The_Grinch [he/him]

That’s why in ny opinion it’s criminal that for most high school math stops before calculus. Calculus wraps up so many loose ends and replaces rote memorization techniques with understanding. Why exactly is the area of a ___ = (formula)? Calculus answers that.

The quadratic formula too, calc replaces it. In fact if I had my way with the curriculum we would skip that one entirety in algebra. I’d also throw in a statistics class, which would directly impact just about everyone’s lives, but that’s another matter.

I never learned my times tables either. We don’t teach them anymore anyway.

No, I’m actually agreeing with you completely. I can see why you took it that way though. My fault.

Sometimes what they’re teaching you isn’t what they’re teaching you.

Maybe you don’t need to know how to find the exact surface area of a cone ever again, but the idea of unwrapping a cone to measure the surface area leaves an impression of a technique for deconstructing a problem, or that problems can be deconstructed into simpler parts at all. It also leaves you with a feel for roughly what the surface area of different shapes would be.

Using a protractor teaches you how to measure accurately and use tools.

Cursive and recorder teaches hand eye coordination, and music is just fundamental to human beings.

Then again maybe you do need to find the surface area of a cone one day, and you could probably go ahead and work out how that would be done even if you don’t remember exactly.

What’s the counterproposal for a curriculum? I’m genuinely curious here, not trying to jump down anyone’s throat. What would school look like without these things?

Everything is like… connected, man.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. The reasons all exist on the spectrum from “we have no reason to care” to “We have every reason to make this difficult for you”

Or btrfs with snapper snapshots you can roll back to. Either way I suspect hard drive corruption. That’s usually what it is for me (although I do lose power with abnormal frequency)

I believe in the conspiracy theory that the reason connecting devices directly to each other anymore without doing a bunch of backflips through third parties is more or less intentional. If you could send a file to your friend sitting right next to you with some sort of wifi-direct or bluetooth or even just via usb-C cable that is seamless and actually works, it would impact every web service from facebook to onedrive. You also have a chilling effect on what kinds of data you’re going to share as well.

That said, tailscale is the ticket for me. The client is BSD licensed, and there exists a self-hostable server which is floss (headscale). Works like airdrop but better.

Arch. I think when people say “bloat” they don’t mean it in the traditional sense of the word. Most people are installing plasma or gnome and pulling all the “bloat” that comes with them. To me at least it’s more that no one is deciding what they think you’re likely to need/do, and overall that makes the system feel much more “predictable”. Less likely to work against what I’m trying to do.

Ignore all the comments about Arch being hard to install or “not for beginners”. That view is outdated. When I first installed Arch when you had to follow the wiki and install via the chroot method. Now it’s dead simple to install with the script and running it isn’t any more difficult than any other distro.

Mainly though it’s because of the AUR.

I don’t like how so many distros ship with discover configured to install flatpaks by default. It’s a huge newbie trap when you click “open file” and uh where are all my files?? You should only install a flatpak if the program is not available for your OS, or if the native version doesn’t work for some reason.

Oxygen² theme was promised around the release of plasma 6 so probably next year!