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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • While I do agree that math gets much easier with interest, and that it gets more interesting the further you get into it, and that math is inherently beautiful, etc. I feel this argument has to fall flat to people who don’t already agree. It’s the education equivalent of when someone says they couldn’t get into an anime and then the fans tell them ‘oh it gets really good around season 9’. You could be completely correct, as you are here, but it’s utterly unconvincing if you don’t already “know.”

    To be fair, I think this is mostly a problem with math curricula. Math classes up through high school and early college seem to focus on well trodden solutions to boring problems, and at some (far too late) point it flips around to being creative solutions to interesting problems. I think this could be fixed eventually, but such is the system we have now.



  • I’ve seen the occasional post here on lemmy making this point. I don’t see anything factually wrong in saying she’d likely keep status quo or even make it worse. But when I see this said the one thing that I always wonder is never addressed:

    How would the outcome be better if you voted against her?

    Like, I have to imagine that someone making this argument thinks Trump would improve the situation. Because if that isn’t the case, then this is not a decision I’m making at the voting booth, so saying she’d continue genocide as a reason to vote against her falls flat (and, if you’re wondering, is why people are quick to downvote this argument). Is the hope that Trump will see the artillery shells sent to isreal as “librul policy” and axe it on that basis? Or that he’ll do such a bad job that he’ll get assassinated/arrested/overthrown? Something else entirely?

    Enlighten me, because I can’t envision Trump making anything better.






  • I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.

    One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.

    It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.


  • I agree pretty strongly with this generally. The farside has a way of having jokes that are so simple on it’s face that I’m left thinking “surely I’ve missed something?” Usually it turns out that no, in fact, I got the joke and was just vastly underwhelmed.

    For whatever reason I found this one to be mildly funny. Couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps it’s the idea that the people who built the atomic bomb weren’t that smart after all?