Crying is a free action
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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58114817
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Pfffft….

Amateurs!

Josuttis’s books are normally pretty good, lots of examples and a clear explanation of why you might want to use something, but oof that looks akin to a kick in the essentials.
Even if you’ve no other reason to update to C++20, the fact that if constexpr gets rid of half the things you’d previously need to use SFINAE for, and concepts gets rid of the other half, makes it well worthwhile. Amazing how much it stops hurting when you stop doing ridiculous things.
C++ 20? I had to learn and do template metaprogramming on gcc 4.8 😭😭😭
The book is a good book though.
I see someone finally embraced the fact that C++ templates are Turing-complete and you don’t really need much of the rest.
That book looks as old as the language itself
Template metaprogramming (with the variadic function) is like from the late seventies IIRC… Older than C++!
Well, people might argue about the definition but the idea has been around some fair time …

For anyone who doesn’t know, this is what linear algebra looks like

y = mx + b
It’s algebra. It’s linear. 😬
No way, dude. Thats affine, not algebra, and not linear. Its a lie meant to divide us.
I agree, all the other examples here are not on a single line. Some of the letters are on top of other letters, definitely not linear.
I solved it. Answer hotdog
That’s not a fair example, I know what linear algebra is but can’t tell what’s going on.
Change of basis would be my guess, but that’s pretty basic.
You could’ve provided something far worse, like a manual construction of the Jordan normal form of a large matrix.
It’s been more than a handful of years since I had to learn linear algebra so I am very out of practice, and this was the first image that I saw that made me go, “yeah, that looks about right.” I thought I should include some image since I have told people during college that I was in a linear algebra class and several had the same response of, “Really? I learned algebra in high school. Weren’t you in calculas last semester?”
One time at work I was trying to work out a least-squares fit using linear algebra.
I have no background knowledge in linesr algebra, it felt like drawing a pentagram on the floor and chanting in backwards Latin.
Thats not too bad. It just takes up a lot of space. Good thing I do my maths on an android tablet
I am a freak who really enjoys linear algebra. It’s actually quite heartening to discover that even amongst my friend group of weirdos, there are still freaks
I see your linear algebra and raise you nonlinear acoustics: boom!
I’m going all-in on transonic fluid dynamics. All the joy of nonlinear acoustics, with a little navier stokes as a treat.
My dad’s grade 4 teacher used to clobber him real good with a Bible whenever he did normal kid stuff, the Bible can definitely make you cry.


I remember algebra. x = 2 and all that jazz. Letters and numbers mixed all willy-nilly. Surely the “commutative” part can’t make it much worse.
This book…I read the whole thing, did most of the problems, and still don’t know a thing about abstract algebra.

Project Hail Mary legitimately made me cry there towards the end. I watched the movie afterwards and it wasn’t nearly as impactful (and I have opinions about the movie, even tho it was decently good), but the book just kicked me in the chest.
Everybody giving all these first year engineering books. Real engineers cry when they’re doing their CCNA certification.

I actually did study for the CCNA and was primed to certify. I decided not to go that route and found myself in a Java class a couple years later. I now don’t use either of those things.
That isn’t real engineering, sorry.
Do your CCIE and come back to me.
And for what it’s worth, I did my BSc.Eng in Electrical too.
You’re not much of an engineer if you can’t see how fallacious your argument is.
Memorizing endless arcane trivia that changes every six months is a parlor trick, not engineering.
The same way memorizing all the SCPI commands of your oscilloscope doesn’t make you an engineer.
That’s actually one of the reasons I didn’t like it. It focuses almost entirely on Cisco router/switch/whatever else setup and gives only minimal background on the actual theory behind networking. That wouldn’t be so bad if this wasn’t the extent of my engineering undergrad experience with networking. We didn’t even technically get the certification because apparently netacad doesn’t count despite being the same content
It didn’t make me cry but the greatest book I ever read was A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck.
Isn’t it weird the a lot of internal and third party documentation and books of older windows system are the opposite of this
Finished compsci but interned as a computer technician and there I thrived. Instead of constantly having to keep up to date on programming: subscribing to journals, attending seminars and conferences, networking with other programmers, and of course (re)studying shit to get certified.
That sounds like my time as a computer technician and then a network tech. Always chasing the next cert to stand out from the next tech. Once I switched to compsci I’ve never been pitched any certifications.
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This one fucks me up
Oh! I know something that can mess you up even more!
For those who don’t know what this book’s about:
This book is lovingly called “Baby Rudin”, because it’s considered an entry-level book that undergraduates can take in their first 3 years, and Rudin also wrote 2 more books that are a large extension of the basic ideas in Baby Rudin, as in, more advanced, covering topics like Measure Theory (one way this is useful is as a framework to have more ways to deal with integrals) and Lesbesgue Integration (and this is an introductory example and application of Measure Theory) in “Papa Rudin”, and Functional Analysis in “Grandpa Rudin” (fancy phrase of the day: infinite-dimensional spaces!).
Please don’t ask further though. Many tears have been shed. Many trees were also harmed in the process (from all the papers that were used for sketching out ideas or proofs).
Please, ELI5 real analysis to me. I thought we just used integrals because they work
No offense to you, but I’m assuming your mention of integrals here are those that you’d frequently encounter in a regular course of calculus in the English-speaking world (little tidbit that I came across a while ago is that universities in a number of countries don’t make a distinction between real analysis and calculus). But I studied in NA, so I can come at your ask from this angle.
To make it perfectly clear though: real analysis (and some beyond) and calculus are looking at the same thing, but coming at it from different angles. Calculus focuses on what’s computable, to have the ability to look at how real values (as in, real numbers) change given a particular function. OTOH, real analysis is, as the name suggests, a study of real numbers, this nebulous idea of “distance between numbers along with other distance-y properties” that we call a space, and the functions that can act in this space.
Here’s an example of the difference in treatment.
In calculus, the idea of differentiability is usually introduced as “the tangent at a point”. And that’s a fairly easily understood idea, and it’s fine to gloss over the details when most of the functions that you will come across and use are going to be differentiable functions.
In real analysis, which is usually an early class in pure mathematics, the treatment is a lot more rigourous: you have to very explicitly define what something is, and it becomes your framework to prove that something IS the thing you’ve defined. The “tangent on a point” isn’t lost, but the way it’s described leaves you with no space for vague interpretations of what’s considered differentiable or not.
The same goes for integrability. And yes there are different ways to think about inevitability to expand on the types of functions that would be considered integrable. In calculus, the Riemannian method is likely the only method that one will ever see. And that’s fine! It’s easy, if not tedious, to compute! And it’s already incredibly useful. Most functions that a student in calculus will ever have to integrate are all continuous anyways.
But Lesbesgue was able to create a definition of an integral that allows us to handle even certain non-continuous functions. The problem? It’s not as easily computable as there isn’t all the derivative rules common in calculus (calculus is a “method of calculation"), even though the intuitive intepretation of the Lesbesgue integral is that instead of slicing the area under the curve downwards, you slice sidewards!
Hopefully that’s easy enough to follow, but let me know if you’d like me to explain further. Trying to grok this old part of my brain here for this.
Edit: I’m adding this on because I think I may have just recalled a very fundamental knowledge with regards to measure theory, that all non-negative functions defined in some measurable space are all integrable using the measure. To be really fair, we straight up just defined integrability to be that, because, and I’m being veeeerrry handwavy here, if you can measure parts of the range of a function in smaller pieces in some way, then you could just add the parts up. A measurable space as just some space where you can put some kind of measurement (think of how you measure things) on a collection of points in some space, think a bunch of numbers.
How easily can we make up methods of calculation that would allow us to take any such function, apply some symbolic manipulation, and arrive at the integral, though, is a completely different ask, and I don’t yet know if there’s effort being put in here.
I’m familiar with a previous edition of that.
However, this one really does your head in: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3484848M/Complex_analysis
99 Euro’s on Amazon that’s expensive!
Ahh yes. Cut my teeth on the 5th edition of that book.
I like thermometers. I don’t like partition functions.
What is the temperature of 50 atoms when extended to bulk conditions?
They’ve been playing us as absolute fools.
I still get flashbacks…
I used this book. It’s not tthhhhhaaaaatttt bad.
Yeah I was gonna say, I actually remember enjoying it, as far as textbooks go, anyway.
I’m glad I was able to choose C++ for my data structures class. Using pointers made it much easier to wrap my mind around trees, graphs, etc. Towers of Hanoi was a mindfuck, though.
Tears of joy, no doubt. No wait. Java…