kcl

The differential equations course was one of the most baffling experiences I ever had. The professor on the first day told us the course would be rote, as opposed to proofs, and every day he copied the methods to the chalkboard. He specifically instructed us to copy them verbatim into our notebooks. In this way there was not a lot to discuss, and from time to time the professor would gently steer us back to merely copying and memorizing the methods, even though no one had questioned him out loud. The methods were entirely disconnected. I had no indication of how they were derived or what the original motivation might be. What a differential equation was or why I wanted to "solve" one---this generated a second equation---was a mystery. None of the problem in the physics sequence looked like this. The engineering students claimed to have them, but reminded me that "this was all done by computers now." In the textbook there were no word problems, only formulas, and so I was never able to infer what this might all be about. The problems gave no opportunity for insight beyond recognizing the form. On the homework I manipulated one formula into another. On the test I did the same thing. Through memorization, I got an A in the course. I never encountered a differential equation before or since.

> numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.

This is an open and ancient question. I don't suppose to have the answer. I will say, the case for mathematics pre-existing is stronger than what you refute here.

It is true this improves the bad path. It ignores desired happy path cases: downstream processes, custom debugging, graceful shutdown, preserved workspaces, and so on.

The way exceptions are handled as a result of siglongjmp'ing out of a signal handler is currently platform-inconsistent and one of the many dark areas I alluded to. It isn't even consistent on Linux between compilers.

This conversation is silly. You are snapshotting the transformative window. If you snapshotted the internet in the 70s or 80s you'd get a much more mundane picture.

I don't know if I think cryptocurrency will be as transformative as the internet or the mobile phone, but I think it will be within a level or two of that scale. It makes good on its promise year after year. NFTs just became popular in the last few years, and that is only one example of many. Are you going to bet against NFTs in the long run? I certainly wouldn't. We don't even know all the technologies crypto is going to enable yet.

GC researchers insist on conflating GC with all of automatic memory management. The public doesn't do this and neither does the article.

> Secondly, you know what's cheaper... Not doing anything at all.

These techniques are on the level of resetting a stack pointer or calling `sbrk()`. Incorporating them doesn't produce more-advanced GC schemes, it just means you neglected to consider similar allowances for RC.

The line of contention is at traversing the object graph and pausing threads.

Your comment is radically naive. You can't literally believe what a business writes in its PR spin. The only thing you can take away from this is that Visa intends to tip the balance towards merchants and away from consumers when it comes to chargebacks. The problem with this is chargebacks just barely work as is.

Punishing honest consumers is not the right way to go about this.

Your approach will not work. Either continue attempting proofs or give up. It's fine to read the answers after you've tried.

> I've heard many many times that you can only learn math by doing it, which is certainly true

yes

> and is akin to saying that you can only learn a language by...

no. this is you evading the main point.

Taking a graded class with homework can help. So can finding an elementary book on a subject that interests you (topology, combinatorics, algebra, ...). Linear is dry, that may be your issue.

I don't know where this method of argumentation came from, but it's obnoxious and I'm over it. There are even soyjaks for this. Either you don't know and you're being lazy (I don't think this is the case), or you do know and you've generated an asymmetric work request for op that you could've answered and that left unanswered by him casts doubt on his argument. If you have a case to make, make it, instead of this nonsense DoS attack. This is not a defense of op's position.

Right, you are the cop-out I am complaining about. Linus is the premier figurehead of the premier open-source project. When a build tool he made for that project goes viral it isn't an accident. If it was anybody else's pet versioning control system would we even be talking about it?

Git's UI/UX is one of the worst engineering sins to be committed in the last two decades, and this website shows why. Literally nothing about git is intuitive and the "underlying model" is entirely ad-hoc. Instead of celebrating how Linus built git in only a few days he should be castigated for knowingly setting up ill-conceived software to go viral.