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@tvaziri@mastodon.social
@tvaziri@mastodon.social Someone chose violence today 😖
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shana
@shana@mastodon.gamedev.place
mastodon
4.6.6
Making games, hacking tools, porting stuff. ex-GitHub, ex-Unity, ex-Xamarin, indie dev, unity ninja, open source hacker. she/her.
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Joined December 04, 2017
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Replying to
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange
Replying to
@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange
@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange I had something like that happen once as well (well, uh, twice at least?), it's just really weird. I always just think "there's 8 billion other people on this planet, I don't need to deal with this one" and throw them mentally in the trash.
Replying to
@cyberspice@oldbytes.space
@cyberspice yeah, I think I've seen it in passing but never actually engaged with the thing at all, zero clue what it meant until Freya's post tbh :-P
Replying to
@shana@mastodon.gamedev.place
@nyx I was expecting someone to point out that you can just omit a starting point in the sigma notation, because it doesn't necessarily need one because it's not really a linear evaluation mechanism, which would completely shatter the silly programming analogy and bring the whole house of cards down! 😝😅
Alas.
Replying to
@nyx@lgbtqia.space
@nyx Oh yeah that's a good analogy! You're totally right, it's way more subtler than this, and the for-loop can never be a complete translation.
I just don't think the detail of the infinity or stopping conditions is where the analogy visibly breaks down because you can always mimic those details in the translation and it *looks* like it still works. The breakage is more fundamental than that (declarative vs evaluated etc), and I was just amused by what got picked up as the gotcha.
Replying to
@j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz
@j_bertolotti hey, whatever gets you to a place of understanding is ok by me, even if it is weird! 😆
Replying to
@shana@mastodon.gamedev.place
I can be as nitpicky as you like, and point out that the sigma also lacks information on the stopping conditions, and it is only by unspoken shared understanding that mathematicians agree on what the infinite summation is doing/what information they're getting out of it, and you can encode that unspoken shared understanding in the for-loop by coding up a stop condition when a convergence is detected.
But, again, not the point of Freya's original point, nor of my posting of it.
Replying to
@jupiter@mastodon.gamedev.place
Replying to
@nyovaya@transfem.social
@nyovaya @nyx Of course, that's neither the point of the infinite summation nor the point of the translation of the math notation into the for-loop.
The point is that there is a translation from the notation to a computer language format that allows a person not versed in maths to understand the underlying concept of the math notation in an intuitive way, as a starting point. If you can't understand what sigma does at its most basic, you cannot understand its actual math purpose as a whole.
Replying to
@jupiter@mastodon.gamedev.place
@jupiter for (sum=0, k=0;;k++) sum+=pow(a*r,k)
Now if you had left the starting index out of the notation, that would have been a stumper 😜
Replying to
@tautology@infosec.exchange
@tautology That might have been why my high school math teacher made me promise I would not go into maths in exchange for a passing grade.
I ended up in computers instead which totally has no maths whatsoever!
(in hindsight, not the best maths teacher)
Replying to
@hjvt@hachyderm.io
@hjvt hey, why have one for-loop when you can have Parallel.ForEach() and turn *all* your cpu cores into one toasty personal heating unit!
Replying to
@xerz@masfloss.net
@xerz If only someone had just put a couple of for-loops as footnotes in my school texts! It would have been such a time saver.
Replying to
@nyx@lgbtqia.space
@nyx Super nitpickity, if you don't have a stop condition, a for-loop will happily go on until the death of the universe (or your pc, whichever comes first)
But in general, the sigma is the abstract definition, the for-loop is a possible concrete implementation of that definition, in a language that the target of this PSA (non mathy programmers) can understand and go "oooh ok I get it now". It would have saved me like half a semester if someone had shown me this up front, no other words needed.
Replying to
@zmz@mastodon.social
@zmz oh yeah, "just" and "simply" should be banned from most sentences, I agree
Replying to
@alahmnat@woof.tech
Replying to
@arielmt@computerfairi.es
@arielmt "give me a couple of weeks" is an amazing response to a request to remove all of the misleading and deceitful naming and logo pretending that this thing is an official notepad++ release.
Replying to
@RikerGoogling@mas.to
hey fam, me and my hubby are at our anniversary dinner discussing which linux os would be best for gaming - as one does during anniversary dinner - and I know for a fact that you're all a bunch of gaming nerds, so can a helpful soul send distro recs for gaming? 🙏
Replying to
@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place
Ok y'all I'm jumping back in here, air is definitely fresher in these parts. Need to spruce up my timeline though, who should I be following?