stingpie

joined 2 years ago
[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

The square root function only has a single answer for every x. This is intentional. The technical definition of function means there can only be a single y value for every x value. Of course, there are situations where you need to consider the positive and negative square root, and that's why the quadratic equation has the ± symbol.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I'm getting frustrated at all these ADHD posts. I know it's a comorbidity with autism, but I don't have it, not all autistic people do, so it shouldn't be in !autism@lemmy.world when there is !adhd@lemmy.world.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

One thing we know about Jesus is that he was very good at using rhetorics. Other than the accounts in several books about him using rhetorical techniques very advanced for the day, there's also evidence that he was skilled enough to start a religion. But any information finer than that is hard to prove. The books are over a thousand years old, written at different times by different people, followed by several translations, so we can't know his exact word choice or style of speech with certainty. The closest to the 'source' are ancient Greek texts which were likely translated from some other language.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Popular Christianity is heavily based on paganism, which is incredibly ironic considering that paganism is generally posed as the antithesis of Christianity. The story of Lucifer is syncretized with the story of Prometheus, although Lucifer doesn't really benefit humanity at all. According to the popular interpretation, Lucifer is the origin of all evil, became a snake in the garden of Eden, and then tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, the snake isn't actually connected to Lucifer in the text—that interpretation was added later to explain the problem of evil (why it exists if God is supposedly good)

The idea that Lucifer is insubordinate and violated the natural hierarchy is very old, but the idea that Lucifer is the origin of evil is relatively new.

Christian theology contains many holes like this because there's a tendency towards treating every word in the Bible as literal, where it may have been written allegorically or as a parable, as Jesus often did. (Just to be clear, Jesus did NOT write the Bible, I'm just pointing out that the writers of the Bible may have tried to replicate his style.) This issue is compounded when you include the Old testament, as it contains portions which are clearly mythological, but are nonetheless treated as fact by certain modern Christians.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It's funny everyone so far has called the character a fursona. Is the main purpose behind a fursona to try and be the fictional character? To hide yourself behind a constructed façade? To be swaddled in blankets of paracosm and derealization?

These are only half-rhetorical questions. I don't understand furries or fursonas.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 33 points 1 month ago (5 children)

What's important to note is that there has been a big shift in the goals and techniques of education. This most famously occured with "common core" math in the US. It was a push to teach math in a more intuitive way, one that directly corresponds with what children already know. You can physically add things together by putting more of them together, and then counting them, so they try to teach addition with that analog in mind.

Prior to common core math, there was "new math," which anyone under 80 years old assumes has always been the standard. New math was a push to teach math in a more understandable way, one that gradually introduced new concepts to ensure children understood how math works. This was satirized by Tom Leher in his song "New Math." If you look up the song, you'll see that new math mostly was implemented by teaching students how base-10 positional notation works, and then using that understanding to present addition and subtraction as logical algorithms.

Prior to new math, the focus of math education was much more about getting the right answer, rather than the skills needed for problem solving using math. This allows for a higher breadth of education, as topics can be covered quickly, but each topic is understood in a shallow way.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

FP & OOP both have their use cases. Generally, I think people use OOP for stateful programming, and FP for stateless programming. Of course, OOP is excessive in a lot of cases, and so is FP.

OOP is more useful as an abstraction than a programming paradigm. Real, human, non-computer programming is object-oriented, and so people find it a natural way of organizing things. It makes more sense to say "for each dog, dog, dog.bark()" instead of "map( bark, dogs)".

A good use case for OOP is machine learning. Despite the industry's best effort to use functional programming for it, Object oriented just makes more sense. You want a set of parameters, unique to each function applied to the input. This allows you to use each function without referencing the parameters every single time. You can write "function(input)" instead of "function(input, parameters)". Then, if you are using a clever library, it will use pointers to the parameters within the functions to update during the optimization step. It hides how the parameters influence the result, but machine learning is a black box anyway.

In my limited use of FP, I've found it useful for manipulating basic data structures in bulk. If I need to normalize a large number of arrays, it's easy to go "map(normalize, arrays)" and call it a day. The FP specific functions such as scan and reduce are incredibly useful since OOP typically requires you to set up a loop and manually keep track of the intermediate results. I will admit though, that my only real use of FP is python list comprehension and APL, so take whatever I say about FP with a grain of salt.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Counter points:

  1. I don't have a counter point. This is just a matter of opinion.

  2. Buy fancy clothes from a yard sale or something. I like to get old time formal wear because it just looks well put together.

  3. You can go out and do things without spending money. Have a walk in the park, go to the library.

  4. I don't know why you associate challenging yourself with not being satisfied. I think challenging myself is fun. It has the "put in the work, reap the rewards" kind of structure. I draw as a hobby, so I mostly challenge myself by trying to draw in unfamiliar art styles.

  5. This is just kinda sad. You're aware that having friends isn't imperialist, right? Friends are a part of every human culture, imperialist or not. Humans are social creatures, and we are very dependent on social interaction. Talking to others is the main way we compare our thoughts and perception to reality–we get a second opinion.

If you really feel that way, I'm sorry to hear that. It can be really hard to try and function ethically in the modern world, so you have to put in some effort to find ethical ways to do things. I hope you get to a point in your life where you feel good about your situation and your role in the world.

Have a nice day.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My character (who is called Korppimmies) has a similarly vague background. His backstory is in broad strokes, but I keep accidentally adding more lore because of my poor choice of words.

The original backstory is that he comes from an isolated tribe which periodically exiles young adults whenever it reaches a maximum capacity. These young adults are then supposed to wander around and found their own tribes in different places. My guy never got past the wandering part and eventually reached "civilization." After a series of foibles and arrests, Korppimmies became paranoid and started wearing a plague doctor's outfit, as it is otherwise very difficult to hide the fact that you have a beak.

Anyway, he's barely got any skills in healing, but went from town to town as a travelling doctor until The Party™ recruited him to help fight a dragon.

Unfortunately, Korppimmies was too smart for the sake of the campaign, and trapped the BBEG in the astral plane way before we were supposed to defeat him, and the campaign is pretty much over now.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I would've expected Nevermore to be a kenku, but unless you really plan out your sentences kenku don't have any unique mechanics, but aarakocra do. It's kind of a shame, to be honest. I've been playing a kenku recently, and I'm not planning out my sentences or anything, but I do have an unconscious tendency to mimic people's style of speaking, so I at least have that going for me.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I think 'implies' asks whether it's possible that A causes B to be true. In other words, it is false if there is evidence that A does not cause B.

So:

If A is true and B is false, then the result is false, since A could not cause B to be true.

If A and B are both true, then the result is true, since A could cause B.

If A is false and B is true, then the result is true since A could or could not make B true (but another factor could also be making B true)

If A and B are both false we don't have any evidence about the relationship between A and B, so the result is true.

I don't know for sure, though. I'm not a mathematician.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I can very much relate to feeling like a sociopath. But masking is a form of disassociation, so I can't really help it if I don't feel a lot of the emotions I put on. And after doing that for a long time, I started picking up on the grander strokes of conversation. It makes me very guilty that I ever even think about how I could manipulate the conversation when I'm detached from it.

 

I don't know if there's a word for it, but 'unconscious multitasking' is the best one I can make up. Basically, when I try to switch tasks, one part of my brain is still focused on the previous task, and the other part is focused on the new task. I can barely think about the new task, and I feel like I'm in a mental fog. The thing is, I can still work on both tasks, just not at 100%. Two different processes are going on in my brain and they are both fighting for the same resources. The other day, I ended up working on two different coding projects at once. One of them was a crazy homebrew AI, and the other was a system which is basically AI dungeon with a background simulation of the world. Every five minutes I'd alt-tab to the other project to write another five lines of code before switching back.

Historically, I've had similar things happen when I was extremely emotional or in shock. I would sort of split into two thought processes running at the same time. I remember once I was crying because I was having a psychotic-depressive episode, and I was simultaneously having negative thoughts about myself, thinking about how to coordinate these negative thoughts with my wailing, and criticizing myself for being disingenuous for planning my own ability to express my emotions!

I don't know if this is some AuDHD thing, or just unique to me. I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD, but my brother has it, and a psychiatrist once did an EEG on me and said I had 'similar brainwaves to a person with ADHD.' I don't really have any traditional symptoms of ADHD (inattentiveness, distractibility, hyperactivity, etc.) So I'm wonder if any of you, especially those with AuDHD, have had similar experiences.

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