VLM

My personal experience is I've had better luck meeting people thru physical real world events than thru phone apps.

Church, friendly local game store, kids sports and activities, the general category of "festivals".

I had a CFX-400 back in the day and it was much more convenient to use it than to not use it. The option of running newtons method by hand on paper was much more annoying than using the watch. I mostly used trig features IRL.

As you can see by the small text above and below the screen you pushed F1/F2 to select the scientific operation you wanted and then "exe" it. I don't recall how "inv" worked, if you selected sine and then inv to arcsin() it or if you tapped inv as a modal and then "exe" while its inverted.

It really wasn't any harder to use than any calculator watch ever shipped. I imagine no one under age 40 has ever used a calculator watch but they were pretty easy to use, just imagine a basic phone calculator app on your wrist but easier to use tactile because of the keyboard.

Its primary downfall was 1) being very expensive compared to carrying a HP calculator in your pocket 2) the buttons and general construction were extremely delicate, the body was just chrome plated plastic IIRC.

Watches in the 80s were like phones in the 2010s it was assumed you'd only get a couple years use out of them before "having to" replace them due to poor components or style, so there's no reason to ship a long term reliable one. These were not "Rolex" lifetime purchases LOL.

Watch bands were also designed to rapidly fail, kind of like fitness bands today.

Watches in the 80s were a very consumerist hobby. Consumerism changes the individual items but the pattern never changes.

Extreme sensor watches were similar to extreme calculator watches but in the 90s. I had a DPX-500, very nice. The barometer drifted too much to be usable. The compass worked very well. As an "outdoor" watch it was fairly durable, rather like desk workers buying "offroad" SUVs that are never driven offroad as the only way to buy a reliable car.

The price of entry to kick off digital photography was a fraction of a megapixel, the industry really kicked into high gear around VGA resolution which is about 1/3 of a megapixel and it was VERY plausible for the computers of the time to manipulate it, store it, transmit it, display it, edit it, etc.

A very "entry level" not good but maybe enough to kick off an industry digital transmission hologram would be like "hundreds of gigapixels" or at least dozens and thats not realistic for computers of this time. The super cool reflection holograms are much worse, like "many dozens of terapixels" to even begin to play with.

I guess its good news there are still frontiers of computation out there to reach. A lot of people believed progress would cease when computers could do high enough resolution video, and they're mostly correct, progress has halted for the general public. But if we ever get smart phones with low petabyte fast on device storage and display, those could realistically have "star trek" like transmission holograms.

That beings up some interesting issues WRT RF engineering. Shannons law and all that. Even with unimaginably complex compression algos will something like a hand held hologram video conference (similar to sci fi tropes) ever be possible? Maybe 60 PB/s would not be unreasonable. Consider the LHC only generates about 1 PB/s when its running and that takes a rather large distributed system and a lot of electricity. I don't think video conference holograms will be realistic... Strange thought experiment the only way to do a "holographic video conference" with sane data transfer rates and power levels might be to send the other side a LLM prompt and ask for a locally AI generated video hologram. "Here's 1000 jpeg pictures of me as raw data, render a hologram of me saying 'scotty beam me up'"

The display hardware tech would be pretty wild. I think it could be done but it would require a minimum of 1980s nanotechnology hype. Like DLP but using individual atoms not "large" silicon mirrors.

In summary the MVP for digital photography required early 1990s hardware, but the MVP for digital holograms requires a LOT more than 2020s hardware. Maybe in the 2040s, 2100s, who knows.

"it's optional."

LOL, no.

In the majority of states in the USA, districts in the state are not allowed to graduate students without taking both an econ class and a personal finance class. Kansas is one of the stricter states. I can only think of three off the top of my head that do not mandate econ/finance classes, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington. Pretty hilarious to claim MA has better education requirements than KS LOL when its the other way around. Also hilarious when the average SAT score in Kansas is 1256 vs a mere 1128 in Massachusetts, LOL. I can't immediately think of any way that the schools in MA are better than KS, which is pretty funny. Is there even one stat or requirement where MA beats KS? Maybe college sports scores...

That said, public schools are mandatory pass, and the kids know it.

I think the problem with education is the prepack solutions sold by politicians intentionally don't reflect reality, sometimes intentionally reflect the opposite, and are designed to be ineffective or even actively counterproductive.

Given the enrollment collapse we're not running out of space in our schools LOL such that we have to kick seniors out of their houses to make space.

They're also economically and socially viable participants in the community.

I live in a municipality that taxes like OP and you don't understand how OP described it. Lets try with easy numbers:

Y2K: buy an 1/8th of a million dollar house. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $1.25M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.

If your mental model is the city tax rate is 0.8%, that is ... numerically correct but its mere numerology.

2026: house is now worth 1/2 of a million dollars. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $5M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.

If your mental model is the city tax rate historically was 0.8%, then you'd have to pay $4K/yr, but it doesn't even remotely work that way, so it simply doesn't matter. Its just numerology. My fraction of total property ownership "value" times the annual village budget is what I'll be taxed, which in this case is the same old $1K.

In reality grandma gets kicked to the street because inflation raises the price of everything, including real estate, but real estate is not even remotely the problem or the solution. Grandma might have afforded a house and its taxes when a McDonalds Big Mac was 75 cents each but now that its $13.49 the village budget has gone up 10x, 20x what it was when she bought, so she better find a way to make 10x, 20x more money or not only is she not going to pay her fair share of the budget via taxes, she's not going to eat food either.

"Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable." Thats the real problem. No one can move in and pay the city budget, and the city budget explodes because now they have to pay the dog catcher at least $250K/yr to live there and nobody can afford to rob peter to pay paul quite that much...

They should compare it to the scale of Israel's similar activities. At least Iran isn't interfering in our elections.

If you live in a 2-d neighborhood the "four color theorem" proves you only need four codes to not share a code with a neighbor, assuming perfect information.

The wikipedia article for the four color theorm discusses higher dimensional life like being in a 3-d apartment building. If you live in a Klein bottle you got other problems beyond ceiling fans.

All ecosystems are local, and local eradication has been a thing since the first shovel was invented, and nothing too bad has happened.

If there's an abandoned lot and you eradicate the mosquitoes by removing the water filled abandoned car tires, the existing ecosystem does pretty well. In a similar way you can willfully decide to make a livestock pond either a mosquito factory or mosquito free and mosquito free has not resulted in any problems.

Local eradication programs have successfully worked for centuries, at least. What makes this story interesting is its very wide ranging and likely very expensive.

There's a whopper in the middle of the article declaring an outcome "high test scores" is a cause, not a result, of a lack of a wide variety of social ills. The cause and effect ratio is obviously reversed. Its like claiming that playing the violin leads to wealth via some magical process, whereas the reality is only wealthy parents can afford to hire a classical violin tutor for their kid, so sure, the wealthiest neighborhoods have the kids who are the best violin players but it would be pretty clueless to describe violin playing as a vocational skill. Its a luxury skill for people who've already made it, like math is for about 99.9% of the population.

Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.

Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.

"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.

The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.

Not a similar comparison in that one project was to produce a plan to extend the limits and goals of mathematics in general while in the process of answering "Is it true, circle yes or no". The other project circled "yes" but the output is not ... progress toward goals oriented.

Its like using AI to do your homework in the middle of a class. Yes, in the short term, that solves the problem of completing your homework. But it creates an entirely new problem of if you never did the homework how do you intend to pass the rest of the class or the remainder of college curriculum? A lot of cheaters ... don't.

A project has a long term path for permanent progress across an entire field. An oracle answers a question, sometimes cryptically, then progress in the field permanently ceases.

The value of a research project to determine if a Turing Machine halts with a T or a F on the tape is, to some extent, did it get a T or an F on the tape, but much more so the value is the tendrils of the rest of the field of mathematics pushing into the project at the start and then pushing out to enrich the rest of the field of mathematics at the end.

On the other hand if you have a project to run that Turing machine and see if it ever halts with a T or F as the proof, the result is completely sterile and WRT advancement of the rest of the field the actual result is kinda irrelevant. No postdoc is going to take the skills learned and move on to a position somewhere else and apply those new skills toward advancing something else in the field or describing a new goal or new way to look at the world. We'll get a popular science article about "oh it turns out the answer is indeed 'T'" and thats it. Sterile.

Personally I always thought the theorem proving turing machine would indeed terminate with a "T" and indeed it did. That's nice, and I bet the result settled a lot of bar bets. Aside from that, it will have minimal impact on progress in the field compared to the human project that's actually advancing the field.

Possibly people will be able to parse the 13 million lines of whatever into useful progress elsewhere in the field, possibly not. It'll be hard to get funding for it. OTOH its early days. Might end up useful in the end.

One person complaining on Wired about "... says she ... had seen too many colleagues decline to speak up during internal meetings out of fear of retaliation for raising issues or proposing far-out ideas." that is evidence of at least one anecdotal individual personal issue. HOWEVER, the vote being "overwhelming" would seem to indicate they have a severe company culture problem not just one anecdotal issue, its not like she was the only one voting for the union LOL. I've worked at companies with and without unions and the ones that had a union, severely needed the union due to incredibly toxic workplace culture combined with a total lack of management accountability for their responsibility/behavior. Generally people won't bother keeping a union going unless they badly need it, given the enormous resources stacked up against them against forming and operating a union... It has to be a pretty awful workplace if forming a union against all that opposition is somehow still the better path... The quality of management has certainly not improved over generations or decades, so an era of declining union membership is probably not an indication of there being too many unions LOL.

Your specific question is for resources to improve, but there's no royal road to soldering, or geometry, or going to the gym.

The fastest way to make progress is to practice, there is no pill or wiki or video that makes progress faster; if anything those make progress slower.

Soldering is exactly like the gym where attempting to avoid time and sweat invariably results in slower progress than just doing it. Especially if someone is selling something to make it easier, it won't work.

If you've already started as per the post you've likely exceeded the skill level covered by "how to solder electronics.pdf" by the Heathkit company or similar intro level stuff.

The only specific technique I can think of is debugging your own boards. Debugging time is very motivational for avoiding mistakes. You'll find it harder to learn to solder if you repair stuff, easy if you build a kit or two of similar complexity to what you're trying to repair. You'll learn anyway as long as you put in the time and sweat it'll just be more emotionally motivating if you're repairing your own work than repairing someone elses.

Dollywood can hold more people than a football stadium. Probably will.

Its a nice theme park. She bought it because she thought it would be cool to have a really awesome theme park in TN. She was both correct and successful. It's pretty cool.

See also Britney Spears, who's mom ran a small daycare. Taylor Swift's an in between story, middle class financial services parents, hard to say if they were paycheck to paycheck or not...

Its not necessarily the best thing that big companies have a business model of taking advantage of poor, or relatively poorer, people, particularly attractive young women. See our global Epstein class and global Weinstein class.