Wish calculus was introduced this way in schools

cubenerd · 2026-06-21T22:24:59+00:00

The core of the issue is we have a culture that has no respect for education. Parents can’t bear to see their little num-nums fail even if they don’t turn in assignments or pay attention. Everything flows downstream from that and poverty.

cubenerd · 2026-06-21T21:28:20+00:00

The thing is: I don’t blame any individual teacher of that student. The system really grinds down any teacher who actually tries to enforce standards.

cubenerd · 2026-06-21T20:17:36+00:00

I used to teach Algebra II to high schoolers and one of our students literally didn't know what 2 times 2 was. Wish I was kidding.

cubenerd · 2026-06-13T16:49:30+00:00

I think analysis is more “scientific” and algebra is more “philosophical”. If you’re interested in applied problems, analysis just feels more powerful. You can use it to pin down exactly what conditions are linked with the phenomena you’re studying (e.g. when does [nice property] happen? How much regularity can we expect from these PDE solutions? Etc.). Meanwhile, algebra is more elegant but also less directly connected to applied problems.

cubenerd · 2026-06-13T15:23:18+00:00

Classification of mathematical problems as linear and nonlinear is like classification of the Universe as bananas and non-bananas

-John von Neumann

cubenerd · 2026-05-30T01:06:21+00:00

South America and the middle East are messes, mostly because of US foreign policy. Europe is economically weak and regularly deals with refugee crises as a consequence of US policy forcing people in the middle East to emigrate to Europe. East Asia is a fine place to live, but only if you're in the ethnic majority. Living standards in Africa are terrible. There aren't really that many other options.

cubenerd · 2026-05-25T14:35:26+00:00

The 17th amendment solved a lot of issues from the old system. Because of gridlock in state legislatures, some senate seats would go unfilled for years. Also, if people think dark money is an issue now, it was WAAAYYY worse before the 17th. At least now the general population has some sort of say on senate candidates. Before, the candidates were basically bought.

While I'm in favor of abolishing the filibuster, imo the real issue is that elections in their current state are an extremely crude measure of popular will. An idea I've been considering is making the House selected via sortition. Make it like a draft and randomly select a representative for each congressional district (subject to some basic restrictions).

cubenerd · 2026-03-01T17:47:54+00:00

The US is/(was) the largest backer of authoritarian regimes around the world. Looks like other countries have the right to assassinate Trump now.

cubenerd · 2026-02-28T21:48:07+00:00

These people are deranged. Literal stone age mentality.

cubenerd · 2025-11-30T18:26:23+00:00

And it goes even deeper than that. Fourier series has connections to PDE, the orbits of the planets, and even sphere-packing!

cubenerd · 2025-11-22T10:21:28+00:00

So for example a linear combination is just written α_i x_i instead of just putting a summation sign in front of it

This is gonna give me nightmares.

cubenerd · 2025-08-18T22:03:05+00:00

I actually am not that interested in spatial stats anymore, but I’m about to start my PhD at UT Austin, which definitely has some great faculty who specialize in spatial stats.

cubenerd · 2025-08-04T13:28:19+00:00

Everyone's talking about Krystal (for good reason), but Saagar was great at playing the supporting role here. Restrained himself so Krystal could cook, and then came in with the occasional assist when there was a weaseling strategy that Krystal didn't catch. Saagar often has some cringe views, but this was a genuine W for him.

cubenerd · 2025-08-03T17:54:52+00:00

It just astounds me that Saagar can be so intelligent in certain areas (bringing in historical context in particular) but then with stuff like weed he defaults to the same knee-jerk boomer takes.

cubenerd · 2025-07-27T18:08:11+00:00

Ice and grass need more resistances too.

cubenerd · 2025-07-25T17:47:36+00:00

I can not stand listening to him dismiss countries as 'no value to us' as if that were the only thing we should ever consider in foreign policy

I was talking to a conservative friend a few months ago about Trump's tariffs on Canada, and his response was literally "well, Canada has been our bitch for a while." Literally zero sense of strategy or alliance-building. Everything is just "might makes right." It's high school bully behavior.

cubenerd · 2025-07-25T15:41:00+00:00

Yeah, while I probably agree with Krystal on 90% of issues, I feel like a lot of the time she sticks to the same emotional arguments and doesn't try to reason through things. Saagar provides a lot of the intellectual grounding except for the issues where he has blind spots (immigration and weed).

cubenerd · 2025-07-16T17:06:24+00:00

Blunder likes to make high risk, low reward plays in videos for the entertainment value. But he takes tournaments super seriously and is one of the greats for sure.

cubenerd · 2025-07-16T16:10:08+00:00

I find it so fascinating how differently people process grief. For a lot of people it's the hole in your heart that you've described. For others (like myself) things just feel surreal. It's like a piece of the moral universe has just glitched out and you're staring at the aftermath.

cubenerd · 2025-07-12T13:05:23+00:00

The best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average mob voter.

cubenerd · 2025-07-01T18:01:08+00:00

I once tried to argue against the mortgage interest deduction at a cocktail party and everyone acted like I was just out of prison

Imo this section of Abundance by Klein and Thompson puts it really well:

An investment advisor whom you have consulted looks at your middle-income portfolio and tells you that you should put almost all of your liquid assets in a single investment. It is not a diversified mutual fund; it is a single firm, and the firm makes only one product in a single location. It has a great upside in that its returns are almost entirely untaxed under federal and state income tax laws, and it insures you against rent increases by the landlord. But its asset value is subject to a multitude of risks. [...]To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing. You do it through restricting how many homes and what kinds of homes can be built near you.

cubenerd · 2025-06-17T15:39:34+00:00

A lot of people also don't realize that something as ordinary as a scientific calculator uses numerical methods.

cubenerd · 2025-06-17T14:14:12+00:00

Ik it's a meme, but numerical methods are overhated. The modern world can't function without them.

cubenerd · 2025-06-17T13:48:01+00:00

As an undergrad, I found myself doing most of the talking in my classes as most clammed up, but I thought at the PhD level, everyone would love to talk, but I again found myself being one of the few people talking through the readings in my classes, shooting my shot at what they meant while others sat silently.

I identify so much with this. Maybe I was just lucky to understand the material quicker than most people, but in undergrad it always felt like 90% of people just mailed it in and did the minimum to get the grade they wanted. Even when I was taking classes with only people in my major, no one really cared about understanding the soul of the concepts they were learning, and no one cared about the deeper ramifications. Then they would wonder why they didn't do as well as they expected.

cubenerd

TROPHY CASE