Sometimes the monopolist does something better for everyone. I’m this case, it’s selfish, of course, because they want people to click the back button to get back into their advertising platform “ecosystem”, but it’s nice to catch a W from "Don’t be evil [when you’re building marketshare]” Google.

I wonder if that’s AI slop? Not saying the whole article is, mind, but if an LLM is used at any stage, it likes to inject superfluous, overly exact adjectives that don’t match the context.

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.

Is Prime Gaming going to be affected?

My read is that this is shutting down all free access to Luna game streaming. I don’t read anything that implies this will affect game codes.

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. Since 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.

Totally agreed, but authors are straight fucked if they try. Popular authors in my genre of choice have tried, and they all say it was a financial disaster for them, and that they can’t afford to be a full time author author KU income. And readers will follow where authors are, since those are the books they want to read.

Amazon’s monopoly on self publishing is probably illegal, but until regulators notice, network effects and anticompetitive practices from Amazon reinforce their monopoly.

Like, my options are, literally:

• Stop reading almost all of the best books in the genre of books that I enjoy, or
• Pirate the books, or
• Read on Kindle Unlimited

Authors have also said that they’re so dependent on The Algorithm, that praying their books hits them double, from the lost revenue and from the reduced visibility. So that’s a double dick move.

I hate it, but here we are.

At least I read so much that Amazon pays authors like 10× what I pay to subscribe, so that’s pretty cool. (~300-400 books/year adds up to a lot of KENP pages!) And I’m not paying $3-5K/year for books to buy them all, sorry. I can’t afford that!

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.

And another reason to support Canada joining the EU.

Economies of scale can make a huge difference in costs, and requiring all cloud services to be entirely domestic would greatly limit options and increase costs. If we can join the EU, then we’ll be part of a big enough economic block to get full benefits from economies of scale and still retain data sovereignty within the context of membership.

Fuck US corporations, their lobbyists, the regulatory capture that leads to their anti-consumer laws, and trade agreements exporting their wealth-concentration laws globally. Disney, in particular, can get fucked with their life-of-creator-plus-90-years copyright terms. But I digress.

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.)

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.

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.

The challenge is the monopolistic death grip Amazon has on self publishing.

For many genres, authors get almost all of their income from Kindle Unlimited. KU requires exclusivity. The result is entire genres of books that are almost entirely Kindle exclusive.

So, the only real options for readers of these genes is either Kindle Unlimited (or buying on Kindle, I suppose) or piracy.

Some authors release serialized content on Patreon or a similar paid or free platform, but those platforms often only get first drafts, are difficult to navigate to get full books, and only cover a subset of authors anyway. And books get “stubbed”, which means everything past the 10% mark gets deleted to comply with Amazon exclusivity, so this is only even an option if you read the whole thing as it is being written. (FWIW, it’s also crazy expensive if you want to sort authors; it can easily cost hundreds of dollars monthly with all the subscriptions.)

So, if you want authors to get paid for their work, then, realistically, you’re stuck using Kindle.

It sucks, but that’s the reality until regulators prevent Amazon from forcing exclusivity for inclusion in the KU program.

It’s still easy/cheap to buy new or used legacy USB data cables.

One wonders whether these old devices just don’t have enough telemetry built in for Amazon’s liking.

I think it’s likely more about DRM.

Old Kindles are incompatible with Amazon’s .kfx format ebooks and newer, stronger DRM. With an old Kindle, it was trivially easy to rip Kindle books to retail-quality epubs.

With these devices ceasing to work with Kindle books starting next month, that loophole closes.

Also, old Kindles will continue to work with already-downloaded Kindle books and DRM-free books, but new files can only be added by USB cable, not using Amazon’s services.

The newer DRM also has working exploits, but it’s not nearly as easy, and they’ve indirectly hinted that one of the remaining methods may be closing soon. But, fundamentally, static media DRM (books, music, movies) is inherently beatable; the full content gets displayed to the user, so it can be intercepted and ripped. Worst case, someone will make a screen-capture app that uses perfect OCR to recreate the book. That’s already a solved problem, basically, it’s just horribly inefficient.

So Amazon will continue to play whack-a-mole, turning millions of devices into e-waste, without even causing a blip for book pirates and those needing format shifting for accessibility.

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.

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.

That’s not really how it works.

Interest rates get low during recessions by deliberate choice from central banks. They reduce interest rates directly to stimulate economic activity. This works because the cost of longer-term investment in growth is, largely, based on interest rates.

You’re slightly right that holding wealth increases money supply, but only indirectly, and only to a certain extent. Most importantly, the amount of money held in banks and investments isn’t affected much by market cycles—the amount saved changes dramatically, but that’s a small percentage of total wealth holdings, so it doesn’t matter much in the short term.

The bigger factor for increasing financial activity is something called monetary velocity, which is a measure of how many times the same dollar is spent per year. Like, you buy something from a store, they pay their employees with that dollar, the employee pays their rent, then the landlord… etc. Monetary velocity can change suddenly in a recession, so it has a far bigger impact.

If you’re interested in this, I’d suggest taking an introductory macroeconomics course. There are lots of free MOOC course options for this, but it’ll take 50-200 hours to complete one of them, likely, depending on your academic background and academic skills.