PM_Your_Nudes_Please @ PM_Your_Nudes_Please @lemmy.world

Posts

4

Comments

1,642

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yup. Voyager/Wefwef is basically the new Apollo. It’s not 100% there in terms of feature parity, but it’s damned close and is being actively developed.

and easier to work out mentally IMO.

And this is the key factor to why math teaching has changed. Rote memorization is actually really really awful for learning.

Teaching math used to be a case of having students fill out their times tables. I still remember having to fill out this chart in under 5 minutes:

This was a quiz that we had to do multiple times per week. It was given to us blank, and 5 minutes obviously isn’t enough time to actually calculate everything; We were expected to have it memorized. And when the students had memorized the table, the quizzes changed into a series of small calculations from the table, again under 5 minutes. So if we ever had to calculate anything out, we could just refer to our memorized times table and pull the number off of that. But the issue is that this only works up to a certain point; Nobody is going to be able to reasonably memorize their times table beyond maybe 15x15. And this means that the times table essentially becomes worthless for doing math in larger numbers.

So instead, the “new” math teaches students how to take complicated problems (like 17x3) and break it down into easier steps. 17x3 is complicated, but 20x3 is just 2x3 with an added 0, and 3x3 is easy too. So if we can convert 17x3 into (20x3)-(3x3) then it becomes much easier to do in your head. Because not everyone can calculate 17x3 accurately, but virtually anyone beyond 1st grade can calculate 60-9.

The “new” math was developed by studying how the students who were good at math actually did their calculations. And it turns out, when you actually understand the concepts, you can create mental shortcuts to break the difficult problem down into a series of smaller problems. And that’s exactly what the “new” math does.

Yup. Epstein getting killed was inevitable, but it’s not like he had many fans; child molesters don’t tend to win popularity contests (unless it’s running for the highest seat in the country…) His death had people upset, but only because it meant he wouldn’t be able to testify against all the billionaires. He was only working against the billionaires because the prosecutors were forcing him to do so.

But Luigi is a symbol of someone actively working against the billionaires, and killing him will turn him into a martyr.

Also, government is built for stability, not efficiency. Ever heard of a company Bus Number? It’s how many individual employees can get hit by a bus, and the company continues to operate without interruption. A higher bus number means less efficiency, but also more stability. And importantly, even the most efficient companies should never have a bus number of 0, because that’s just setting your company up for failure.

If you have one dude down in IT who has been silently plugging away for 20 years, does all of the weekly server maintenance tasks without making a huge fuss about it, has slowly absorbed other duties throughout the years, etc? Yeah, if he gets hit by a bus, your company is likely fucked. Maybe not right away, but soon enough, when all of those “extra” tasks suddenly aren’t getting done and begin to pile up. Even if the company immediately re-hires for the position, the new person won’t know everything that the old dude was doing. Since the old dude had just been quietly soldiering on, a lot of his job duties were tacit and implied, rather than being written in a job description anywhere. The bus number is 0 in a surprising amount of multimillion dollar companies, because efficiency means there’s just one or two people holding everything together.

Imagine if the DMV was forced to close for the week, just because Janet in accounting got the flu and she was the only one who knew how to do some mission-critical task. Or even worse, what if City Hall shut down after a tornado landed across town? Because one or two people across town happened to work at City Hall, and were affected. People would lose their goddamned minds, because crisis is when people need the government the most. People expect roads to be cleared of debris, power lines to be repaired, access restored to blocked neighborhoods, water service to be restored, etc… But if the government has a low bus number, there’s a good chance that the government will shut down when a few government employees are affected. The bloat is, in large part, a redundancy to ensure continued operation. The government never has just one person capable of doing a task.

Yeah, New Mexico IDs and license plates both say “New Mexico, USA” for exactly this reason. So many people have almost been illegally arrested and turned over to ICE by incompetent cops during traffic stops. Cops will pull New Mexico plates over, see the New Mexico ID, and demand to see visa paperwork because they think the person is from Mexico.

Any “retro” collection. Old video games, for instance. In many cases, the barrier to entry is sky high, because there are very few old consoles or games on the market; The collectors have bought all of them, and are never planning on selling.

It’s tedious, but it’s mostly just a matter of waiting for the water to heat back up afterwards.

Unplug the heater, then run the bathtub until you’re out of hot water. Turn off the bathtub, and turn off the water supply going into the heater. Attach a garden hose to the bottom of the heater, and run it to a drain somewhere. Turn the hot water on somewhere like a sink, to provide a vent to the system; It won’t run because the supply is turned off, but it’ll at least allow air into the system for when you drain the heater. Use the spigot at the bottom of the heater to drain it.

Be prepared for a gross rush of water at first, because all of the sediment and rust will have settled to the bottom of the heater where the spigot is. Once it’s drained, you can do whatever maintenance you need. For instance, you probably need to replace the cathode rod, which is designed to wear away over time to protect the rest of the heater from corrosion.

To do a final flush, you can open the water inlet at the top of the tank. It’ll help drain any last remaining sediment out of the tank. Then turn off the water inlet, turn off the spigot, disconnect the hose, and leave the sink tap open while you refill the tank with fresh water.

The whole process only takes like 30 minutes, and then you’re just waiting for the heater to come back up to temperature afterwards.

My wife was caught up in that Ebola scare, because she was on the same plane that the nurse (who had been treating Ebola patients and knew she had been exposed) flew in on. The feds came knocking on her door, and basically said that if anyone in the household left the house, they would immediately go to prison. They put ankle monitors on everyone in the household, and security tape across all the doors and windows so none could be opened without visibly breaking the tape. The CDC called every hour or so to do mandatory temperature checks, and they had to talk to every person in the household to make sure everyone was still present.

Apparently she almost got fired over it, because her manager initially didn’t believe her. She tried to pull the typical “if you’re sick you need to find someone to cover your shifts. If you can’t find anyone, you need to come in” BS that is rampant in retail. It wasn’t until my wife had the feds call her manager and basically tell her “she’s 100% under quarantine, and if you encourage her to break it we’ll haul your ass in front of a judge” that the manager relented.

I bet he'd be like "Nah, use it to pay for people’s health care more assassins.”

Imagine a crowdfunded CEO bounty program

Yup, this is my concern. They’ll claim he resisted during their no-knock raid, and they had no choice but to execute him in his bed. And all of the body footage will be “accidentally” scrubbed, or every single officer “forgot” to turn their body cams on.

“The assassin didn’t resist” is going to be the new “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

Supposedly, once they got across the border and got access to Russian smart phones, they quickly discovered porn. There were several reports (though TBF, they could have been propaganda), that the NK soldiers kept getting caught masturbating by the Russians they were working alongside, and some were incapacitated due to the fact that they had masturbation-related injuries. Like the NK soldiers just used every single opportunity to whip out their new phones and beat their meat until it was bloody.

It’s a blue collar union, and blue collar workers (regardless of union status) overwhelmingly vote conservative.

That’s my concern. It’ll go the way of climate change and school shootings.

The narrative will shift from “it doesn’t happen” to “there’s nothing we can do to stop it” to “why even bother? It’s normal so it’s not a big deal.”

I think you need to read more than the first five words of my comment, because that’s the exact opposite of what I said.

Oh it absolutely will be, but they would have found other justifications to pardon people anyways. This gives them a convenient talking point, but they could have drawn one out of the ether anyways.

Ah you’re right. I was thinking of Lozito v. The City of New York. Same ruling; different circumstances.

Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.

For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.

So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.

So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.

Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.

Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.

Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.

We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 7 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 6 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1 and worked subsequently, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.

Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra three or four searches (1-1000 > 1-500 > 1-250 > 1-125 > 1-75… etc…) to narrow it down.

If they don't do their job and you have proof then they're screwed

Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.

The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.

The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.

Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.

My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.

Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.

And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.

Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.

The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.

Oh I enjoyed the gameplay. But the actual story of the second play through was a slog until about 75% of the way through.