When it was new, I got a lot of "Certainly! ..."
Like, come on, mate. You didn't even read the first sentence before submitting.
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VB is still great. I use it to fully automate a lot of Excel-based tasks, like looping through thousands of Excel files to pull values or update spreadsheets with new features.
Sure, there are more powerful tools, but VBA is built in and works really well for some tasks like that.
I think that the core idea, that Ubuntu is taking risks, shipping an LTS with major changes, is concerning. New core utils that don't have feature parity, pipewire as a snap, a single-digit-days-old kernel (which has major changes to scheduling that cause known major regressions with some major software until they get updated), a new sudo implementation that may not be as secure (?), etc. Plus, jumping the hardware req to 6 GB and removing a GUI app for non-snap apps...
Just more evidence that Ubuntu isn't a good recommendation anymore.
I'd go a step further, and say it's a bad idea to recommend any Ubuntu-based distros. Yes, that means Mint.
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I don't have time to get into the full 13 (? iirc) steps of Liljedahl's Thinking Classrooms approach, but it's exactly designed to meet the needs of students like you. Some highlights:
- Students are randomly assigned to a new group of 3 daily
- All students work on vertical whiteboards, or equivalents
- The teacher presents a math task that starts easy-ish, but requires some work/thought to figure out
- If 30% of students in the room understand the task, then it will quickly trickle between groups
- The teacher circles exemplars of great thinking; students are not allowed to erase these until the next debrief
- The teacher regularly cycles back to get students to explain their work to the class, showcasing and explaining the bits the teacher circled
- Start over with a more advanced task/"next step"
It's an incredibly effective teaching method for secondary math. And there's clear motivation every step of the way for what you're doing and why it matters.
And the teacher only explains about 5-10% of the material; everything else is explained by the students as the carefully curated progression of activities guides them through discovering the math themselves.
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Yes, examples like that are good, of course. But, frankly, abstract examples like that won't do much to motivate the students who need the most help to get motivated learning math.
I like to interject little anecdotes like that, too. One of my "go tos" to "why are quadratics useful" goes something like "Well, they come up a fair bit, so I could give you some examples—and I will, as we with through the unit, but the real reason we teach quadratics is because they're the simplest non-linear function. This is the first steps into looking at functions that aren't a straight line. And the tools you use to work with quadratics are super important for understanding all the really cool functions you get to learn on the next couple of years..."
That's basically your example, but one step lower and more directly applicable to students, imho. The Taylor Series thing I usually only drop in grade 11/12 (pre)calculus classes, mostly as a hook for the math nerds that they have really cool things to look forward to learning in post secondary. It's a terrible application to use to try to motivate learning about polynomials for a student who couldn't care less, lol.
Really, we need to intermix all approaches, depending on the students in the class. At private prep schools, leaning into academic needs works well. In a non-academic math stream, both your example and my examples will go over like a lead balloon.
But, regardless, motivating students to be excited for math, and the excitement of finally figuring out a tricky concept/problem? That's what we need more of.
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If by "practical application" you mean "motivation for learning the skill", which is I think the way you're using it, then yes. But that's not the usual definition in math education, and not what most people mean by it.
Like, for example, to introduce quadratics, a good progression might be to challenge students to build a table of values and graphs for x², then x² + 3, then graph x² – 5 without a table of values, then 2x² vs. 5x² vs. ½x², –x², etc.
And if you have a Thinking Classroom, every student in the class is working on figuring out that progression collaboratively in small groups. The teacher guides students to discover the math themselves through a series of examples, and mostly interacts with the students by asking questions, never giving them the answers.
That's not "a practical application of quadratics"—at least not in the usual definition—that's a learning activity sequence (paired with a set of interrelated pedagogical practices).
A good, practical application of quadratics is more like a Dan Meyer "3 Act Math" lesson on predicting the trajectory of a basketball shot. Also cool, good teaching. But not a great way to introduce quadratics.
(P.S. Yes, I use and like em dashes. I'm not a robot.)
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Citation needed.
Seriously, though, that's not what the research is showing. Peter Liljedahl's research, for example, supports that a very effective way to teach mathematics is by having students actually think about math, instead of just passively receiving info dumps (as is common in most traditional math classes). See Building Thinking Classrooms for details but, in short, it's a method of getting students playing with math concepts for almost the entire class time every day.
No "practical applications" needed. Counterintuitive, but it's a highly effective practice.
What's core to practical applications working is student motivation, and practical applications are one way to induce motivation. But it's often not the best option, especially for inherently abstract skills.
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That kinda breaks down in practice, though. Math is hard for a lot of students. Adding an extra layer of domain-specific application on top of an already confusing topic just makes it worse.
Like, we need polynomials for huge swathes of higher-level math. My favourite application of polynomials is that most continuous functions can be approximated by a Taylor series, which makes some functions that are otherwise impossible to calculate a derivative or integral trivially easy. It's elegant, beautiful, and deeply practical.
And completely useless for a grade 8 student learning about polynomials for the first time.
Sure, there's lower-hanging fruit for practical uses for polynomials, but they're either similarly abstract (albeit simpler) or contrived. Ain't nobody making a sandbox with length (3x + 5) and width (2x – 7), eh?
I could go on. At length.
Point being, yes, practical applications are better. BUT (and this is a big but) only when there are simple practical applications.
Instead, recent math education research supports teaching fluency through playing with math concepts and exploring things in many ways: symbolically, graphically, forwards and backwards, extending iteratively with increasing complexity, etc. This helps students develop intuition for math concepts and deeper understanding. Then, and only then, teach the standard algorithms and methods, as students will appreciate the efficiency of the tool and understand what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.
This argument fundamentally misunderstands AI and copyright.
Straight dumps of AI output can't be copyrighted, but as soon as it's modified by a human in nontrivial ways, it's copyrightable again. If open source projects are using straight dumps of AI output without modifications, then the project will be irrelevant before copyright matters, lol.
It's great for coding things that you don't care if it gets it wrong, though. Like, I vibe coded a JavaScript injection to add a client-side accessibility feature to a website running a fairly complex tech stack. I don't know JavaScript, but I know how to code, and I know enough HTML and CSS to do simple things.
It failed quite a few times, but each time I just needed to refresh the page for a clean slate, tell the LLM how it fucked up, and try again. In about an hour, I had a functional script I could inject in the site to bolt on a new feature.
I was reading the code along the way, so I know what it's doing for the most part (not some of the JavaScript things, like why there are extra brackets in places I wouldn't expect, but whatever.) It wasn't doing anything dangerous.
Not mission critical. A small block of code to do one simple thing. There was no real downside or cost of failure, aside from wasted time. And it's small enough that it's easy to understand from scratch; it'll be fairly easy to update and maintain.
On the other hand, it sounds like Microslop and NVidia (and many others) are using AI slop in complex, mission-critical projects. I'd be nervous for their future, if I cared about them.
Not if you're running an Arch-based distro, like CachyOS. Between CachyOS's Hello app and Octopi, it just works.
Granted, I do use the terminal, but that's because I'm a tinkerer and I want to do unusual things, not just web + games + office suite. For most users, they never need to see the terminal, aside from hitting "q" and "y" when they install or update things a few times.
Brittleness didn't get talked about enough. I couldn't figure out why my fundament was breaking on retraction to my Creality Hi CFS over and over again. It was driving me nuts. The prints all came out looking great, so I thought I wasn't having humidity issues and that there was a mechanical problem somewhere. Took the whole damn thing apart to clean and check that everything was tightened to correctly. Multiple times.
I just needed a filament dryer.
I had no idea that filament snapping on retraction could be caused by wet filament, and I read about 3D printing a lot more than most. Almost all threads about wet filament are about print quality, and people rarely mention brittleness. Conversely, in threads about filament jams/errors, most comments focus on the mechanical parts (tension, loose screws, debris in the gears, temps, etc.) and rarely mention wet, brittle filament as a possible cause.
If you're reading this and don't have one (or another method for it), get a filament dryer. I recommend the Creality one when it goes on sale as it's one of the cheapest options that can hit the high temps needed for some filaments and that can also be used as a dry box you can print from. My only gripe is needing to prop the lid open when it's drying to release the humidity. It's silly that it can't dry filament properly without the door cracked open.
In recent history, it's every 20 versions, iirc: 5.19, 6.0, ... , 6.19, 7.0
I'm not a kernel developer, but it does seem weird to remove the legacy function in the same patch as the replacement function is shipped.
That said, isn't it fairly easy to install a modified kernel? Or is that hard on Ubuntu for some reason? I suppose it's to do with official support cycles and patches, so that's only really a viable fix if the distro manages to kernel options, to ensure timelines with security patches and commercial support.
I appreciate that the author suggests that Google take on maintenance of the Drive integration. I'd rather volunteers work on supporting open platforms and protocols, which seems to be what they're doing.
Which reminds me: I need to get a Syncthing server set up.
What the AI slop did I just read? That wasn't even edited.
The infill selections for comparison don't make a lick of sense, and one of the tables doesn't even have content that matches its introduction.
What a waste of time.
Edit: 57 upvotes? What the hell. Does nobody read the article?
Sounds like Windows Search Indexer. I just changed the settings in my Win 11 VM to only index the Start menu, but I'm also an old school folder user, so I never use the Windows menu to find files anyway.
Before the change, my VM was arbitrarily locking up, unable to do just about anything. It's been a lot smoother since the change.
Except for when sandboxing is better, like for server-type things that need to "just work" and won't directly interface with anything else on the system.
Like, a WiFi mesh network controller has no need to access anything on the system at all and users will only interact with it by a web portal. Docker (or an alternative) is perfect for that.
The ending content is pretty level-headed about this. Basically, "wait for a legal consult/directives from Arch Linux before implementing anything." That seems like the most prudent thing to do.
Hopefully, the legal opinion is that this is unconstitutional, and that a conglomerate of nonprofits will collectively agree to fight this in court if any of them are sued over ignoring stupid laws.
The headlines focusing on AI layoffs are still mostly missing this, too.
The real reason for layoffs in tech are from a quiet recession that's hidden by circular AI cashflows, correcting for inflated staff count from COVID overenthusiasm, or to free cashflow for throwing more money into the AI pit. (Or all three, of course).
AI doesn't reduce headcount; it just slightly increases the efficiency of skilled workers to do simple, mundane tasks—and even that requires careful oversight or it'll inevitably fuck it up.
But skilled workers are quick at mundane tasks... it's just boring. So it's not really generating much value, even in the best case.
And the sloppening is showing us all the downsides.
The house of cards is going to come tumbling down soon, and it's going to be a lot worse than the 1999 dot com crash. I heard that OpenAI needs to pay big bills for datacenter expansion in the fall with money they don't have—I don't have the source for it, but, if true, that could be the domino that triggers the crash. Circular cashflows between highly leveraged companies makes the entire chain as fragile as the weakest link.
An 80% market correction wouldn't be outside of historical norms. Hold onto your hat on the way down!