Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
How do you all cope with the great ensloppification of the net when searching.
I usually limit to before 2022 but that’s increasingly out of date, fiddly, and not always accurate anyway. I just fucking hate getting a couple of paragraphs into something and realising it’s all fake.
And human work is buried in tides of garbage. It’s not like it was great the last few years BS (before slop) but it’s awful now
At this point, when I’m looking up something that hits me with pagefuls of links to barely relevant vibecoded scam websites, I’d rather ask a fucking chatbot. At least it’s usually (?) able to give me links to real websites. Very much a choose your flavour of infuriating slop situation.
The irony being that the chatbot does seem to have access to a list of relevant, non-slop websites, or at least some sort of way to rank searches by reliability, which of course they would never implement in the human-usable search engines.
I wonder if there’s a market for RevivingYahooTM, which in some ways was more link curation than search engine.
When searching for examples of commands, I’ve sometimes been resorting to telling google to restrict itself to pdf files of specific websites (example redhat, with sometimes useful commands for server maintenance broadly)
It’s a bit sad that it’s not just search that has gone downhill, but new documentation too (I swear Microsoft Azure documentation is getting worse).
Really bumping up against this taking a math class. It’s not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. There’s at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. That’s the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasn’t slop-adjacent.
I’m glad I studied when hyperphysics was top of the search results. Education now seems miserable.
You can get a local copy of all of hyperphysics
Which math class?
Calculus III, vector calculus
Well, that at least I’m reasonably prepared to answer questions about.
Here’s a free online textbook that may be useful. I’d also recommend grabbing a copy of Mary L. Boas’ Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences.
Thanks. So far, the questions I missed on the first exam were mainly due to sign errors when calculating determinants for cross-products, so that’s a simple enough fix I suppose. I’ve seen some of the material before, as halfway through the last time I took Calc 3 was when the Covid lockdowns hit. Even though classes are back in-person, this current instructor is still presenting most of the material in static notes and lecture videos online, so it’s still a tough adaptation for me. We’re using the James Stewart text that is pretty common everywhere, though thankfully the instructor has set it up so I don’t have to pay for ebook access yet again.
I picked up the famous Spivak text a few years ago, and am only just now working up the courage to crack it open. I’ve had a few years’ gap in between classes, so reviewing the earlier material with more proofs involved is probably a worthwhile exercise in any event. I’m given to understand that particular text is something of an on-ramp to real analysis. I’ve been considering trying for a math minor once I transfer for engineering, and it seems like real and/or numerical analysis would be two of the prime upper-division classes for that.
Yeah, there’s not much to be done about sign errors, other than practicing problems until you reach the point where you always make an even number of them.
You might not need it for this course, but cross products got easier for me once I learned my way around the Levi-Civita_symbol and the Einstein summation convention. This is covered in chapter 10 of Boas’ book; she cites Evett (1966).
Real analysis is definitely the kind of course that can benefit from an on-ramp. It’s often a student’s first encounter with proofs that involve a lot of machinery: theorem after theorem of epsilon-delta business to establish something that you didn’t doubt in the first place. I think it’s easy to get lost in the details there, particularly if care isn’t taken to explain what confusions these methods were devised to avoid.
The OpenStax textbook covers the development of the general equations of the various conic sections. If the Stewart book covers that in such detail, it must be jammed into the appendices or exercises someplace. I’ll have to find the time to go over that, at least; I still don’t have a great intuition for hyperbolas.
Yes, this looks like what I need to understand the negative j term in the cross product formula. Cambridge looks to have the 3rd edition of Boas’ book up for download, so I have a copy now. We’ll see how well I comprehend it, I feel like I’m missing the concept of index permutation to really understand the Wikipedia article.
I don’t know how much traffic we’d get if we tried to cultivate a math discussion here. I did make an account on Mathstodon too and perhaps I should spend more time there. Tutoring at this level is sparse, at least at a community college. There’s one tutor for my class available via Zoom, and the instructor himself is apparently teaching 5 classes when he’s only under contract for three. If I signed up for 5 classes as a student, I’m sure I’d be setting off all sorts of alarm bells in the registration department, if they even let me go through with it.
The Levi-Civita symbol is, in programming lingo, a function that takes three arguments:
epsilon(i,j,k)wherei,jandkare integers that label the coordinate axes. Let 0 stand for the x axis, 1 for the y and 2 for the z. Thenepsilon(0,1,2)equals 1. If we swap the values of any two arguments, we flip the sign: e.g.,epsilon(1,0,2)evaluates to -1. Now, swap again:epsilon(1,2,0)must change sign again, so it evaluates to 1. But the sequence 1,2,0 is just the original sequence 0,1,2 read cyclically from a different starting point. In this way, we can work out what the value of theepsilonfunction is for any input. When the inputs are all different, the output is either 1 or -1, depending on whether the input sequence is “in order” or “in reverse order”. Write the numbers 0, 1 and 2 around a circle. Read clockwise, and you get one output; read counterclockwise, and you get the other. If two inputs are the same, thenepsilonmust evaluate to zero, because, for example,epsilon(0,0,1)with the first two inputs swapped isepsilon(0,0,1)again, meaning that the output must be minus itself.limiting to .edu or ye olde mathematics stack exchange might get you part of the way, in addition to the previous suggestions. Lots of good stuff on old university websites!
Edit: and hyperphysics, as suggested by schnoopy
My non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isn’t that important.
More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that https://marginalia-search.com/ excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.
the marginalia dude is a bit of both-sideist, though it could’ve been worse (his second reply in the thread clarifies things a bit). and frankly, most of the alternative search engines developers are worse.
Software programmers: At last we have created the Milkshake Duck from classic internet shitpost “Do Not Create the Milkshake Duck”
Yeah, his clarification means he may be a liberal or anarkiddy rather than, as was my first reaction, a fascist.
This is nice! I’m curious how it’s building its index.
Probably not great fot general research, but for finding wholesome authentic stuff like cooking recipes it seems great.
Yeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it won’t function as a complete substitute for another.
Unfortunately some stuff is important lol. I’ll check out marginalia but suspect it’ll be hard to find non evil-empire focused stuff