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Cake day: March 12th, 2025

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  • bampop@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldSome things don't change
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    9 hours ago

    The other fields are attempting to describe reality. While Newtonian physics is useful, as an approximation, it’s also quite clearly wrong. You can imagine a universe which follows those rules but it’s not this universe, and that’s why it’s wrong. Mathematics doesn’t care about this universe, so you can pick whatever rules you want. Imaginary numbers are not “more accurate”, they don’t invalidate any previous understanding. They are an imaginary concept with interesting properties. For mathematics, that’s enough.


  • bampop@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldSome things don't change
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    1 day ago

    The answer to that question didn’t change, what changed is how you might interpret the question.

    If I asked “what are the REAL roots of x² + 2x + 2” the answer is still “none”. And prior to imaginary numbers being widely used, that is how the question would have been understood.

    Mathematics involves making choices about what set of rules we’re working with. If you don’t allow the concept of negative numbers, the equation “x+1=0” has no solution. If you give me an apple, then I have no apples, how many apples did I have before? The question describes an impossible situation, and that’s a perfectly valid way to view it.

    Different sets of rules can change what’s possible but don’t invalidate conclusions based on other sets of rules. We just need to specify what set of rules we’re working with.









  • If the day started at 1:00 then by the second hour you would be at 2:00, even though only 1 hour has passed.

    When the second day of the month starts, the day of the month is 2, even though only 1 day has passed.

    I mean, numerically it does make sense to start at zero but it doesn’t seem to correspond to the way people think and talk.




  • I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it’s perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don’t give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don’t want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how “experienced” I get, that’s always going to be the case. Maybe I’m just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.