The funny thing is that a lot of Conservatives think that the profit motive + free market efficiencies will reduce costs, and that public systems are full of lazy incompetents who are wasting taxpayer dollars.

And… They’re not entirely wrong, either. And I say this as an educated NDP voter. They’re mostly wrong, because of many factors that mostly boil down to 1%ers building laws and systems to further concentrate wealth. And that wealth they’re hoarding is from profit motive leading to lower costs and the free market increasing efficiency… And also from profit motive leading to higher prices and that most of the reduced costs aren’t efficiencies, they’re cutting corners to deliver inferior services.

But their world view:

• Makes sense
• Is simple
• It’s internally consistent and coherent
• It’s supported by lots of research (mostly in theoretical economics, mind you…)
• Blames “others”/outsiders for their problems
• Etc. etc. etc.

There’s a reason uneducated, young, white, male voters are flocking to the Cons. The Left’s answers are, by comparison, complicated and messy, with lots of grey area, and involve significant change to systems that have perpetuated white make privilege. So, even though uneducated white males would be far better off in a progressive world, it’s much harder to convince them.

I skimmed most of this thread and didn’t see anyone mention that Steam actually supports third party stores. They let developers sell game keys on other storefronts for free (with limits, granted—the number of keys they can generate depends on sales on Steam, I think.)

Fanatical and Humble only exist because Steam handles all of the games delivery infrastructure for them. That’s, like, the opposite of monopolistic behaviour. Name another tech monopoly giving their services away for free so other directly competing businesses can profit.

I keep forgetting how useless Epic is.

Every once in a while, I want to scan my Epic library to see what’s there… and it doesn’t even seem to have a library feature? I need to use a separate app just to see all my games on their storefront.

Then, occasionally, I’ll want to check out what people are saying about their free game offers… and they don’t have reviews?

They don’t support Linux.

Their Android app keeps redirecting to their website for basic functionality.

Do they even have a method for devs to show patch notes or have updates? I have seen any.

I mean, great that they’re giving developers a bigger cut, I guess, but 88% of nothing is worse than 70% of actual sales. Why would I, as a customer, ever try to shop there? It’s a terrible UX missing many features I have grown to expect.

So, yeah. The author of this article gets it.

Great article, and the author brings receipts.

I want to preface this by saying I’m not an AI doomer. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that a word prediction machine (LLM) is capable of intelligence. We’re no closer to AGI with LLMs than we ever were.

I also think AI has its uses; it’s a great tool, for narrow, constrained use cases. Editing text and vibe coding simple scripts, for example—but even in incredibly simple cases, it gets shit wildly wrong very frequently.

But the benefits are massively outweighed by the harms. Coaching suicide. Filling the web with AI slop. Reputational harm from not catching hallucinations. Semantic ablation.

We’re not getting rid of AI; the models are here to stay, and anyone with $2K of hardware can run a decent model at home. But that’s also going to be the end of the AI bubble. There are no natural moats to protect a monopoly. OpenAI will never be profitable since the value they create is less than their operational costs. It’s a money pit.

So, in a sense, I guess I am an AI doomer —the inevitable collapse of the AI bubble is going to cause a major recession, at least as big as the '08 financial crash, and these tech bros are doing massive harm both now and when the economic fallout lands. No surprise people want them dead.

But I’m not worried about LLMs turning into SkyNet.

Sometimes the monopolist does something better for everyone. I’m this case, it’s selfish, of course, because they want people to click the back button to get back into their advertising platform “ecosystem”, but it’s nice to catch a W from "Don’t be evil [when you’re building marketshare]” Google.

I wonder if that’s AI slop? Not saying the whole article is, mind, but if an LLM is used at any stage, it likes to inject superfluous, overly exact adjectives that don’t match the context.

It’s done by Temu and AliExpress, too. Not sure how much power the Canadian government has on direct-from-China online storefronts, but it’s already happening to Canadians, if not by Canadian businesses.

I think that the core idea, that Ubuntu is taking risks, shipping an LTS with major changes, is concerning. New core utils that don’t have feature parity, pipewire as a snap, a single-digit-days-old kernel (which has major changes to scheduling that cause known major regressions with some major software until they get updated), a new sudo implementation that may not be as secure (?), etc. Plus, jumping the hardware req to 6 GB and removing a GUI app for non-snap apps…

Just more evidence that Ubuntu isn’t a good recommendation anymore.

I’d go a step further, and say it’s a bad idea to recommend any Ubuntu-based distros. Yes, that means Mint.

Is Prime Gaming going to be affected?

My read is that this is shutting down all free access to Luna game streaming. I don’t read anything that implies this will affect game codes.

I don’t have time to get into the full 13 (? iirc) steps of Liljedahl’s Thinking Classrooms approach, but it’s exactly designed to meet the needs of students like you. Some highlights:

• Students are randomly assigned to a new group of 3 daily
• All students work on vertical whiteboards, or equivalents
• The teacher presents a math task that starts easy-ish, but requires some work/thought to figure out
• If 30% of students in the room understand the task, then it will quickly trickle between groups
• The teacher circles exemplars of great thinking; students are not allowed to erase these until the next debrief
• The teacher regularly cycles back to get students to explain their work to the class, showcasing and explaining the bits the teacher circled
• Start over with a more advanced task/“next step”

It’s an incredibly effective teaching method for secondary math. And there’s clear motivation every step of the way for what you’re doing and why it matters.

And the teacher only explains about 5-10% of the material; everything else is explained by the students as the carefully curated progression of activities guides them through discovering the math themselves.

Totally agreed, but authors are straight fucked if they try. Popular authors in my genre of choice have tried, and they all say it was a financial disaster for them, and that they can’t afford to be a full time author without KU income. And readers will follow where authors are, since those are the books they want to read.

Amazon’s monopoly on self publishing is probably illegal, but until regulators notice, network effects and anticompetitive practices from Amazon reinforce their monopoly.

Like, my options are, literally:

• Stop reading almost all of the best books in the genre of books that I enjoy, or
• Pirate the books, or
• Read on Kindle Unlimited

Authors have also said that they’re so dependent on The Algorithm, that pirating their books hits them double, from the lost revenue and from the reduced visibility. So that’s a double dick move.

I hate it, but here we are.

At least I read so much that Amazon pays authors like 10× what I pay to subscribe, so that’s pretty cool. (~300-400 books/year adds up to a lot of KENP pages!) And I’m not paying $3-5K/year for books to buy them all, sorry. I can’t afford that!

Yes, examples like that are good, of course. But, frankly, abstract examples like that won’t do much to motivate the students who need the most help to get motivated learning math.

I like to interject little anecdotes like that, too. One of my “go tos” to “why are quadratics useful” goes something like “Well, they come up a fair bit, so I could give you some examples—and I will, as we with through the unit, but the real reason we teach quadratics is because they’re the simplest non-linear function. This is the first steps into looking at functions that aren’t a straight line. And the tools you use to work with quadratics are super important for understanding all the really cool functions you get to learn on the next couple of years…”

That’s basically your example, but one step lower and more directly applicable to students, imho. The Taylor Series thing I usually only drop in grade 11/12 (pre)calculus classes, mostly as a hook for the math nerds that they have really cool things to look forward to learning in post secondary. It’s a terrible application to use to try to motivate learning about polynomials for a student who couldn’t care less, lol.

Really, we need to intermix all approaches, depending on the students in the class. At private prep schools, leaning into academic needs works well. In a non-academic math stream, both your example and my examples will go over like a lead balloon.

But, regardless, motivating students to be excited for math, and the excitement of finally figuring out a tricky concept/problem? That’s what we need more of.

And another reason to support Canada joining the EU.

Economies of scale can make a huge difference in costs, and requiring all cloud services to be entirely domestic would greatly limit options and increase costs. If we can join the EU, then we’ll be part of a big enough economic block to get full benefits from economies of scale and still retain data sovereignty within the context of membership.

Fuck US corporations, their lobbyists, the regulatory capture that leads to their anti-consumer laws, and trade agreements exporting their wealth-concentration laws globally. Disney, in particular, can get fucked with their life-of-creator-plus-90-years copyright terms. But I digress.

If by “practical application” you mean “motivation for learning the skill”, which is I think the way you’re using it, then yes. But that’s not the usual definition in math education, and not what most people mean by it.

Like, for example, to introduce quadratics, a good progression might be to challenge students to build a table of values and graphs for x², then x² + 3, then graph x² – 5 without a table of values, then 2x² vs. 5x² vs. ½x², –x², etc.

And if you have a Thinking Classroom, every student in the class is working on figuring out that progression collaboratively in small groups. The teacher guides students to discover the math themselves through a series of examples, and mostly interacts with the students by asking questions, never giving them the answers.

That’s not “a practical application of quadratics”—at least not in the usual definition—that’s a learning activity sequence (paired with a set of interrelated pedagogical practices).

A good, practical application of quadratics is more like a Dan Meyer “3 Act Math” lesson on predicting the trajectory of a basketball shot. Also cool, good teaching. But not a great way to introduce quadratics.

(P.S. Yes, I use and like em dashes. I’m not a robot.)

Citation needed.

Seriously, though, that’s not what the research is showing. Peter Liljedahl’s research, for example, supports that a very effective way to teach mathematics is by having students actually think about math, instead of just passively receiving info dumps (as is common in most traditional math classes). See Building Thinking Classrooms for details but, in short, it’s a method of getting students playing with math concepts for almost the entire class time every day.

No “practical applications” needed. Counterintuitive, but it’s a highly effective practice.

What’s core to practical applications working is student motivation, and practical applications are one way to induce motivation. But it’s often not the best option, especially for inherently abstract skills.

That kinda breaks down in practice, though. Math is hard for a lot of students. Adding an extra layer of domain-specific application on top of an already confusing topic just makes it worse.

Like, we need polynomials for huge swathes of higher-level math. My favourite application of polynomials is that most continuous functions can be approximated by a Taylor series, which makes some functions that are otherwise impossible to calculate a derivative or integral trivially easy. It’s elegant, beautiful, and deeply practical.

And completely useless for a grade 8 student learning about polynomials for the first time.

Sure, there’s lower-hanging fruit for practical uses for polynomials, but they’re either similarly abstract (albeit simpler) or contrived. Ain’t nobody making a sandbox with length (3x + 5) and width (2x – 7), eh?

I could go on. At length.

Point being, yes, practical applications are better. BUT (and this is a big but) only when there are simple practical applications.

Instead, recent math education research supports teaching fluency through playing with math concepts and exploring things in many ways: symbolically, graphically, forwards and backwards, extending iteratively with increasing complexity, etc. This helps students develop intuition for math concepts and deeper understanding. Then, and only then, teach the standard algorithms and methods, as students will appreciate the efficiency of the tool and understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.

The challenge is the monopolistic death grip Amazon has on self publishing.

For many genres, authors get almost all of their income from Kindle Unlimited. KU requires exclusivity. The result is entire genres of books that are almost entirely Kindle exclusive.

So, the only real options for readers of these genes is either Kindle Unlimited (or buying on Kindle, I suppose) or piracy.

Some authors release serialized content on Patreon or a similar paid or free platform, but those platforms often only get first drafts, are difficult to navigate to get full books, and only cover a subset of authors anyway. And books get “stubbed”, which means everything past the 10% mark gets deleted to comply with Amazon exclusivity, so this is only even an option if you read the whole thing as it is being written. (FWIW, it’s also crazy expensive if you want to support authors; it can easily cost hundreds of dollars monthly with all the subscriptions.)

So, if you want authors to get paid for their work, then, realistically, you’re stuck using Kindle.

It sucks, but that’s the reality until regulators prevent Amazon from forcing exclusivity for inclusion in the KU program.

It’s still easy/cheap to buy new or used legacy USB data cables.

One wonders whether these old devices just don’t have enough telemetry built in for Amazon’s liking.

I think it’s likely more about DRM.

Old Kindles are incompatible with Amazon’s .kfx format ebooks and newer, stronger DRM. With an old Kindle, it was trivially easy to rip Kindle books to retail-quality epubs.

With these devices ceasing to work with Kindle books starting next month, that loophole closes.

Also, old Kindles will continue to work with already-downloaded Kindle books and DRM-free books, but new files can only be added by USB cable, not using Amazon’s services.

The newer DRM also has working exploits, but it’s not nearly as easy, and they’ve indirectly hinted that one of the remaining methods may be closing soon. But, fundamentally, static media DRM (books, music, movies) is inherently beatable; the full content gets displayed to the user, so it can be intercepted and ripped. Worst case, someone will make a screen-capture app that uses perfect OCR to recreate the book. That’s already a solved problem, basically, it’s just horribly inefficient.

So Amazon will continue to play whack-a-mole, turning millions of devices into e-waste, without even causing a blip for book pirates and those needing format shifting for accessibility.

This argument fundamentally misunderstands AI and copyright.

Straight dumps of AI output can’t be copyrighted, but as soon as it’s modified by a human in nontrivial ways, it’s copyrightable again. If open source projects are using straight dumps of AI output without modifications, then the project will be irrelevant before copyright matters, lol.