WTF Bites
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I get Bruce Schneier's CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter, and in the latest one there was a link to a Reddit AMA he did, and in that there was a link to an old (2008) paper of his that I've been reading and I came across this, commenting on a particular psychology experiment:
Ignore your amazement at the idea of spending $125 on a calculator; it’s an
old experiment.I recently paid $150 for a second-hand calculator for my daughter, because it costs $240 new.
I'd ask "What happened?", but really I know: programmable and graphing calculators used to be forbidden, now they're required. And because the feature sets are so rich, the teachers only know how to use the standard model on the booklist and aren't able to help kids with different models figure out how to do the same things on theirs - my daughter had been trying to make do with a TI my sister-in-law had given her, but it wound up being too difficult for her to keep up.
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@Scarlet_Manuka plus TI has a monopoly on standardized test-approved calculators. And the College Board doesn't want innovation in calculators. So they're charging an arm and a leg for something that's way weaker than even the worst smartphone, for about the same amount. Because the education system really does have greedy, grasping corporations running most of it. But not the private schools, the "support" side. Textbooks, standardized tests, supplies, curricula, etc. They're the worst. Worse than Oracle on its worst day.
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@Benjamin-Hall Location, location, location, I guess. The point of my post was that my daughter couldn't use the TI because it was too different, so I had to go and buy the Casio that was on the official booklist.
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@Scarlet_Manuka Which TI?
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@Tsaukpaetra I ask because the TI-84 (which the TI-89 looks like) is pretty well known for its friendliness, and the TI-Nspire is absolutely not. If he got his daughter the Nspire, that would explain why she had a hard time with it.
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I wonder what platforms FF15 are available for...
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So to summarize: failed face recognition device sent notification to his phone, which sent lock request to Google Assistant, which told lock to lock door. Aah, the 21st century.
So, not current HTTP standards of forwarding where there has to be at least 10
301
redirects before you end up on the URL you thought you were clicking initially?...
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in WTF Bites:
I'd ask "What happened?", but really I know: programmable and graphing calculators used to be forbidden, now they're required. And because the feature sets are so rich, the teachers only know how to use the standard model on the booklist and aren't able to help kids with different models figure out how to do the same things on theirs - my daughter had been trying to make do with a TI my sister-in-law had given her, but it wound up being too difficult for her to keep up.
Please. I know perfectly well how to deal with different models. I just do not want to explain everything six times because everyone has a special snowflake calculator which insists on switching to Radians this way instead of that way.
Now, if I could simply tell my pupils to switch to Radians and they'd know what to do, I couldn't care less about the model they're using. But they usually don't know how and that's why there's a standard model. So I don't have to spend 5+ minutes of running around.
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@Rhywden I have a small list of "recommended" calculators, and if you go off that list, you're on your own. I require them to befriend their calculator and strongly recommend that they consistently use one calculator throughout. In the lower classes I'll show the different forms of scientific notation entry, but only really once.
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Obligatory XKCD:
And if you want to know how it ended up that way, this video is pretty good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoGl8-Wc-L0
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in WTF Bites:
I get Bruce Schneier's CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter, and in the latest one there was a link to a Reddit AMA he did, and in that there was a link to an old (2008) paper of his that I've been reading and I came across this, commenting on a particular psychology experiment:
Ignore your amazement at the idea of spending $125 on a calculator; it’s an
old experiment.I recently paid $150 for a second-hand calculator for my daughter, because it costs $240 new.
I'd ask "What happened?", but really I know: programmable and graphing calculators used to be forbidden, now they're required. And because the feature sets are so rich, the teachers only know how to use the standard model on the booklist and aren't able to help kids with different models figure out how to do the same things on theirs - my daughter had been trying to make do with a TI my sister-in-law had given her, but it wound up being too difficult for her to keep up.
Weird. 20 years ago my Casio cost like 15€.
Not graphing but could do all the scientific functions, including the statistics stuff we never bothered to learn.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
What about Bob your uncle?
You must be mixing me up with someone else. My uncle is Bill, not Bob. (Like that matters to anyone else here…)
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Worse than Oracle on its worst day.
Steady on there! Nick Lucifer of the Oracle Business Process Innovation unit objects to that whole concept…
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Not graphing but could do all the scientific functions, including the statistics stuff we never bothered to learn.
I learnt all that stuff… but I did the advanced mathematics optional course too. (I've also forgotten much of the details. )
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@dkf We just did the stats by hand. In your typical exercises of, say, 5 numbers it doesn't take that much longer. And you actually know what you're doing.
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We just did the stats by hand.
Of course. We weren't allowed to use calculator functions until we could do them by hand or understood at least some of the theory behind them (so no, we didn't calculate trig functions or logs by hand). But once we knew what was being done so it wasn't magic any more, we could use the calculator as a tool to help.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Worse than Oracle on its worst day.
Steady on there! Nick Lucifer of the Oracle Business Process Innovation unit objects to that whole concept…
I read that as "Oracle Business Provocation" unit...
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I wonder what platforms FF15 are available for...
Just ask Lorn...
Oh...different FF. My mistake.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
I require them to befriend their calculator
This is my calculator. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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@PleegWat From the school which brought you Full Metal Bracket?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
I require them to befriend their calculator
This is my calculator. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The soul of mine lives in stasis on my current phone, forever remembering that the last thing I desired of it was how it simplified 22/1000...
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
(Go on the store page)
explained
When NOT logged into Steam, the price I see is
The reason I can have it at 90% off is that I also own the original Spintires
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in WTF Bites:
May explained in several other tweets that he was easily able to unlock the door with a pin code, and could have opened it with his phone as well, so it was no big deal.
He also explained that while he appreciates that regular keys wouldn't have locked him out of his home, he likes having the ability to remotely allow his kids in and out of the house.
We just give our kids keys when they get to highschool age.
No, you don't get it. Read that part again.
he likes having the ability to remotely allow his kids in and out of the house
It's not about being fancy, it's about being overprotective and overcontrolling.
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@TimeBandit
Goddamn I don't understand what's happening with that thing. I first took notice of it when Intel tech demo got released back in... very long ago. Then Spintires was made, a glorified tech demo with log deliveries. But alright, I'm from the former Soviet bloc, some of those fuming pieces of shit are my best childhood memories.Then it got abandoned. Later Mudrunner came along, at 50% off for "Oldtires" owners (+ another 10% off for whatever reason at the time). All-around better, but some people were raging. But then there was Reddit AMA, the new publisher promised continued support, there was a free map and a DLC... and lo, it's being abandoned again! Now there will be American counterpart, and Mudrunner 2 has been announced
It's like a clear example how not to do it, except they can get away with it because it's one of a kind.
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@ben_lubar The numbers go from 0 to H. That's why it's called Hexadecimal!
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@ben_lubar The numbers go from 0 to H. That's why it's called Hexadecimal!
Wrong! Take for example:
See? The first byte 0x has an X. it's hEXadecimal.
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@Zecc Maybe it's both?
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Oh, come on. This is just silly:
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@Cursorkeys That bug report is from this month? Pretty sure I saw a demo of that idea years ago. Didn't really work, but still.
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@ben_lubar I don't think anyone in recent years has been mad enough to make a system that uses an ILP64 datatype size profile. The early versions of the DEC Alpha may have been ILP64 — I forget the details and wikipedia is unhelpful on this — but absolutely nobody else tried since then as the sheer quantity of breakage of existing code is too bloody much. (I32LP64 is the most common 64-bit model, and IL32P64 crops up a fair bit on Windows.)
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@ben_lubar At first I thought "wow, I hadn't seen two-byte booleans since the VB days!". But then I remember our product's Data Access Layer (which must be accept several RDBMSs, one of them Oracle) actually uses short integers columns to store boolean values.
Also, 16-byte
double
values? Well I wouldn't be surprised if 80-bitlong double
were stored this way (for alignment reasons) on platforms that actually support them, but otherwise...
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@Tsaukpaetra The calc was in Approx mode. Here's the same in Auto, which defaults to Exact for this stuff:
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@Tsaukpaetra The calc was in Approx mode. Here's the same in Auto, which defaults to Exact for this stuff:
Yeah, I don't remember why I switched modes...
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Also, 16-byte double values?
I find it hard to imagine many applications (other than stupidly zoomed in fractal rendering) that need more precision than
long double
. Heck, a lot of apps that model the real world probably only needfloat
(or less!) due to the sheer quantity of errors in the input data…
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@ben_lubar are people in the game industry really that bad at C++? Please tell me this is an isolated example...
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are people in the game industry really that bad
Yes.
That also holds true when I add your “at C++” to the sentence.
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@ben_lubar are people in the game industry really that bad at C++? Please tell me this is an isolated example...
Gamedev is not far from the industry average. And the industry average isn't far from that slide. For example, most people still think lists are faster than vectors for random insertions and deletions.
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When I wanted to get started with Unity I 'evaluated' every book I could find in the usual places, and the ones from Packt weren't even worth it for free.
Even if the information was all correct (I only read a few pages of each) the presentation was usually appalling.
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The next step is realizing that there are people developing web games, thus combining all the competence of your average game developer with all the competence of your average web developer.
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Oh hey, Firefox's new tab page has this little icon with a fox wearing a VR helmet. Maybe I'll post it on the Fox Ideas thread.
It's small, but it looks like it is an SVG file, so I can make it as big as I want:
Decodes Base64 from data URL, saves file to disk, opens it in browser
That's a lot smaller than I wanted. Zooms in. Wait, that looks all pixelated.
Opens in Inkscape
Uh-hum.
Opens SVG file in text editor
The best part is of course:
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@Zecc It's almost as if text-based formats are a bad idea and the only reason we use them is we can't agree on a proper goddamn container format for binary data.
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No internet? No problem! It's certainly no reason to stop the spinner according to Windows Update.
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Ever since I set my desktop background to solid blue, my window borders have been... solid purple?.
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@Applied-Mediocrity Why do you say Spintires got "abandoned"? It was finished. ... right?
Was there some feature promised that you didn't get? I guess is my question.
If you want abandoned, see DayZ. A game I paid $30 for like 6 years ago and isn't any closer to completion now than it was then.