large. Oh well. It was just an old wood glue bucket, I’ve got another empty one, so I can use that lid but strengthen it first with some plywood. Something for future Lyse to deal with.

All in all, it was still good fun. Wood (haha) do it again, but at least with some sketches on paper. ;-)

The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s #GameOfLife: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/science/math-conway-game-of-life.html

Mathematicians just solved a 125-year-old problem, uniting 3 theories in physics
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A Math Lesson From Hitler’s Germany
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Canadian math prodigy allegedly stole US$65M in crypto
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CLP Calculus Textbooks
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Show HN: OCR pipeline for ML training (tables, diagrams, math, multilingual)
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@eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Not including a photo was a stupid move, sorry. There you go:

This particular one is 95mm wide and 185mm high. Fairly compact.

I can only use it figure out distances to other dates and to do some basic calendar math. I’m not able to actually schedule anything. But I grew up with a month calendar like you have there where all appointments of the entire family was recorded.

By far most of my paper use is drawing random stuff on scratch paper during meetings. :-D

Google, DuckDuckGo massively expand “AI” search results
Clearly, online search isn’t bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They’ve announced they’re going to show even more “AI”-generated answers in Search results, to more people. Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with mor … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I am a big fan of “obvious” math facts that turn out to be wrong. If you want to understand how reusing space actually works, you are mostly stuck reading complexity theory papers right now. Ian wrote a good survey: https://iuuk.mff.cuni.cz/~iwmertz/papers/m23.reusing_space.pdf . It’s written for complexity theorists, but some of will make sense to programmers comfortable with math. Alternatively, I wrote an essay a few years ago explaining one technique, with (math-loving) programmers as the intended audience: https://www.falsifian.org/blog/2021/06/04/catalytic/ .

@prologic@twtxt.net Nah, it’s really not necessary from my point of view. There’s not enough math here that would justify it. In the spirit of simplicity, I’d leave it off. O:-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Absolutely! Truly amazing work and excellent explanations.

I’m pretty sure they didn’t tell us this in school either.

I don’t remember what topic it was, but some of the maths lectures at uni were heaps better in linking several matters together. In school we were always told: And now for something completely different, we start a new topic, so when you kids haven’t understood the previous one, worry not, now you got the chance to maybe get this one and improve your maths grade. Only at uni we were actually taught that it’s in fact basically exactely the same thing as something else, just with some slightly tweaked rules. If I only were told this a decade earlier or so. It would have made stuff sooo much easier.

@prologic@twtxt.net does that include mine? otherwise it would make them 8 and 5, maybe even throw off your maths by 0.00001% 😆 … and, come on! 1.04% seems like a good ratio considering how many gopher holes and gem capsules compared to how many Web servers out there in the world 😂

(#2024-09-24T12:44:35Z) There is a increase in space/memory for sure. But calculating the hashes also takes up CPU. I’m not good with that kind of math, but it’s a tradeoff either way.

Pinellas Trail Challenge: 36.30 miles, 00:14:47 average pace, 08:56:28 duration
DNF’d, but had a great time! i could have walked it out the last ten miles and still made the cut-off but after doing the math i would not have been done until about 1900 and we had guests visiting from out of town and i did not want to be even more of a wreck while entertaining. met a lot of great people and happy for the challenge.
#running #race

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha! yeah sounds about like my HS CS program. A math teacher taught visual basic and pascal. and over on the other end of the school we had “electronics” which was a room next to the auto body class where they had a bunch of random computer parts scavenged from the district decommissioned surplus storage.

The advanced class would piece together training kits for the basic class to put together.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Despite that these AoC math text problems are rather silly in my opinion (reminds me of an exercise in our math book where somebody wanted to carry a railroad rail around an L-shaped corner in the house and the question was how long that rail could be so that it still fits — sure, we’ve all carried several meter long railroad rails in our houses by ourselves numerous times…), these algorithms are really neat!

So today’s #adventofcode was solved with no programming. Just a bit o maths and wolfram/alpha

@prologic@twtxt.net It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I’m pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas.

I used to be a big fan of a service called cocalc, which you could also self host. It was kind of an integrated math, data science, research, writing, and teaching platform.

I hadn’t run it in awhile, and when I checked in with it today I found their web site brags that cocalc is now “extensively integrated with ChatGPT”.

Which means I can’t use it anymore, and frankly anyone doing anything serious shouldn’t use it either. Very disappointing.

Definition of e
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So… Just out of curiosity (again), back of paper napkin math. Based on Vultr pricing, running my infra in the “Cloud”™ would cost me upwards of $1300 per month. That’s about ~10x more than my current power bill for my entire household 😅 (10 VMs of around ~4 vCPUS and 4-6GB of RAM each + 10TB of storage on the NAS)

Euler Diagrams
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#TIR (Today I Realized): typical human hands count in base eleven, as two closed fists can represent zero, so a good single-digit representation could be a [0..A] range #math

#TIR (Today I Realized): typical human hands count in base eleven, as two closed fists can represent zero, so a good single-digit representation could be a [0..A] range #math

The Universe by Scientific Field
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Assigning Numbers
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Weird Unicode Math Symbols
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A person’s feelings don’t have one answer like a math problem. Fantasy and Love: Mischievous Kiss Quotes | Korean Drama Quotes

New repository: aquilax/zadachko - Math template test generator.

When I read this I see a a niche, super premium hardware company that managed to acquire tens of thousands of customers by word of mouth. Not only that, their customers are all in-effect self employed or small businesses with huge average revenue per employee. They manage global supply chains, intense competition, all while taking on and managing huge legal/compliance risk. How is is that supposedly “dumb,” criminals can do this, and yet many of us are stretching our intellectual capacities to learn new technologies and maths, developing our nth stupid app, trying to achieve a fraction of the customer traction and revenue that street thugs manage to do every day. Are these people much smarter than average, or does it mean that if you sell something people actually want, literally nothing else matters about your intelligence, education, character, background, or anything at all. When I read these drug stories, it just reinforces for me that growth solves everything. You can succeed with a crew of violent, drug addicted idiots whose only reliable characteristic is short term thinking, and who spend half their time in prison if you have product market fit. What I’m beginning to think is that the “smarter,” people are in a company, the less anyone will want their product. It’s like the success of a venture is inversely proportional to the number of ostensible geniuses it employs. reply How Police Secretly Took over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime | Hacker News

📚 Finished reading A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley

Nice explanation of the difference between 1/0 and 0/0: https://blog.plover.com/math/division-by-zero.html

📚 Finished reading Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math by Daniel Tammet