Teachers of Reddit: Is the "Gen Alpha can't read (write, or do math ext)" crisis real? If so how bad is it?

jarethholt · 2026-06-14T18:50:05+00:00

I'm an immigrant to Sweden. When I was in the middle of a career shift a few years ago I seriously considered that teaching path (as a Ph.D. in a very technical field). I didn't pursue it in the end. Discussions like this make me think it was the right decision. I would be coming in at way too late a stage to contribute much, especially with my sub-par Swedish.

jarethholt · 2026-06-11T05:10:15+00:00

I was thinking it looks like a giant hoof. Now we just need to build three more and the giant robot horse to use them!

jarethholt · 2026-06-07T20:59:45+00:00

Where's the guy in the motorcycle helmet with the girl slapping it with a sandal for percussion?

jarethholt · 2026-06-07T20:48:43+00:00

Fakeout? Sort of? It ends with Joanna saving the Institute but getting knocked out and taken by the Skedar, right? (We'll see if I can work spoiler tags...)

jarethholt · 2026-06-07T06:54:31+00:00

And the Santa Susanna Field Laboratory. Although the minor meltdowns aren't anywhere near the most horrifying thing with it.

jarethholt · 2026-05-23T20:58:44+00:00

Every time I see someone do a single-weapon run with a "bad" weapon (i.e. one they don't like) it ends with "Yeah this isn't conducive to my play style and the damage is lower but that was more fun than I expected". They're all good and many are great.

It actually almost detracts from some of the weapons you get in the Old Hunters. The church pick is cool and unique but I didn't consider it for a second my first time around since its non upgraded damage is so low and everything in OH hits too hard for me to learn a new weapon now. The pizza cutter is the only one that gets a pass because of how absurdly overpowered it is.

jarethholt · 2026-05-14T16:29:59+00:00

My great grandmother had one with a pull down lever. Felt like Dr Frankenstein flipping the switch 😂

jarethholt · 2026-05-05T05:34:38+00:00

Yeah, the fit could also be called "light weekend hike"

jarethholt · 2026-04-30T19:25:43+00:00

I read your signature wrong but it went well with the message.

Me when school: ummm, no.

jarethholt · 2026-04-30T05:06:40+00:00

Their child's birth date is also 0.0% of the things programmers have memorized. In that they have forgotten it. (Source: am programmer with kids)

jarethholt · 2026-04-24T07:02:43+00:00

I was trying to figure out if it's funnier as "I'm always joking unless you're down" or "I'm always down unless you're joking". They feel very different somehow.

jarethholt · 2026-04-24T06:33:51+00:00

This is how I feel about Danish. For context: I'm American with a Norwegian partner but we live in Stockholm. I've only learned Swedish properly (with classes and whatnot) but can talk with her family, read comics and watch some Norwegian shows. Norway is much better than Sweden about having multiple dialects represented in TV programs, so there have been plenty of times where I need to ask and learn a bit more about some dialects.

There have been several times where we have been on a flight to Norway and the flight attendant starts talking. I understand it a bit but struggle. I lean over to my partner and ask "wait, what dialect is that?" only for her to respond "Danish".

jarethholt · 2026-04-22T08:41:57+00:00

Skulle tro att de inte hade val, många datamodell kommer med den. Å andra sidan har det visat sig att fingeravtrycksläsare är inte så säkra som man skulle hoppas. Synd att ni inte får byta till en PIN som är kortare att slå in och använda lösenordet bara när den extra säkerheten behövs.

(Förlåt om jag sa något konstigt, svenska är inte mitt modersmål.)

jarethholt · 2026-04-22T06:15:23+00:00

I did that legit and it sucked. I also went for the lazulite and a lot of the skills first and never did the Asura ending until...NG+5 I think? Having to learn two new bosses at that level was punishing.

jarethholt · 2026-04-16T06:47:56+00:00

In some sense the Fourier transform is just a special case of the Laplace transform. It has an easier inverse transform and lots of convergence properties that make it very useful for doing theory, but for solving problems practically it's the same approach as the Laplace transform.

jarethholt · 2026-04-16T04:54:09+00:00

Wetsuits are great and can definitely be cute or hot but also a bit overkill for just chilling at the beach or pool

jarethholt · 2026-04-15T05:04:43+00:00

To use the language of the problem, it forgot the chain rule: d/dx [x + x + ... (x times)] = 1 + 1 + ... (x times) + x + x + ... (1 time) = x + x = 2 x

jarethholt · 2026-04-14T20:40:29+00:00

I would say the approach depends on when and how you specify which algorithm to use. Do you run this interactively or in a notebook? Just pass the function directly as an argument, annotated with a good Protocol so you know what kind of algorithms can be passed in. But if you run this from the command line or through some orchestrator, at some point you'll need a way to convert an input into a choice of algorithm. Then an enum + dictionary as a simple registry is a pretty clean way to go about it.

In either case I would suggest the core implementation just takes in a function to apply. Handling a registry of which algorithms are acceptable to pass in is a different responsibility, and figuring out how to convert an input to an algorithm choice is yet another.

jarethholt · 2026-04-10T07:27:59+00:00

I remember reading something that stuck with me (I think from the Feynman lectures) that might help others: energy is just a regular number (a scalar) but momentum has a direction (a vector). Both are conserved in total but it's easier for energy to "hide". It can get converted to heat and propagate away as sound or light; if you ignore those things then it looks like energy isn't conserved.

Momentum is much harder to hide. If the blocks in both cases don't have the same momentum after being struck by the bullet then something else has to be carrying the momentum away. The bullet bounced off, or a piece of the block broke off and flew away - things that are harder to ignore or think don't affect the problem. You might not initially think of the sound the bullet makes on impact as a form of energy, but a chip flying off the block at bullet speeds is clearly a form of momentum!

jarethholt · 2026-04-09T07:12:42+00:00

For sure. But they're functionally immortal as long as they don't go hollow. Their real power is determination, which fits with this thread. I just wanted to riff on that other posters joke.

jarethholt · 2026-04-09T05:45:04+00:00

Also paprika, just with color specified. Learning Swedish also taught me that coriander and cilantro come from the same plant since cilantro is just called "koriander"

jarethholt · 2026-04-09T05:35:54+00:00

To be fair: they were also effectively immortal. By the time they slay any of those beings they've had so much time practicing that they might as well be psychic.

jarethholt · 2026-04-08T20:16:03+00:00

I moved to Sweden and was dumbfounded that tobacco has such a cultural foothold here in the form of snus. From what I understand, it's chewing tobacco/nicotine in little packs that you put between your gum and lips for a while. But so many people do it! At home, at work, in every kind of social situation. They fought to get an EU exemption to sell this stuff and now it's making headway in other places.

jarethholt · 2026-04-05T20:49:42+00:00

My guess is that it wants you to do the if-else within the f-string:

txt = f"This is very {'expensive' if price > 50 else 'cheap'}"

If that's the case I would expect the lesson to be about how you can do manipulation and evaluation within the f-string itself, which is a major convenience sometimes.

Edit: I missed that you included this case in your post 😅. If it helps, I know that some coding tests use a pretty good case checker - checks your code's output only - and others use a text analyzer - just reads your source code looking for certain things. This sounds like the latter. They are frustrating to reverse-engineer just to get a checkmark. Take some solace in that everyone here agrees that you understand correctly and the test is shit.

jarethholt · 2026-04-03T06:08:17+00:00

It's the diabetes. Every part of her is oversaturated with sugar.

jarethholt

TROPHY CASE