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Joined 7 months ago
Cake day: July 8th, 2024
  • khalid_salad@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025English
    3·
    1 hour ago

    Re: Smart TVs, what works for me is a Roku TV, skip all of the sign-in shit (don’t even connect it to the internet — update firmware via USB if necessary1). Then, plug in whatever devices and navigate to them. Close enough to a dumb TV for me.

    I almost have Android TV figured out: Bought a cheap Onn Android TV box, sideloaded SmartTube in case I need to rewatch The Gemsbok’s Video performing an existentialist reading of Fucking Dark Souls2, installed MullvadVPN3, and sideloaded whatever other apps I needed. The only reason I say it is almost figured out is I couldn’t bypass the Google account creation/login — an insufficient stopgap is to create a throwaway account, though it’s very hard to do this in a way that isn’t linked to your real identity, I think.

    (This will be part of my “how to privify/securify your shit” series, if I ever learn to write.)

    1: it isn’t
    2: this sounds angry but it’s more pumped up, this shit rules
    3: note that “block connections without VPN” is built into regular Android, but not Android TV, as far as I can tell

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025English
    5·
    2 days ago

    New response from scratch because I manically edited the shit out of my old one. Sorry for linking the wikipedia page there — you were clearly referring to the same thing I was and I didn’t take the appropriate time to understand your reply. I apologize.

    The backlash I am familiar with is that students would learn how to identify the place value of something (“the 3 in 220134₅ has value 3 * 5¹”) but not be able to do actual arithmetic (3 * 5 = ?). Basically “why are my kids learning this abstract stuff about numerals or set theory when they can’t even remember their times tables?” That is my primary issue with it — it is not good pedagogy. Abstraction should come after a student has learned the foundational material. They aren’t professional mathematicians, and treating them as such (beginning with abstract definitions, as we do) is bad pedagogy.

    I am sure there was some pushback in the form of “this is too hard”, but I don’t know how much of that kind of pushback occurred. I also would not necessarily blame it on the intelligence of parents. I can imagine a sort of shellshock when your 10 year old comes home with abstract mathematics that you never learned or only learned in high school or at the undergraduate level. And I can similarly understand the outrage when you expect your child to learn foundational skills in school, only for those to be skipped in favor of a high-minded appeal to “real understanding” (in my experience, this is a theme in US education — don’t memorize basic arithmetic because you can just consult your calculator; don’t memorize facts because you can just look them up).

    I do not know what the curriculum was before new math, but I would be very surprised if they exclusively taught arithmetic in all of K-12 before the 1950s. I haven’t confirmed this, though.

    I do think it is good pedagogy to pepper in motivations for abstract concepts early. Have a student evaluate 1723 * 16 via the standard algorithm and separately have them perform

    1000 * 16
    700 * 16
    20 * 16
    3 * 16
    now add em up and think about why you get the same answer

    tl;dr I think it was more “why are my kids learning this shit before they learn to multiply” than “I have no idea how to help my kid with their homework.” Anecdotally, the latter is not something I have experienced (when I taught K-12), even when the material was abstract and something the parents couldn’t help with.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025English
    7·
    2 days ago

    Some highlights from my high school AP (Advanced Placement) English class:

    1. teacher insisting that you can’t split an infinitive in English, but can’t explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
      • also something about “up with which I will not put” because god forbid you know what you’re talking about
    2. some inappropriate discussions about abortion
    3. we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after “reading” shelley’s novel, but didn’t relate it to the book in any way1
    4. we read some shitty short story, which turned into a shitty movie, and then the teacher kept relating back to the film when discussing the themes of the book
    5. at some point they were like “choose your own novel to read and analyze” and we didn’t really do analysis, and the novel selection was
      • dan brown’s shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
      • one of ayn rand’s pieces of shit
      • i don’t remember what else, but there were definitely no classics
    6. we had to write college entry essays for the teacher to “critique.” i wrote mine about how math fucking rules. the teacher decided it was too technical (despite there being no actual math in it), so they gave it to their partner (an engineer) to read — I doubt this was legal — and came back to tell me how well-written it was2

    my high school education was probably considered decent. don’t even get me started on “whole language learning” and “new math” and the insipid pseudoscience plaguing our certification programs while our populace treats our teachers like shit

    1: Also, this movie was nearly a century old when we watched it and my class got mad at me for spoiling it.
    2: it wasn’t written well

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025English
    24·
    6 days ago

    I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it’s “normal overwrought” or “LLM bullshit.” You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don’t say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like “as a language model”).

    No one describes their algorithm as “efficiently doing [intermediate step]” unless you’re describing it to a general, non-technical audience — what a coincidence — and yet it keeps appearing in my students’ writing. It’s exhausting.

    Edit: I really can’t overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get

    my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element

    which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get1

    In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable i initialized to 0. At each step of the loop, we check if i is less than n - 1. If so, we then check if the element at index i is less than or equal to the element at index i + 1. If not, we output False. Otherwise, we increment i and repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we output True.

    and I’m fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.

    1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven’t determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it’s only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025English
    3·
    13 days ago

    Without knowing why you think they suck, it’s hard to say. I like having unphishable uncopyable credentials, and it irritates me that they aren’t more widely supported. On my desktop or laptop, they’re less irritating than TOTP, for example, which is neither unphishable nor uncopyable but much more widely used.

    I’ve come around a bit since posting yesterday (after looking into the various hardware key options, like OnlyKey). The biggest issue I have is that the firmware cannot be updated (which I realize is somewhat a matter of taste regarding your threat model). Other than that, it’s the added complexity of “use this physical device” and the concern I had about recovering accounts if I lost the Yubikey. Their page on spare devices does not inspire confidence.

    Whilst there isn’t really such a thing as “too secure”, it is the case that things like passwords are not infinitely scaleable. Something like yescrypt produces 256-bit hashes (iirc) so there’s simply no space to squish all that extra entropy you’re providing into the output… it might not be any more secure than a password a quarter of its length (or less!).

    128 bits of entropy is already impractical to brute force, even if you ignore the fact that modern password hashes like yescrypt and argon2 are particularly challenging to attack even if your password has low entropy.

    Fair point! I chose 128 because it’s the maximum allowed in Bitwarden (if it’s going to be copy-pasted anyway, who cares). Assuming I didn’t fuck up basic math, the entropy of a passphrase of length n selected uniformly at random from characters in A is given by nlog|A|, so to reach 128 bits of entropy with 70 chars (lower + upper + digits + special) requires a passphrase of length 21.