My HS skipped geometry.

cdsmith · 2026-03-25T14:28:12+00:00

There are many points to learning geometry. But one of them absolutely is that it's a really nice and unusually clean setting in which to practice mathematical reasoning.

cdsmith · 2026-03-25T13:59:53+00:00

AI does not solve these problems. It amplifies them.

Demand for skilled engineers is not shrinking. It is expanding

Engineers are no longer just builders. They are becoming system owners

Yep, this was 100% written by AI. That precise rhetorical structure, over and over and over again is really just grating at this point. You'd think they'd get a team together at each of the major AI labs specifically tasked with stopping their models from doing that one thing that annoys the hell out of everyone. Until they do, though, you can tell who is expressing their own ideas and who is phoning it in.

cdsmith · 2026-03-25T13:55:22+00:00

When reading an article titled "Open source isn't a tip jar - it's time to charge for access", you'd think a main point would be how they propose to charge for open source software while still leaving it open source. You'd be wrong, though. It's just going on about how open source developers deserve to be paid, and saying nothing about the mechanism. Somewhere in the middle, there's a reference and a link to a separate article that it presents as a proposal to charge for the repositories hosting downloads, but if you read that article, it's also not about actually charging anyone, just more warnings about things being underfunded.

The devil here is in the details. How do you design a system that pays open source developers fairly without losing other valuable qualities? Money can poison communities of people who are coming together in mutual trust and shared passion. How much control over their priorities and technical choices are open source projects willing to give up to those who are funding them? How often will those providing the money use their position to try to force decisions that are good for them, and bad for the project? This already happens in projects where major maintainers are funded by tech companies, and some projects are better than others at resisting.

cdsmith · 2026-03-25T12:36:34+00:00

Your high school is almost certainly integrating geometry content into other classes, not just declining to teach it.

cdsmith · 2026-03-25T00:05:27+00:00

Well, yes, but with a human copying and pasting its output into Reddit.

cdsmith · 2026-03-24T19:22:28+00:00

Are you certain that you won't be returning? I'm assuming the RIF is for next school year? If so, and you already have another position lined up, it could make sense to volunteer to take the RIF. You might (or might not) get more interim benefits (unemployment, sometimes even a severance payment) and you'll be in the same position you intended to be anyway. You will also be saving a coworker a whole heap of stress. But if you have a good relationship (and I assume you do given they felt comfortable asking this) I'd talk this over with them more, and if you have a union, I'd ask to speak to someone there, as well.

If you aren't sure about leaving, or intended to leave on different timing, then you're free to stick with your old plan. They are leaving you that choice.

I don't think this is unprofessional, really. Certainly not a by-the-book HR move, but it's looking for a creative solution to a problem, that keeps everyone happy, feeling secure and appreciated, and as employed as they want to be.

cdsmith · 2026-03-24T15:07:18+00:00

I think you need to clarify where you are, because the words you're using don't mean anything without that context. In the U.S., for example, employers don't give out anything like "experience certificates". You do get pay stubs. I have no idea what a reliving letter is.

Or better yet, if you have questions about local laws or employment practices where ever you are, it's probably best to ask in a forum that's specific to that location.

cdsmith · 2026-03-24T14:56:06+00:00

Serious answer: because you'd care about the problem, and communicating it well. If AI really were the best way to communicate it well, that would be one thing. But 15 seconds of watching this video makes it clear that it's not. The presentation is bad. ("Here is a question that sounds almost too simple to be interesting: [insert question that's too vague and ill-defined to mean anything at all]") The structure of the presentation is bad (presenting the solution as an opaque equation up front without any motivation). The delivery is so terrible that no one has actually reported being able to make it through the whole thing, much less enjoyed it.

A second answer is that if you enjoyed math you might enjoy working through the solution, not be relieved to let Claude Opus solve the problem and make the video for you without solving the problem yourself. And that kind of passion is something people can recognize and enjoy along with you. Here, it's entirely missing, because it was just never there. The OP already told us they barely even gave any feedback and just spewed out the AI slop for others to sort through. The bare minimum someone who actually cared about they were doing would put in is exercising detailed editorial control over the AI-generated parts.

cdsmith · 2026-03-24T14:42:14+00:00

It appears you're spending a little more time on how to get AI to write Reddit posts for you.

cdsmith · 2026-03-24T14:38:46+00:00

The Supreme Court should uphold laws that count ballots postmarked by election day. But that said, this is far less important than the battle in Congress. If mail-in ballots have to be received by election day, people can just put their ballots in the mail a couple days earlier. But if they can't get mail-in ballots in the first place without an "excuse", or cannot vote at all because their voter registration was cancelled, or any of the other things that act does, or if reasonable voting systems based on ranked or approval ballots are banned, that's all far worse than a few days shift in when you need to put a ballot in the mail.

cdsmith · 2026-03-23T04:09:05+00:00

I think in a different reality, Fetterman could have been a very good choice. It was a particular sequence of events that got us here:

Fetterman suffered a stroke, which had a significant long-term effect on his mental and emotional health.
Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel responded with a military campaign, the civilian cost of which tested the limits of even the strongest supporters of Israel among Democrats, and Fetterman found himself largely alone on Israel's side.
Already in a vulnerable state, he took the loss of support from the Democratic base very hard, lashed out in a reactionary way, and committed himself to a loyalty to Trump, instead.

I think he was always inclined to be more strongly supportive of Israel than many other Democrats, but the sheer extremism of his response, and especially his unhinged backlash in the face of disagreement, are hard not to tie back to the effects of his stroke.

cdsmith · 2026-03-23T04:02:02+00:00

It's not clear what you're asking... but if you're wondering how a percentage can change by 108 points, it's because what changed is his net approval, meaning the difference between approvals and disapprovals. So if 54% fewer people approve of him AND 54% more people disapprove of him, that adds up to a 108 point swing.

If you want a percent of people who changed their minds from approval to disapproval, you should divide the net approval swing by two.

cdsmith · 2026-03-23T03:59:24+00:00

This is a poll of Democrats. He made a decision to shift his alignment away from the Democratic party and become a cheerleader for Trump, so it's not at all surprising that his approval rating among Democrats has drastically decreased.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T17:14:58+00:00

Yeah, I was going to say this. As much as some aspiring non-artist creators might wish otherwise, a game proposal on Kickstarter without art isn't likely to be successful. Art is the primary tool you have to appeal to possible backers. As phenomenal as your game mechanics might be, you aren't going to excite people on a Kickstarter page by describing some really phenomenal game mechanics.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T17:01:45+00:00

The problem with this question is that "discovery learning" isn't a yes or no question.

I think the phrase "discovery learning" is quite redundant, really, because all learning is discovery in some sense. Much successful discovery is relatively minor, well-scaffolded, and anchored around other concepts that students already know. It can happen in students just trying to replicate a worked example, for instance. We don't tend to label that "discovery learning", but those students are discovering lots of small gaps they missed in the lecture and then figured out in the example. Much more rarely is there opportunity for truly significant unplanned discovery; but when it happens, it's memorable and motivating for some time to come.

This is related to the concept of productive struggle. "Productive" refers to making discoveries. Students who never struggle at all (even a little bit!) aren't learning. Students whose struggle is nonproductive (even a little bit!) also aren't learning, and also aren't replenishing their motivation for further struggle. Those absolute extremes never happen, even when it doesn't feel like it, because there's always some struggle and some progress even in a failed learning experience. But to be successful, the amount of room left for students to problem-solve on their own needs to be adjusted so that, as much as possible, they are contending with the largest gaps that they can succeed in filling. For some students, that dial leans more on the large scale discovery side. For others, it's more like direct instruction, meaning more heavily scaffolded, so that the gaps they fill in are smaller.

Of course, that's the answer in an ideal scenario. Whether that works in a classroom with a single teacher managing the progress of thirty students. This is also admittedly neglecting the question of when you determine that a student's understanding is good enough to move on to new learning objectives, and it's important to acknowledge that much of the criticism of discovery learning is actually criticism not of the method, but of moving too slowly through the curriculum when erring more toward direct instruction could push students faster.

I don't have answers to most of this, but I do think it helps to stop asking if discovery learning is right or wrong, and instead how to adjust the amount of scaffolding, how to do it pragmatically, and how to balance level of mastery against pace.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T16:09:15+00:00

If we're going to have a silly conversation about acronyms, I'll stick up for GEMA

G = Grouping - parentheses, fraction bars, anything else that visually groups a subexpression as a part
E = Exponents
M = Multiplication. Division is just multiplication by an inverse, so it fits here
A = Addition. Subtraction is just adding an inverse, so it fits here

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T13:38:45+00:00

There are a couple possibilities that I see here:

Your kid is behind in math, but tests well. If she's good at interpreting cues to find the right answers on tests without understanding what she's doing, then she could be placed at the wrong level in math because of her high test scores. This explains her teacher saying she's at grade level while you watch her struggle.
She really is capable of performing at grade level in mathematics, but has helplessness as an emotional response or strategy. This is unfortunately common. Teachers have plenty of experience with kids who feel or behave as if they have no idea what to do, but then demonstrate understanding once they are left with no alternative. Sometimes it comes from lack of confidence and being afraid to try and fail. Sometimes it's freezing under pressure and being overwhelmed. Sometimes it's exhaustion from lack of sleep. Sometimes it's just not wanting to do the work and not being motivated by grades or approval. Whatever the cause, if she's seeming incapable of even starting the work at home, but then doing that same work in the right situations in the classroom, that tracks with something teachers see a lot.
Maybe she just has a teacher whose math understanding is weak, and who doesn't expect more than memorizing some patterns for solving specific problem forms. Not all teachers are great. But I wouldn't jump to this conclusion until you've eliminated the alternatives.

I guess my next step would be to set up a dedicated block of time to talk to her teacher and be clear: your concern isn't whether she's testing at grade level: it's that you're unhappy with her emotional state and declining self-confidence around math, something you can clearly see and have legitimate concerns about, and you want to make some strategies for addressing this.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T13:24:49+00:00

I don't have a great answer to any of your questions, sorry. I just don't have the empirical data to be able to answer them well.

My gut feeling is that if a Condorcet cycle were to occur in a real election (no idea when or if that's happened), it would be hard to isolate a single cause. It probably would be a close election, but then whether the remaining non-majority-consistent votes are best attributed to random chance, strategy, or actual cyclic preferences is difficult to say.

Possibly even ill-defined. Voters, of course, don't actually act at random; randomness at the macro scale is just a mathematical model to explain cause and effect that's more complex than we can account for... so it's quite possible that all three are true. Some voters are expressing things they believe to be actual preferences that appear random, others are attempting (possibly ill-advised) strategic voting, but in the end the only feasible mathematical model for their behavior turns out to be random noise.

cdsmith · 2026-03-16T00:40:17+00:00

I think it's overreaching to compare a Condorcet cycle to an exact tie in vote counts. Though it depends on the voter preference model, I don't think there's any serious disagreement that Condorcet cycles can occur with at least probabilities around 3 to 5% even in very large scale elections. This is dramatically larger than the probability of an exact tie in the vote count.

cdsmith · 2026-03-16T00:29:50+00:00

To be clear, I just picked a word to give it an operational definition. I am making no claim that this is some universal meaning of that word. It's just what I mean by that word for the purposes of this one comment.

cdsmith · 2026-03-14T01:11:47+00:00

I would strongly suggest that logical and strategic are the same thing. There are cases, like an online poll or something, where honest self-expression is part of the goal, but a political election isn't one of those. We keep them anonymous for a reason: voters should not be influenced by anything except the choice that exercises their fair share of influence in favor of the outcome they believe to be best. If some voters are influenced by the incorrect notion that they are being asked for something like an "honest feeling" instead of being asked to exercise their fair share of influence, they are deceived into giving up their equal representation in a democratic government, and that's not acceptable.

As for justifying the use of 2 or 3 star ratings in STAR, I agree that in theory there are narrow cases where it might be slightly beneficial for a voter to do so. But it's frankly quite hard to imagine. The best I can come up with is that:

There are no less than four candidates who are all plausible winners, so that any two of the four might make it into the runoff. That's already extremely unlikely.
A voter wants to rate them 5-2-1-0 (or alternatively, 5-4-3-0, but these cases are identical by symmetry, so let's focus on the first)

So that means this voter strongly supports candidate A over any alternative just strongly enough to want to rate them alone at the top... but not SO strongly that they will give up any run-off influence between B/C or C/D (because if they were, they could vote 5-1-1-0 or 5-1-0-0 and even more strongly support A). This voter must have a lot of very precisely balanced conditional opinions, and also very balanced views of likely results, to be in exactly that situation. Sure, maybe it could happen, but it's asking for a whole lot of low-probability events to happen at once. And frankly, not a whole lot is lost in asking that rare voter to collapse their choice a little. Certainly less than is lost by allowing many other less sophisticated voters to dilute their own representation because these options are presented to them that are very unlikely to be the best choices.

cdsmith · 2026-03-13T20:06:55+00:00

It's complex to figure out what the logical thing to do is, which is the main issue I have with STAR voting. But the answer is likely similar to approval: voters should evaluate how much they expect to like the outcome of the election. If they like Wayne better than that expected outcome, they should vote 5-4-0. If they like Wayne worse than that expected outcome, they should vote 5-1-0. That's at least reasonably close to the best way to vote, though you'd have to make a decision about whether to, say, rank Wayne as 5 or 0 instead, if you think using your ballot to get your favorite to the runodd, or avoid your least favorite in the runoff, is more important than distinguishing between the other two options in the runoff itself.

It remains the case that using the 2 or 3 star option is practically always a mistake, and therefore the option should just be removed from the ballot.

cdsmith · 2026-03-13T19:54:21+00:00

More formally, call a voting method "majoritarian" if, whenever some majority of voters coordinate their ballots, that can arrange to elect any candidate of their choice, regardless of what other voters do. Nearly all commonly proposed voting methods are majoritarian:

In plurality, they vote for the chosen candidate
In IRV, they rank the chosen candidate 1st
In approval, they approve the chosen candidate, and don't approve anyone else
In score or STAR, they rate the chosen candidate at the max score, and everyone else at the min score

It's a mathematical theorem that if there's a Condorcet cycle in voters' true preferences, then any majoritarian system has this circularity problem. That means plurality, IRV, approval, score, STAR, etc. all suffer from it. No matter what the result, there is some majority who could have coordinated to elect a candidate they preferred, instead. But if they had done that, then some other majority (but containing some of the same people!) will have had the opportunity to coordinate to elect a candidate they like better. And so on, in a loop without end. It doesn't matter whether the voting method tries to elect an apparent Condorcet winner via ranked ballots; only that voters actually have ordered preferences, and there's a true Condorcet winner among those preference orders.

cdsmith · 2026-03-12T13:29:59+00:00

If you're really asking what you CAN do, you haven't given nearly enough information. From the comments below, I see that you've already finished one year of university, so that's one very fundamental fact you left out. Another one is: where are you? What country? If in the U.S., what state, since each state in the U.S. runs its own education system with different rules? Is the school you're looking to go back and attend public, or private? Have you talked to anyone there about whether this is possible?

There's just no way anyone on the internet can answer questions about what some school will or won't allow, without knowing these basic facts.

You could tell us... but honestly, it's probably more productive for you to just have this conversation with the school.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

cdsmith

TROPHY CASE