• Flax@feddit.uk
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    7 days ago

    Computer science students multiple years into the course think I’m a hacker for using the linux terminal

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I once showed that trick feature - opening the terminal - to an Apple Genius Bar employee once. His brains almost fell out of his ear he was so surprised.

    • ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz
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      7 days ago

      Classmates of mine who moved to Linux in college, 20 years ago, all graduated at least a semester later than I did. To be fair, I got my pirated copy of everything from them.

      • Flax@feddit.uk
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        7 days ago

        Granted, linux is probably much more user friendly now. Although I still see mysterious errors on boot and cannot boot into newer kernel versions. How peculiar.

        • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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          6 days ago

          I’ve used a Linux desktop for 25 years now

          Yeah, it’s gotten a bit easier, just like Windows and Mac.

          Not that much has changed, and frankly, most of basic Linux really isn’t that hard, it’s just getting people off the shitty windows concepts that is the hard part.

        • ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz
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          7 days ago

          I am getting into Linux now with Bazzite, but back then, Windows was still okay. Nowadays, Windows is as enshittified as MSN.com was back in the day.

      • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        What is this even trying to say?

        When we had to team up for lab assignments I was working with a like-minded guy and we did everything Linux when the assignment didn’t specifically specify that we had to use windows. The teacher was constantly updating the wording of his assignments and asked us to put a little bit of windows in there. We were way ahead of the rest of class and had plenty of time left to switch the windows parts in and out like nothing. That was 12 years ago.

        If it was possible on Linux we used Linux, if not then we used windows. We used a very pragmatic approach, but favored Linux where possible.

  • Rainonyourhead@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.

    I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.

    I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

    None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.

    I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.

  • RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Just how greedy some professors can be.

    Like the one that had a publishing deal with Pearson. He wrote his own textbook, charged $700 for it, then made you remove parts from the book so it made used copies of the book worthless.

    • vaionko@sopuli.xyz
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      6 days ago

      I’m very grateful of having a publicly funded university. I pay around 70€ a year for the student union and another around 70€ for student health care. That’s all I pay, includes the school, materials, and free healthcare.

  • 8baanknexer@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    It has been proven that each mathematical reasoning system* either has a statement that cannot be proven true or false, or a statement that can be proven both true or false. In simpler terms, it has been proven that we can’t prove everything.

    Gödels incompleteness theorem if anyone wants to look it up.

    • only holds for reasoning systems that can reason about numbers
  • Nikls94@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    That I am way stupider than I thought I was. No seriously, constantly failing and seeing how little I actually know made me question my life choices.

  • steeznson@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    My highschool friends weren’t really friends, just people who’d been temporarily thrown into the same unfortunate position as me.

  • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    That teaching isn’t the point. It’s getting research grants or funding. So much energy was spent on that. Students came 2nd.

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      Students came 2nd.

      Right. Yes. At least second. For sure.

      There’s not like, another kind of research we should save a spot for? No? Okay. 2nd is good.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    7 days ago

    At a certain point, you need to be force which pushes you forward. I saw a lot of intelligent people fail because they no longer had the external stimulus to go to class.

    Also, it is easier to manipulate people in positions of power, but you have to understand how they think and are rewarded. There is a reason why a lot of liberal arts education is focused on having people understand others.

    Also, the liberal arts education of a century ago was basically a degree which was intended to make managers. Along with it, the extra-curricular activities were an important part of the education, but just what happened in class.

    • MakingWork@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      Why is it easier to manipulate people in power? What makes them more vulnerable to manipulation?

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        A lot of the official liberal arts college education goes into understanding the perspectives of others, with a bias to people in power and their power structures. While not an explicit thing they are teaching you, college is teaching you how to understand power structures and the people within them.

        If you have a better understanding of power structures, it becomes easier to push said structures to achieve your own goals since you can speak to power structures in their language instead of your own in order to get what you want.

        Also, a lot of the clubs and other extra-curricular activities are designed to create small power bases to practice these techniques on.

        It is a lot easier to get what you want when you can speak on other people’s terms.

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          Where can I learn more about this? Recommend any books or any techniques? I’d love to learn more about power structures, and people in power.

          In workplaces, I’ve seen people put themselves into positions of power, get roles their not qualified for, and influence managers to dislike people. Office politics.

          • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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            6 days ago

            There are a lot of historical books on various topics; i feel like a good spot is to pick an era and dive in.

            Also, everything is politics, especially office work. Part of the purpose of college wasn’t just to get people to gain knowledge, but to work up Bloom’s Taxonomy by applying knowledge learned and analyzing it. Reading books might get you knowledge and maybe comprehension, but the value is in those higher levels.

  • vividspecter@aussie.zone
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    7 days ago

    I know people’s experience varies on this but I absolutely hated high school, and only discovered that I enjoyed learning as a process because of uni. And I’d probably still be small minded and somewhat bigoted if I hadn’t gone. Simply because it forced me to critically evaluate my own views and also exposed me to a number of types of people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

    It’s a shame it’s so expensive in some countries, because I think it’s important to have a well-educated society more broadly.

  • railcar@midwest.social
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    7 days ago

    That I spent years developing proficiency in my language and expanding my vocabulary to get accepted, only to be told to write simplified English in journalism school. Then they doubled down in my business classes to write for a 6th grade education and those who don’t speak natively.

    • beejboytyson@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Ya I was surprised that that became the style they liked in my university history classes. None of that rhetoric bullshit.

  • jaycifer@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    A lot of things from my Philosophy and Literature class:

    In the Old Testament (or at least Genesis) a man’s semen is literally a bunch of little hims and thus impregnating a woman with a son is creating a new him, and something went wrong if it’s a daughter. Obviously that’s wrong, but if I pretend to go back in time to when nobody knew anything about biology beyond the super obvious, it makes a very basic sort of sense. More importantly, it has provided me with a lot of context for why Abrahamic religions have (or have had) the views they have on masturbation, abortion, and patriarchy.

    Gulliver’s Travels is a bunch of satirical metaphors that go right over the head of someone lacking the cultural context of the time it was written. The Lilliputians are at war with other tiny people because of how they eat their egg delicacies (I think they eat it out of a bowl while the others eat out of a cup or something). This is making fun of the schism between Catholics and Protestants taking communion where one believes the bread they eat becomes the literal body of Christ while it’s more figurative for the other. End of the day, they both eat bread to worship God and cleanse their souls, but they’ll kill each other (at the time anyway) for how the other does it.

    Many have heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some men are in a cave and shadows are cast representing real things, but only in an illusory way. They then leave the cave and discover the reality of those things. But what I didn’t know is who was casting the shadows. In ancient Greece around this time there was a group called the Sophists who basically told people what to think/know, ‘soph’ being the root term meaning “knowledge/to know.” Literally the knowers. These Sophists are the ones casting the shadows, claiming to give knowledge while only giving the illusion of it, trapping the men in a cave of falsehoods. What enables them to leave is what Plato calls philosophy, again ‘soph’ but also ‘philo’ meaning “love of/to love.” Essentially to escape the false illusions given by sophists and discover reality one can’t just claim to know things or be told things and take them at face value, they must have a love for knowledge that will lead them to seek it out and try to learn the best ways to seek it out.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      7 days ago

      Big-endian versus little-endian. i.e. which end to crack a boiled egg to scoop out the contents with a spoon. (The other end goes in the egg cup). Gets some use in computer science due to the way certain numbers are stored in memory, and also with date formats. US format is middle-endian. Got to wonder how Swift would have run with that observation.

      The allegory of the cave is deeper than that. Sure, perhaps there are unseen others guiding your world view, but it can go the other direction into the concept of qualia and the nature of perception itself. Perhaps some façades are necessary as we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything otherwise.

  • ptc075@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    Being able to communicate effectively is critical in a public speaking role. Sadly, I learned this in the inverse - class was taught by a TA who didn’t speak English, professor was never available, whole class failed, no one cared. Still fills me with rage to this day. But, it did make me a better public speaker, so I guess that’s something.

  • haloduder@thelemmy.clubBannedBanned from community
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    6 days ago

    Higher education is a waste of money for the vast majority of degrees, even STEM ones.

  • coherent_domain@infosec.pub
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    6 days ago

    Functions on real numbers are incredibly werid.

    There are continuous but nowhere differentiable functions.

    There are continuous and monotonically increasing function that goes from 0 to 1 (i.e. surjective function [0,1] →[0,1]), that “almost never” increases; specifically, if you pick a point at random, that point will be flat on said function with probablity exactly 1 (not almost 1, but exactly 1, no approximation here).

    More impressively, you can have function that is continuous, but you cannot find a connected path on it (i.e. not path connected). In plain word, if anyone told you “a function is continuous when you can draw it without lifting your pen”. They have lied to you.

    EDIT: the last one (crossed out) is wrong. Intuitively “topologists’ sine curve” contains two parts; you can neither find a distinct seperation for them (i.e. “connected”), nor can you draw a path that connects the two part (i.e. not “path connected”). However, topologist’s sine curve is not the graph of a continuous function.

    • myslsl@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      More impressively, you can have function that is continuous, but you cannot find a connected path on it (i.e. not path connected). In plain words, if anyone told you “a function is continuous when you can draw it without lifting your pen”. They have lied to you.

      You are misrepresenting an analogy as a lie. Besides that, in the context where the claim is typically made, the analogy is still pretty reasonable and your example is just plain wrong.

      People are talking about continuous maps on subsets of R into R with this analogy basically always (i.e., during a typical calc 1 or precalc class). The only real issue are domain requirements in such a context. You need connectedness in the domain or else you’re just always forced into lifting your pen.

      There are a couple other requirements you could add as well. You might also want to avoid unbounded domains since you can’t physically draw an infinitely long curve. Likewise you might want to avoid open endpoints or else things like 1/x on (0,1] become a similar kind of problem. But this is all trivial to avoid by saying “on a closed and bounded interval” and the analogy is still fairly reasonable without them so long as you keep the connectedness requirement.

      For why your example is just wrong in such a context, say we’re only dealing with continuous maps on a connected subset of R into R. Recall the connected sets in R are just intervals. Recall the graph of a function f with domain X is the set {(x,f(x)) : x is in X}. Do you see why the graph of such a function is always path connected? Hint: Pick any pair of points on this graph. Do you see what path connects those two points?

      Once you want to talk about continuous maps between more general topological spaces, things become more complicated. But that is not within the context in which this analogy is made.

      • coherent_domain@infosec.pub
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        Sure, I have no problem with analogy. I called them lie simply to peak people’s interest, but in research and teaching, lies can often be beneficial. One of my favorite quote (I believe from Mikołaj Bojańczyk) is “in order to tell a good story, sometime you have to tell some lies”.

        At the begining of undergrad, “not lifting pen” is clearly a good enough analogy to convey intuition, and it is close enough approximation that it shouldn’t matter until much later in math. I can say “sin(1/x) is a continuous function on (0,1] but its graph is not path connected”, which is more formal, but likely not mean anything to most of the reader. In that sense, I guess I have also lied :)

        However, I like to push back on the assumption that, in the context of teaching continuous function, the underlying space needs to be bounded: one of the first continuous function student would encounter is the identity function on real, which has both a infinite domain and range.

        • myslsl@lemmy.world
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          I can say “sin(1/x) is a continuous function on (0,1] but its graph is not path connected”, which is more formal, but likely not mean anything to most of the reader. In that sense, I guess I have also lied :)

          It’s also false. Take any pair of points on the graph of sin(1/x) using the domain (0,1] that you just gave. Then we can write these points in the form (a,sin(1/a)), (b,sin(1/b)) such that 0 < a < b without loss of generality. The map f(t)=(t,sin(1/t)) on [a,b] is a path connecting these two points. This shows the graph of sin(1/x) on (0,1] is path connected.

          This same trick will work if you apply it to the graph of ANY continuous map from a connected subset of R into R. This is what my graph example was getting at.

          The “topologists sine curve” example you see in pointset topology as an example of connected but not path connected space involves taking the graph you just gave and including points from its closure as well.

          Think about the closure of your sin(1/x) graph here. As you travel towards the origin along the topologists sine curve graph you get arbitrarily close to each point along the y-axis between -1 and 1 infinitely often. Why? Take a horizontal line thru any such point and look at the intersections between your horizontal line and your y=sin(1/x) curve. You can make a limit point argument from this fact that the closure of sin(1/x)'s graph is the graph of sin(1/x) unioned with the portion of the y-axis from -1 to 1 (inclusive).

          Path connectedness fails because there is no path from any one of the closure points you just added to the rest of the curve (for example between the origin and the far right endpoint of the curve).

          A better explanation of the details here would be in the connectedness/compactness chapter in Munkres Topology textbook it is example 7 in ch 3 sec 24 pg 157 in my copy.

          However, I like to push back on the assumption that, in the context of teaching continuous function, the underlying space needs to be bounded: one of the first continuous function student would encounter is the identity function on real, which has both a infinite domain and range.

          This is fine. I stated boundedness as an additional assumption one might require for pragmatic reasons. It’s not mandatory. But it’s easy to imagine somebody trying to be clever and pointing out that if we allow the domain or range to be unbounded we still have problems. For example you literally cannot draw the identity function in full. The identity map extends infinitely along y=x in both directions. You don’t have the paper, drawing utensils or lifespan required to actually draw this.

          • coherent_domain@infosec.pub
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            6 days ago

            Yes, you are right, topologists’ sine curve includes the origin point, which is connected but not path connected. I guess I didn’t do very well in my point-set topology. I will change that in my answer :)

    • felsiq@piefed.zip
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      7 days ago

      Can you please elaborate on that second one, or drop a name so I can look into it? Sounds very counterintuitive and like something I wanna know

      • coherent_domain@infosec.pub
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        7 days ago

        The second one is the cantor function, also known as devil’s staircase; the third one is topologist’s sine curve.