Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

The quadratic formula.

When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.

As much as I’d like that to be true, probably not. Automatic signature machines have been a thing, especially for presidential signatures, for a while now. This is more a hit to Trump’s ego than anything.

First, reddit no longer has any good content, communities, or real engagement specifically because of manipulation like this.

Second, it is absolutely not benign.

It’s generating engagement to astroturf as a basis of using you and manipulating you and the community here. Lemmy will not benefit from it. Yes, I’m against it. I’ve seen what that kind of influence has on an online community.

I don’t care if I’m “allowed” to report them. These latest bots are pretending to be people when it’s clear they are not. Going to call out, downvote, and report liars and trolls wherever they appear, AI or not.

Astroturfing AI slop powered engagement bots rehashing reddit’s greatest hits discussion topics like OP.

This AI slop just seems to be a reddit greatest hits as performed by shiny new AI slop bot pretending to be a person to generate engagement.

AI slop engagement bots like you.

You can’t possibly have any experience with shoelaces because you don’t have feet. You’re just AI slop.

I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.

You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.

Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp

The article is saying that these sharks aren’t really sharking though. The sharks behavior has been changed by environmental factors (regular human feeding and humans raising the local sea temperature by dumping warm water from the desalination plant).

1. Sharks are attracted by usually warm water from desalination plant.
2. Tourist guide boats start chumming the waters to keep the sharks around for tourists.
3. The attraction of so many mostly harmless sharks changes their feeding dynamic. Ever tried eating an ice cream cone near a small child? Ever tried pushing an ice cream cart through a crowd of small kids? Way different dynamic as supply and demand changes as the crowd grows.
4. Formerly mostly harmless and “shy around humans” sharks start directly approaching humans as a source of food.
5. Sharks investigate human, beg for food. How do sharks investigate? By biting, nibbles really, or bumping into people swimming.
6. The first bite generates a predictably violent reaction from the humans, which triggers a feeding frenzy response. Humans aren’t equipped to defend or escape this.

The point is that at every step of the way, these sharks are acting in a very strange way (for them) as a direct result of human action. We’ve seen this kind of thing before when people feed wild animals, strange and dangerous human seeking behaviors develop: alligators, bears, moose, etc. Dangerous animals? Yes, but the behaviors that result in human deaths are in no way natural.

I’m not complaining, just thought you knew something that I didn’t. That’s why I asked.

Ok, but I can also just choose the color directly and not set an image as a wallpaper. I appreciate your effort, but what is the advantage here to tiling a PNG?

The first Addams Family movie starts with a Christmas scene and so is set during the Christmas season, but clearly has Halloween vibes throughout. The sequel, Addams Family Values, gets even weirder in this kind of holiday mashup vibe. The kids get sent off to a summer camp, where they are doing a thanksgiving play for some reason. So it’s Halloween vibes throughout, with turkeys and pilgrims, but it takes place during the summer.

At work, all black, because I prefer working in a darkened room and sometimes I need to use the laptop in sunny conditions full of glare. I have no need of any extra light getting blasted at me not directly related to something I’m working on. Also, I get a kick out of the “Why are your other monitors off?” comments. Also, IT tends to clutter my desktop with a bunch of shortcuts with a hodgepodge of icon styles, it’s a lot easier to visually parse these on a black field.

At home, the media server is directly connected to a TV with HDMI and has a desktop environment. My distributions default wallpapers always come in two varieties, colorful or greyscale. The server automatically logs into a restricted user account for family access to Kodi, retro arch, web browsing, etc., which has the colorful wallpaper. If for some reason I need to get into the admin account with a GUI, the desktop wallpaper is grey. It’s like an always-on simplified color coded whoami. Since I almost never interact with this machine except through ssh or the services it hosts, this is the most amount of ricing I’m willing to do.

They work great until they don’t. I’ve had the same experience, be prepared to replace it occasionally because it’s usually near impossible to disassemble and clean the pump mechanism completely.

We figured it out in the last millennium, I think we can figure it out again.

The real reason would probably be that you’d need to make the soles out of rubber again instead of the cheap foam that almost all modern (fast fashion disposable) shoes are made with these days.

• Kashmir - Led Zeppelin. Really anything from Physical Graffiti or by John Bonham.
• Caravan - Buddy Rich
• The Blues Walk - Max Roach & Clifford Brown
• Tom Sawyer - Rush. Or really anything else with Neil Peart.
• John the Fisherman - Primus. They won’t be the same since Tim “Herb” Alexander left the band, but I’m sure he has his reasons.(also: Hamburger Train, Over the Electric Grapevine, Tommy the Cat, Mr. Knowitall, Harold of the Rocks)
• Discipline - King Crimson (also: Thela Hun Ginjeet and most of the rest of the album, which seems to mostly treat the guitar as a percussion instrument more than most.)

Sorry if these are cliche.