Notices by Matt McIrvin (mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz), page 2

@TerryHancock @dalias @futurebird A pattern I notice a lot with open-source projects is that the one-time installation and setup is the hardest part, and unfortunately that's the first impression people get. I think it's because the developers will tend to work on the problems that annoy *them*, and the things you only have to go through once are way down that list.

@inthehands I think there is one exception--for a lot of people in creative fields who may have some kind of borderline ADHD condition, getting past the blank page or the digital equivalent is a real struggle. And if there's something that can push them past that step from nothing to something, they'll find it useful.

There's a powerful temptation to just use version zero, though, especially if you're not the creator but the person paying the creator.

I've been reminiscing a lot about calculators lately. I started learning math just when electronic scientific calculators were replacing slide rules as tools for engineers.

But scientific calculators are themselves almost extinct outside of the classroom, because computers, smartphones and tablets running powerful CAS or numerical software can do all the kinds of computing you really need... unless you're not allowed to use them because of classroom or exam restrictions.

So the market has contracted to education, and the high-end calculators sold today, though they're extremely powerful, are very much catering to students rather than to engineers or scientists. There's a lot of power siloed into user-friendly apps, but less ability to link those together into powerful custom-built systems of your own design.

And inevitably, because I'm getting old, I have a lot of nostalgia for old ones... particularly for HP's RPL line, starting in the late 1980s with the 28C (which was woefully underpowered, but the potential was there) and continuing through the very capable 28S and 48/49/50 series.

The ones I actually had were the 28S and the 48SX--the latter got stolen after just a few years; it was too damned expensive to leave lying around. I still have the 28S somewhere though the batteries for it can be hard to find. But I've been getting back into messing with them through emulation. Here's Calculator Culture's review of the 48SX that goes through its innovations, strengths and weaknesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yujtxo5efbE

HP's scientific calculators were quirky in that most of them until quite recently solely or primarily used postfix or Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), a stack-based system in which every operator followed its operands: to add 2 + 3, instead of

2 + 3 =,

you'd press

2 [ENTER] 3 +.

These calculators had a stack, that is, a list of numbers represented as a vertical tower that they would generally enter and exit from the "bottom" (in HP's terminology, at least). In the addition above, the ENTER key would signal that you were finished typing a number and put the 2 on the stack. The + would implicitly do an ENTER if necessary, then take the bottom two items off the stack and add them.

For more complex calculations, there was no messing around with order of operations or nested parentheses--the stack was everything. So, say, (4+5) * 3 - 2 could be entered as

4 5 + 3 * 2 -

(where it's understood you type ENTER after every number not followed by an operator.)

The joke was that an advantage to using an HP was that nobody ever asked to borrow your calculator more than once. But for complex calculations off the cuff, people who used them soon learned to prefer RPN to algebraic entry, and I still like it.

I think one of the things that fundamentally bothers me when conspiracy theorists get into scientific topics is the basic laziness of it.

There are a lot of things about the universe that are hard to understand or that nobody understands, but to a remarkable extent it's basically an open book. It takes a lot of effort though. It works in complicated and subtle ways that the human brain isn't trivially suited to comprehend. Trying to understand all that is a huge adventure.

These people imagine that all of the big questions of existence have easy peasy answers but that they only seem hard because someone is deliberately hiding the answers from them, like some annoying nerd who won't let them copy their homework. We got the answers all handed to us on a silver platter but they're locked up in a government warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant.

@futurebird he hasn't adjusted to the newfangled innovations of the Harry Truman administration.

@noracodes I'm a programmer and I think I could give a 10,000 foot view of what happened when you did this in 1996, but there's so much extra magic in there now since they got rid of an independent search bar that I might second-guess myself.

@IPEdmonton @mekkaokereke @mickeleh

We do, in some places. I have never had to stand in a significant line when voting in person in my small Massachusetts city. The places where it is chronic seem to be minority urban neighborhoods in places with hostile state governments. It's hard not to think that it is intentional vote suppression.

@futurebird The whole creepy incel/PUA subculture is absolutely obsessed with "objective" laws of human desirability, masculinity, femininity, etc. that are based on physical measurements and sound straight out of some 19th-century text on physiognomy. There seem to be a lot of young men who are attracted to this stuff as an explanation for why they have trouble fitting into the world.

What it all reminds me of is a guy on my first-year college dormitory floor who was preoccupied with making these numerical rankings of how cool or extroverted or "alpha" all of the boys on the floor were. I could see him becoming a menace on the Internet but he didn't quite have it at the time.

@inthehands I recall the Bing one faceplanted on not recognizing that a movie's release date was in the past, even though it could tell you today's correct date if you asked. And then it doubled down with seemingly angry language when challenged on the point.

@wizzwizz4 @inthehands It's an interesting problem for this kind of approach--you have certain categories of text in the corpus describing specific events in time, that were appropriate things to say at the time that text was written, but it's now possible to deduce that the text is obsolete. But only if you have an understanding of how time works.

@inthehands @wizzwizz4 I could maybe imagine a mind "embodied" in a virtual world very unlike ours; it would probably develop into a very otherworldly intelligence. But these language models don't even have that--their world is just language interactions severed from direct experience of any of the things the language is referencing.