“Exquisite use of an interrobang, good sir. I doff my fedora to thee.”

Having worked at institutions with “no Friday deadlines” as a rule, but Monday 8/9am deadlines are A-OK, I feel your pain. The “logic” from central management is that us markers don’t have to mark over weekends and have enough time to mark before classes on Wednesday-Friday, but what’s stopping me from just ignoring the assignment marking until Monday?

For me it’s Grothendieck’s prime.

Divisibility by 3 rule is real. If the sum of the digits of a number is divisible by 3, then the number itself is also divisible by 3. Same goes with 9. There’s an 11 rule, but it’s a bit convoluted.

It’s more insidious than dead internet theory. Imagine any significant social media platform containing a large proportion of users that can be directly prompted to tout any message, or mass downvote opinions that the company doesn’t like. All this can happen while the company claims to be a “free speech platform”.

There should be a narcissist’s prayer for people who bury their heads in the sand.

That didn’t happen

And if it did, it’s contained online

And if it isn’t, it’s not popular

And if it is, you can ignore it

And if you can’t, ¯\(ツ)/¯

Depends on your frame of reference. When traversing the surface of a globe, your described concept of a straight line isn’t intuitive.

”For a comment.”

In this day and age, who hasn’t made incredibly specific ultraviolent threats against an elected official while constantly reassuring others that they are serious/making a promise to enact these threats? Did this upstanding citizen simply forget to cite his first amendment rights to the agents?

The is me with my PhD thesis. I wrote it, submitted it, planned for an absolute grilling in the Viva, got waved through the Viva with just minor corrections for grammar, went overzealous with corrections, submitted for review, got accepted, finally graduated.

It still makes me sick to look at it on my bookshelf.

This really makes me grin, as I’ve argued these “theological debates” on multiple sides depending on which splatbook I’m into at the time. I’ve definitely been on both sides of the Caine vs Prime Archmage debate.

Do they have a different tattoo or are you referring to the one circling their arm? It looks like the inscription on the One Ring to me, though I definitely could be wrong.

I agree on a personal level. FOSS software is much more convenient for my usecase of writing papers/typsetting notes, some automation, writing a program that works for me, and browsing/videos.

On the level of someone working in academia, it can be incredibly inconvenient if not outright impossible to implement. I can manage if I come across a bug in some FOSS software in my personal usage. An enterprise encountering an error with some utility whose support forum is a discord server: completely unacceptable. The entire printing service being offline because CUPS is temperamental: completely unacceptable.

Enterprises are the core customers of these inconvenient pieces of software with subscription based models.

On a phoneline service that I have to call about twice a month, you also get a frequent click and a second-long pause in the music, that makes you think you’ve connected to an operator. Given how the service is outright malicious to its users, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was hard coded into the system to keep callers on edge.

Pad thai isn’t even that spicy. Who’s ordering a super spicy pad thai?

Sorry if you’ve seen this already, as your comment has just come through. The two sets are the same size, this is clear. This is because they’re both countably infinite. There isn’t such a thing as different sizes of countably infinite sets. Logic that works for finite sets (“For any finite a and b, there are twice as many integers between a and b as there are even integers between a and b, thus the set of integers is twice the set of even integers”) simply does not work for infinite sets (“The set of all integers has the same size as the set of all even integers”).

So no, it isn’t due to lack of knowledge, as we know logically that the two sets have the exact same size.

The niche story/support communities were a real staying power for me until they started taking a nosedive ~5+ years ago. Suddenly power-users were showing up, posting their creative writing exercises in all tangentially related subs, and it got ate up because over the top drama is more entertaining to some than true (or at least very plausible) stories.

It began with users policing others. You called out a fake story and you got half a dozen people playing devils advocate asking how you knew the story was fake. The poster being a serial poster who has dozens of box-ticking ragebait stories (per week) across multiple subs isn’t a clear enough indicator that this is a creative writing exercise for them.

Before long, subs were seeing much more engagement due to copycats and drama seekers; suddenly the rules prohibited calling out fake stories. Suddenly your support subreddit for offloading about your abusive parents has turned into the personal playground for creative writers with 58 part epics about their mother getting arrested for the fifteenth time for brandishing a knife at a baby at the family dinner.

I’ve already unsubbed from a community on Lemmy because I’ve seen one creative writer is cross-posting to Lemmy under the same name.

I admit the only time I’ve encountered the word utility as an algebraist is when I had to TA Linear Optimisation & Game Theory; it was in the sections of notes for the M level course that wasn’t examinable for the Bachelors students so I didn’t bother reading it. My knowledge caps out at equilibria of mixed strategies. It’s interesting to see that there’s some rigorous way of codifying user preference. I’ll have to read about it at some point.

Actually, the commenter is exactly right. The real line does contain the open interval (0,1). The open interval (0,1) has the exact same cardinality as the real numbers.

An easy map that uniquely maps a real number to a number of the interval (0,1) is the function mapping x to arctan(x)/π + 1/2. The existence of a bijection proves that the sets have the same size, despite one wholly containing the other.

The comment, like the meme, plays on the difference between common intuition and mathematical intuition.

Yes, there are infinities of larger magnitude. It’s not a simple intuitive comparison though. One might think “well there are twice as many whole numbers as even whole numbers, so the set of whole numbers is larger.” In fact they are the same size.

Two most commonly used in mathematics are countably infinite and uncountably infinite. A set is countably infinite if we can establish a one to one correspondence between the set of natural numbers (counting numbers) and that set. Examples are all whole numbers (divide by 2 if the natural number is even, add 1, divide by 2, and multiply by -1 if it’s odd) and rational numbers (this is more involved, basically you can get 2 copies of the natural numbers, associate each pair (a,b) to a rational number a/b then draw a snaking line through all the numbers to establish a correspondence with the natural numbers).

Uncountably infinite sets are just that, uncountable. It’s impossible to devise a logical and consistent way of saying “this is the first number in the set, this is the second,…) and somehow counting every single number in the set. The main example that someone would know is the real numbers, which contain all rational numbers and all irrational numbers including numbers such as e, π, Φ etc. which are not rational numbers but can either be described as solutions to rational algebraic equations (“what are the solutions to “x^2 - 2 = 0”) or as the limits of rational sequences.

Interestingly, the rational numbers are a dense subset within the real numbers. There’s some mathsy mumbo jumbo behind this statement, but a simplistic (and insufficient) argument is: pick 2 real numbers, then there exists a rational number between those two numbers. Still, despite the fact that the rationals are infinite, and dense within the reals, if it was possible to somehow place all the real numbers on a huge dartboard where every molecule of the dartboard is a number, then throwing a dart there is a 0% chance to hit a rational number and a 100% chance to hit an irrational number. This relies on more sophisticated maths techniques for measuring sets, but essentially the rationals are like a layer of inconsequential dust covering the real line.

There’s no problem at all with not understanding something, and I’d go so far as to say it’s virtuous to seek understanding. I’m talking about a certain phenomenon that is overrepresented in STEM discussions, of untrained people (who’ve probably took some internet IQ test) thinking they can hash out the subject as a function of raw brainpower. The ceiling for “natural talent” alone is actually incredibly low in any technical subject.

There’s nothing wrong with meming on a subject you’re not familiar with, in fact it’s often really funny. It’s the armchair experts in the thread trying to “umm actually…” the memer when their “experience” is a YouTube video at best.