apricot
apricot on Hacker News
I'm not sure anything I say can convince you, as your mind seems to be made up already, but my experience has been that those videos help my students understand the concepts of linear algebra, comparing the mastery level now vs. before the series was published on YouTube. Especially when it comes to getting a feeling for what a linear transformation is, and how the properties of matrices echo the properties of the transformation they represent.
As for "fresh learners", I can provide my own son, who watched the series before taking his first linear algebra class, and says that it helped him a lot.
No learning gains? I teach linear algebra. I can assure you that students who watch and study the "Essence of linear algebra" videos (which I recommend on the syllabus) do better on my tests that those who don't, because they learn stuff from them.
"We have altered the deal..."
> In a world where allegations are disconnected from reality, we can only expect repression to be increasingly disproportionate.
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
I hadn't, thanks! Spaced repetition is certainly a useful tool. I always try to start every lecture with one or two review problems (that I call "brick problems", making sure the previous brick row is solid before building on it).
I don't assign homework anymore because I have no interest in grading AI output (and even less interest in asking AI to grade AI output). The inverted classroom approach works well for me. Students read the textbook on their own (and I encourage them to use office hours, collaborate, or use AI tools if they need more explanations), doing checkpoint exercises to make sure they understand the material, and class time is spent on working problems.
> This would be such a dumb thing to do, and so easy to get caught with...
Based on what I see of American politics, it seems like the thing to do, then!
My son was really into Brio trains when he was young, and I wrote a program to visually design layouts by placing track segments one after the other. The program took that tolerance into account, and gave a score to the layout based on how much it had to force the pieces together. I had the idea of adding some automation to design complex networks but that never materialized.
I teach linear algebra in college, and during our first class, I urge all my students to watch this series as soon as possible. It's great at giving them a geometrical understanding of what's going on, so they feel more motivated to learn the theorems and do computation (and already develop some intuition as to why the theorems are true).
In addition to the points listed, it gives the algorithm nerds the opportunity to show their overqualification by whipping out the O(n) median algorithm and proving that it works in linear time.
That kind of innovation is not always for the best. As an example, after hearing so much praise about the kuru-toga mechanical pencil, which rotates the lead as you write so it stays sharp longer, I went and bought one. I hate it. The rotation mechanism means the lead doesn't stay in place but has a weird "give" to it, which I notice every time I raise the pen and put it back to the paper. It's very small, a fraction of a millimeter, but it is noticeable and distracting. For me, the cure is a lot worse than the disease. I went back to my 10-year-old Pentel P205 which is stable as a rock.
This was funnier than I thought it would be.
I bought a Filco Majestouch with Cherry blues, 15 to 20 years ago. I'm still using it, and don't plan on stopping. It's not wireless and doesn't have backlighting or RGB lights on it, but I don't care about any of that. It just works and feels great. It was expensive but worth every dollar — and might very well outlive me.
AppleWin, and the assembler is an early version of Glen Bredon's Merlin.
I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment.
Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one.
We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I taught them about assembly language and told them about the registers, instructions, and addressing modes of the chip, memory map and monitor routines of the Apple, and after that we went and wrote a few programs together, mostly using the low-resolution graphics mode (40x40): a drawing program, a bouncing ball, culminating in hand-rolled sprites with simple collision detection.
Their assignment is to write a simple program (I suggested a low-res game like Snake or Tetris but they can do whatever they want provided they tell me about it and I okay it), demo their program, and then explain to the class how it works.
At first they hated the line editor. But then a very interesting thing happened. They started thinking about their code before writing it. Planning. Discussing things in advance. Everything we told them they should do before coding in previous classes, but they didn't do because a powerful editor was right there so why not use it?...
And then they started to get used to the line editor. They told me they didn't need to really see the code on the screen, it was in their head.
They will of course go back to modern tools after class is finished, but I think it's good for them to have this kind of experience.
Nah, that's just how Stephen Wolfram writes. He also really enjoys telling us how great he is, and does so in every piece he writes.
And it produces an amazing amount of horseshit.
By an amazing coincidence, that's also my date of birth, as well as my kids'.
So much effort is spent in the computer industry to un-solve previously solved problems.
> So, you can 'set it up', but you can't 'set up it'.
You can, however, set up us the bomb.
> Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin.
Advertising company's browser makes it hard to block ads. Film at 11.
I also prefer web versions for similar reasons, and enjoy them while I still can.
What an abject thing to say.
Automatic translation, for sure, as evidenced by this sentence in the two's complement section:
In fact, complement is a concept in counting systems, and the Chinese term for it is "complement".
This is awesome. You are awesome.
> That's not within his power to do.
What rock have you been living under for the past eight months?
I disagree. I'm still using hardware that I bought at the turn of the century (a wireless mouse and an MP3 player) because they are powered by rechargeable AAA cells. If they used a built-in battery, I would have had to replace the battery, which is much more complex than changing a AAA cell.
I have three recent electronic devices that I would like to keep using but cannot, as their battery has reached end of life, replacements are hard to find, and changing the battery involves performing surgery on the device that I'm not confident I can do safely.
Maybe there's something I don't understand, but I think "broken bar" should be a broken bar, and "vertical line" should be a vertical line, rather than the reverse.
This is a great project. I want to show it to as many teenagers as I can.