Do keep in mind that basically every single Israeli goes through military training, which includes training in psychological counter-warfare (hasbara). Even the 'cool' Israelis you know in real life are spies at the beckon-and-call of Israel 24/7.
What I'm trying to say is that this is an intentional part of their strategy. They know what they're doing.
They probably have a small detachment assigned to every popular-ish website. For the long tail, they have bot farms.
Genuinely, what is it that you get from studying mathematics?
I get that it's a hobby, but what do you even do with the knowledge you acquire?
I don't exactly fear math (even though I'm complete shit at it) but the time investment required is absolutely massive for something with questionable utility, even just for playing around with. You need a super strong base to even attempt bashing basic problems, so that's easily four or five years of study just to play around a bit.
For me, math was a way to study structure. I find this sort of thing tremendously beautiful on its own, but as it happens "finding the structure in things" turns out to be quite lucrative in the professional world as well, and I often use various ideas and strategies I chanced upon as a student of mathematics.
counterpoint to
> easily four or five years of study just to play around a bit
it depends significantly on the branch of maths you choose! I've been told by a professor of fluid mechanics that he has difficulty posing and approving subjects of undergrad dissertations because the knowledge threshold for contributing meaningful ideas reliably is so high, but in my primary interest (combinatorics) this is very much not the case.
the OEIS is replete with old sequences that no-one has considered in much detail in a decade or two, and have a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for one willing to toy with them.
https://oeis.org/A185105 is a good example of such a sequence; "sample the elements of a random permutation of [n] in a random order and record each one's cycle (under repeated iteration), then T(n,k)/n! is the expected of the kth distinct cycle recorded," which seems like it would have been of some interest to someone in the last ≈13 years (since ie. it's well-known that the first cycle's length is uniform in [1..n]), but didn't receive any formulas until I happened upon it recently with my own toolbelt (which is quite modest and certainly could be learned in less than 4 years).
the OEIS is an excellent resource for both readinh and sharpening one's amateur teeth on novel (ie. unexplored, or at least undocumented) problems and very rewarding, if that's your goal with learninh maths
> Genuinely, what is it that you get from studying mathematics?
GP here, I would say that I gain understanding. I know that might seem vague, but that is the truth. For example, while not technically traditional math, I have been trying to brush up on stats a bit. I like to read research journals about health, psychology, etc.. I want to be able to make my own inferences about the journals I read with an informed opinion.
I do, yes. I won't call it a hobby because I don’t create anything, I'm just a mindless rabid stupid cunt of a consoomer who doesn't know how to differentiate his ass from a hole on the fucking ground, but I do spend a lot of time listening to music. I've spent a lot of money on audio equipment.
Even so, if you wanted to bring up time signatures, microtonality or something like math rock… I'm aware of those, but I still think the only thing that matters is that they're tools meant to allow you to express a certain message in the most appropriate ways, not so much an end in themselves.
I don't think hobby requires building anything. Spending time actively engaged is enough. One can enjoy mathematics the way one enjoys listening to music.
On the other hand if you do want to make something, and you happen to know related math then suddenly you can use it.
Building these are neither my hobby, not did I learn the relevant math for the exclusive purpose of making it. But once you acquire a few math razors you start seeing inviting fluffy yaks that were invisible before.
> but I do spend a lot of time listening to music. I've spent a lot of money on audio equipment.
This is a great domain to motivate oneself to delve deeper into Mathematics. For example;
1) What parameters do you look at in audio equipment before you buy?
2) Somebody is trying to sell you "Hi-Res" music and equipment; Are they worth the money? Why? Why Not?
All of the above need mathematics to comprehend at even a basic level. There are both complicated objective (physics/mathematics) and subjective (our auditory system) parameters to understand eg. logarithms, harmonic series, frequency modulation, tuning, impedance, human hearing frequency range and sensitivity etc.
Having some mathematical idea of the above not only saves you money but also helps you enjoy music "optimally".
The Science of Musical Sound by John R. Pierce. An old classic (also checkout his other books on Waves, Signals and Information Theory). They are all written in a semi-technical and clear manner for the general audience. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Pierce
Pretty much. Americans want to export their fascist ideology to Europe under the guise of "freedom of speech". They need to get their own house in order first, frankly.
The whole world, frankly. The mere concept of "freedom of speech" is a Trojan horse for far-right movements to gain ground amongst the peoples of the world.
We fucked up from the very moment we let agitators spread their poison around without any sort of punishment. Now the rot is widespread enough that they're making their moves.
> Many of the clowns who throw shade on us from across the pond live in dystopian hellscapes...
Rose tinted much?
These are all fucking awful. The UK is bad because it took leaking of state secrets before Andrew proper action, being a paedo and involved in trafficking just means you have to move to an "out of the way mansion". At least now its getting the attention.
But the US ignores the sitting president involvement.
And shoots unarmed people in the street.
Most of the clowns throwing shade from the US ignore their hypocrisy.
The former Prince Andrew is not in power. Makes it much easier to do something about him.
>And shoots unarmed people in the street.
The militants interfering with law enforcement? You don't know what you're talking about. You people also don't have guns to defend yourselves. You have broad knife bans and harass people for taking pictures with guns while on vacation lol...
> Most of the clowns throwing shade from the US ignore their hypocrisy.
No hypocrisy here. It's real funny how little you know about our country, or your own. You have completely been suckered by propaganda issued to destroy the West.
"Nationalistic" is not a synonym for "national interest". And the point was not just that its nationalistic content, but rather that broadcasters are being pressured to air it.
I'm not sure who you expect to push for airing essentially patriotic ads and content, besides the government. It is not necessarily nefarious. We need to have some modicum of civic mindedness and that needs to come from somewhere. The government itself is at least usually not partisan when it comes to generic campaigns like this.
For starters, nobody needs to push "patriotic ads". When the country does good things worth being proud of, patriotism arises naturally.
But either way, the grave error here is conflating civic mindedness as having anything to do with the current administration. These clowns would find a way to divide us over a children's spelling bee.
I don't think it "arises naturally" -- Our country is still something to be proud of, despite its flaws, and patriotism is a dirty word these days. The current administration is mainly seen as unusually divisive because of a relentless smear campaign against Trump conducted over a period of about 10 years. He's no saint, but if you look at it objectively then this breathless hysteria is unwarranted and downright harmful.
Smear campaign? It's the man's own actions - incompetence backed up with divisive bullying. If you don't see that, then you're still in the reality distortion field.
As for patriotism, I see quite a lot of it at the weekly protest I drive by and sometimes attend. As I said, it arises naturally.
He has an obnoxious personality but that's the extent of it. It's not I who is "in the reality distortion field."
Protesting makes sense sometimes but I'm not going to sit here and say that they are all patriotic. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that we have different ideas of what is a patriotic, much less worthwhile, protest.
No, that is not the "extent of it". Trump's obnoxious personality serves as a distraction from the abject incompetence, and it is apparently still working on you. The general pattern I've seen is that he picks a position, no matter how outlandish or impractical, that gets the most vocal support. He then claims to be doing something about it with some token actions. When anybody points out the glaring flaws, he and his cult of believers go to work attacking the critics.
For a recent example, see his atrocious failure on tariffs. A supposed mandate to do something about bringing American industry back, plus a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. But then the main plan merely consisted of tariffs that could have worked twenty years ago, applied in a simplistic blanket manner that harms domestic industry? And still even then the whole push ends up being a giant failjob for not doing the basic work to get them passed into law! But of course the enemy-scapegoat will always end up being someone else, because making excuses is Trump's only skill.
Some of these dynamics have terribly destructive results, especially with regards to our individual liberties. For example, the terrorist attacks on American cities - hence the protesting. And protesting about the violation of our natural rights as laid out in our country's founding documents seems pretty damn patriotic to me.
> relentless smear campaign against Trump conducted over a period of about 10 years. He's no saint, but if you look at it objectively then this breathless hysteria is unwarranted and downright harmful.
it is almost like Trump has been a public figure his entire life and in politics (after being best buds (as well as a donor) with the Clintons and the likes his entire life) only small percentage of his life. so we know who he is and we have always known who he is well before this "10 year smear campaign" - too funny to always read about this "oh Trump good, everyone's out to get him"
Trump was very popular till he decided to run against Hillary. He was known as kind of a character, but was generally well-liked and invited on many TV shows (in addition to his own TV show, and starring in movies). The smear campaign escalated with Russiagate lies (yes, lies, and commissioned by Hillary). Trump has his flaws but he has put up with more shit than any other president I remember. Seeing how bad they had it out for him naturally makes me take his side, even though he is not my ideal candidate lol...
Trump was popular with a certain segment of people. Like the kind of person who doesn't understand how to constructively manage a business and thinks that being "the boss" revolves around firing people, presumably because they're generally on the receiving end of it. If you weren't in that segment, occasionally seeing him was more like "oh wow, that guy is still around?"
There is no conspiracy here. Running for president gave him widespread attention, where he became relevant to many more people - relevant in a negative way. And while the actual facts have become heavily politicized, that Trump's policies are so beneficial to Russia and China is itself quite damning, regardless if he himself is aware of it or whether it's merely being susceptible to foreign agents in his orbit.
For reference where I'm coming from - I was telling my aghast blue tribe friends in 2016 that Trump had a good shot at winning and was talking about a lot of longstanding problems other politicians would not. The problem is that it was, and continues to be, just empty talk.
> To be honest, I think having a few more popular US/UK/EU YouTube channels doing any kind of FPGA-based or silicon-based hardware design (i.e. not just RPi or PCB stuff) would help hugely. I've not worked out how a content strategy in this space that I think will work - yet!
It doesn't exist because it's impossible. Practical experience valuable enough to get you an apprenticeship is inexistent without knowing an engineer dedicated enough to take out the two or three hours of downtime they have to teach you for free.
Asinine? What I don't want is for potential undergrads to waste their time and money futilely chasing a mirage formed by propaganda.
You can sue me for this, but I don't think lying to starry-eyed teenagers to compete like starved beasts for an ultra long shot at some semblance of a career is a good thing.
When the dust settles, all that they will have learned will be completely and utterly useless and they will have to reskill immediately. How about doing the right thing from the start?
You have to remember this is a site geared towards American techbros. Americans don't know what culture even means, much less why it's important. Cultural creations to Americans are shit like burger or Coke ads.
It's even worse for techbros. All techbros ever read are self-help books and Nick Land's meth-fueled ramblings. Peter Thiel is a head honcho techbro because he was able to finish The Lord of the Rings.
You ask an American what's the last painting he saw and what he thought about it and he'll bring up whatever random shit some vastly-underpaid and over-exploited immigrant will have been made to plaster over a McDonald's wall.
The "intellectual" Americans will bring up Thomas Kinkade and how his work embodies the true nature of what American society should be all about. His pieces make them long for the good old past where non-whites knew their place and segregation was a godly law.
I mean, that's the entire issue. There's very little tangibly better than Discord. I like the idea of Matrix, but it's complete garbage in practice.
At least for now, the solution lies more in mass outrage and action rather than any technological migration. The post raises this and I think it's a good point.
Also, the fetishism for federation has got to stop. It's only barely workable in asynchronous environments like the Fediverse, but on a live chat service it's ruinous. It's feels like it's half of what's suffocating Matrix.
IDK, XMPP group chats have always "jest werked" for me (though admittedly I haven't used them much).
The difference between XMPP group chats and Matrix group chats is that Matrix servers replicate all the message history, whereas XMPP group chats are hosted on a single server. IMO the "bring your own account to a central server" model of XMPP is a good thing, but the "replicate all the things" model of Matrix is not.
Element is way better these days. Not many people know this but Matrix team upgraded synapse last year to support hundreds of simultaneous voice/video users without the need for that shitty jitsi. They aren’t advertising bullshit to you all the time. The ACLs for spaces and rooms more granular and expressive. Your data isn’t training AI models used by people that want to enslave you. You have control where your data resides for protections by jurisdiction. Element has web embeddings for links now, it has all the platforms supported, it’s easy to verify sessions and backup your key. They support SSO external auth. What more can you want?
What I'm trying to say is that this is an intentional part of their strategy. They know what they're doing.
They probably have a small detachment assigned to every popular-ish website. For the long tail, they have bot farms.
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