>that the math done for its own sake is just not as beautiful to me as math that has applications.
The point that the person who you're replying to is making is that you dont know the distinction between maths done for its own sake and maths that has applications until potentially hundreds of years later.
>So I'm wondering yet again: why do people find C pointers so difficult to grok?
For me, understanding pointers to data types was not the hard bit(int* or some_struct*), but wrapping my head around *array being a pointer to the first part of a contiguous segment of memory took a lot of time. Once that idea(and what ++array_pointer really did) settled in my head, pointers felt fairly normal to deal with.
I'd like to offer a single datapoint(mine) on this too, I'm going to university soon and in the last few years, the fact that the internet exists has allowed me to solve interesting math problems that I would've never learnt in school
>From anecdotal memory, I think what happened was a shift from real problems to abstract concepts
Funnily enough, I am the exact opposite; I struggle with statistics and mechanics since they are very linked to the real world and I seem to thrive in understanding abstract ideas. The more abstract, the better :)
I like to think of abstract mathematics as a bunch of code in a library, the code on it's own is vast and has no real purpose when it is standalone, but it becomes immediately useful when a program with a purpose uses it in tangible ways. I would definitely love to make abstract mathematics make sense as a part of the project.
>To answer your question, I’d be interested in analytic geometry and similar concepts which would related to computer graphics.
Those are good suggestions that I didn't think about at first; function transformations and polar coordinates are definitely worth exploring, and a lot of computer graphics involves calculus and linear algebra that I do plan on covering already.
>Where would you post? Is there a feed we could subscribe to?
Still figuring details out, but probably on my .github.io domain(and if the project receives enough attention, I might move it onto it's own domain) and I'll likely use an email based system or an RSS feed after I tackle the "make good learning resources" problem.
>Part of the problem is that people don't know what they want. Another part of the problem is that people ask about really advanced things that they are not ready for, and where they don't have time to dedicate to learning the basics.
Yeah I do totally see that, and my idea is to make a resource that gives you the value that you extract out of it, although it's a fine line between making yet another boring textbook and a resource that is engaging but also informative.
>For your own interest ... what would you start with?
This is where I am a bit torn, because on one hand, I'd love to jump in to cool stuff that people learnt _how_ to do but were never taught the ideas behind them. For example, integral substitution seem to be taught in this rather boring way where you're told to mechanically execute a bunch of steps that people just need to memorise to pass their exam.
I'd love to jump right in and derive the idea of a substitution from the Reimann integral definition, and go into some detail about the intuition behind it. And then perhaps I can explore more calculus like the idea of limits(which are typically another terribly explained) and then move on to Taylor series expansions etc.
But at the same time I don't want the barrier of entry to be really high, so mabye starting with the idea of derivatives, and then approaching higher level topics might be a better structure?
Oh thanks for reminding me of SOME, I might try participating for sure. The reason I asked B) is because I need a starting point since there's so much I could talk about, so e.g. "limits always confused me", "integrals never truly clicked", "the idea of derivatives and really the whole of calculus went by too quickly", or "polynomials and their properties are still a mystery" would be the sorts of starting points I'm looking for.
I still think it's marketing because if it really is dangerous, why talk about it in the first place? (I don't doubt that it may be 'dangerous' if used for nefarious purposes, but if I have something dangerous, I wouldn't go announcing it to the whole wide world).
If you query Wikipedia or Google for an hour on a topic you know about there’s much less of a chance you’ll get inaccurate information than with ChatGPT where it’s almost a given. Assuming people get some basic training it won’t be hard to ask someone in the class about a baseball record and then let them see ChatGPT hallucinate the players and dates.
I think you're giving too much credit to the average user, empirically, we as humans tend to question less and believe more about things that are beyond our understanding, and LLMs are certainly way more of a black box than a search engine. The idea of a search engine is intuitive enough, but a large language model which involves maths that people likely haven't even heard of? and is the next big thing(TM) and will revolutionise the world? Yeah I have a feeling it will take some time before the average user understands the ins and outs of this tech.
Also the problem isn't necessarily about understanding the tech, but more about how it will be perceived at first. As long as every big player hypes up the tech as if it's perfect and revolutionary, I can't blame people for blindly trusting it at first(because it might as well work for most things they use it for, it will take some time before the pitfalls become apparent).
This. I don't think people lower their thresholds for applying critical thinking / fact checking just because it is an LLM's answer.
If someone blindly trusts and uses an LLM without checking for more evidence, then they would've done the same with any other source, be it Google, the newspaper or whatever.
You know, like lawyers that present motions full of made-up case law in court?
"In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that the chat bot could lead him astray." [1]
Make the API reasonably priced instead of making it effectively impossible to run 3rd party apps, make 3rd party apps a reddit gold only feature, make reddit gold better in general(the main complaint ive heard is "why do i even buy reddit gold?"). They've got 2000 employees, surely there's enough people to come up with better monetisation ideas than I could in a few minutes that don't involve pissing off a big chunk of the userbase.
So "big money" caused Reddit to overcharge for API access? How? If this is bad for Reddit's valuation, "big money" should be demanding that they pull back. What do you know that Reddit's investors do not?
The experience I get as a user of the app? Is it that hard to believe that people at the very top can be out of touch with the average user of their product? I'd be surprised if any of those people have even seen the Reddit homepage once. We've seen plenty of companies go down because they made an incredibly out of touch change which caused mass migration to a better product(the example floating around is Digg). All this happening right as they prepare to go public is really all the indication one needs to deduce what's going on.
