ugh i deleted a solid sneer because i thought it was too mean

weird i curl https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/ | grep -i “lemmy world”'d but 0 hits i guess i have to actually read the article now

I bought the cheapest $50 one I could find to see if it was worthwhile and I agree — power and video both go through the USB c port, so I just plug it into my laptop and I’m good to go. Setting up a Raspberry Pi or Android TV dongle just got easier, too.

The one I purchased was a Yodoit PTM15. For $50, it’s not bad, with a 1080p IPS display. My biggest gripe is that the buttons are on the left side and the USB c and mini-micro-wtf-is-this-hdmi ports are on the right side, which means portrait mode is a non-starter (unless you mount it). Since my programming language of choice is TeX, this actually kind of sucks for me.

I initially scoffed at the vesa mount — why would I mount a portable monitor? — only to realize it could be very useful after reading your post and seeing your setup. Thanks for sharing. ❤

That’s awesome. :)

I tried something similar with my Steam Deck (Bazzite + Gamescope works OKish) but I got tired of using a KB+M.

I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation. I have this old bullshit Amazon Fire HD 6 (Fire 6 HD? Who fucking names this shit?) that I am trying to fuck with and you can bypass connecting to the internet at all by clicking any SSN → back → not now, so maybe it’s possible on some Android TV devices. Or maybe not and I can finally get around to reading Don Quixote.

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 necessary^1^). 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 Souls^2^, install MullvadVPN, and sideload whatever other apps I need. 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

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.

I was referring to a specific movement to fuck up the math curriculum:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

As far as parent frustration, I have heard of Common Core taking a simple concept (“what is 7 * 8”) and making it confusing in some myopic but well-meaning attempt to generate intuition:

evaluate 7 * 8 using perfect squares

with the expectation that the student do something ludicrous like:

7 * 8 = 7 * (7 + 1) = 49 + 7 = 56 7 * 8 = (8 - 1) * 8 = 64 - 8 = 56

and I have heard parents complain about that. I have also heard individual people complain that they personally liked math until they got to algebra (the “it was fun until they introduced letters”). However, I am not familiar with any backlash against students being asked to learn more than just arithmetic.

As an aside, I want to state that arithmetic is mathematics and is important for students to learn. When we trivialize it, we end up with students who don’t have numeracy, and it is very hard to teach them more advanced concepts (for example, explaining the formal definition of a limit is impossible if a student struggles with “whenever x is within ẟ of a, then f(x) is within ε of L”) . Lockhart’s Lament is fine and all, but even he responds that the pendulum not belonging all the way on one end doesn’t mean we should swing it all the way to the other.

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

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

some inappropriate discussions about abortion

we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after “reading” shelley’s novel, but didn’t relate it to the book in any way^1^

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

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 piece’s of shit
• i don’t remember what else, but there were definitely no classics

at one point 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 was^2^

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

so like one-half-thousand days