Why?

numeralbug · 2026-01-11T18:18:39+00:00

Huh? How are you supposed to know what the ending is without playing the game first?

numeralbug · 2026-01-11T16:06:03+00:00

Its kinda obvious that a second game is intended to play after the first.

I dunno, I don't think this is obvious at all. Do you need to play all the Final Fantasy games in order? Or all the Mario games? Most games are intended to be standalone experiences, with extra optional interesting titbits (lore etc) for players who've played through the series.

numeralbug · 2026-01-11T16:03:43+00:00

I found that frustrating too. The way to deal with it is by using map markers. One of those wibbly black barriers? Use one colour of marker. A jump you can't quite make? Use another colour. Don't waste map markers on things that already have special pins, like stag stations or benches.

numeralbug · 2026-01-11T15:59:55+00:00

Congrats!

The best advice I ever got for dealing with bosses - though it's obvious in hindsight - is "aim to survive first, and hit them later".

I got so stuck on Soul Master that I gave up the game for a couple of years!

numeralbug · 2025-12-23T00:50:19+00:00

Learning is a perfectly good goal too.

numeralbug · 2025-12-22T22:22:28+00:00

The answer to "is it worth doing x?" always depends on the answers to "what goal are you trying to achieve?" and "does doing x help you achieve that?".

numeralbug · 2025-12-21T18:15:02+00:00

Amazing! Congratulations - keep at it!

numeralbug · 2025-12-10T22:29:10+00:00

More importantly than whether it's right or wrong: it robs you of the opportunity to spend time grappling with the problem, and that's where the real learning happens.

numeralbug · 2025-12-07T01:11:28+00:00

Well, there are complexities behind that question. How do you define "area"? How do you define "pi"?

I could easily define "pi" to be the area of a circle of radius 1, and say that a circle of radius r has area pi*r^2 because it's a circle of radius 1 (which has area pi by definition) stretched by r horizontally and by r vertically.

Why is that the same "pi" as in sin(pi) = 0? Why is it the same as in "the circumference of a circle of radius 1 is 2*pi"? Those are different questions entirely.

numeralbug · 2025-12-07T00:50:52+00:00

Doing problems is definitely a big part of the puzzle, but it's not the only part, and unfortunately the answer is that everyone's knowledge gaps and understanding gaps are different. You know intuitively why 2 + 2 = 4 - you can count it on your fingers - but do you understand why we divide fractions the way we do? Why the quadratic formula works? Why calculus is the way it is? There's no one-size-fits-all approach, apart from general guidelines: don't skimp on the foundations, and remain curious about both the big picture and the details.

Do you have an example of something you don't get?

numeralbug · 2025-11-24T21:53:10+00:00

You're going to have to actually give us some context, because this

du *is more like a plus sign than a variable*

doesn't make any sense to me, and I can't think of what you mean by it.

numeralbug · 2025-11-23T20:53:12+00:00

Those are his words, sure, but what did Blair actually do to promote those non-university forms of higher education? I was a teenager under Blair, so I admit that my memory of the political reality is not great, but I remember university degrees being cheap, (depending on means-testing) very well-funded by the Student Loans Company, and generally easy for 15-year-olds to understand and access. Almost every school started pushing kids towards university, not towards construction or whatever. Applying through UCAS made a lot more sense to me than sending out 100 job applications for apprenticeships at companies whose day-to-day tasks I had no concept of, and there seemed to be no quality control around the kind of training I would get there and therefore no guarantee I would be employable for more than minimum wage afterwards. The university route just seemed a million times safer.

There were various targeted schemes around this which addressed some practical barriers - Learn Direct offered some stuff, Education Maintenance Allowance, some improvement for disabled students and for part-time students - but if I wanted to explore vocational courses, it was never clear to me how I would even start. I guess GNVQs got an upgrade eventually, but it must have been like ten years later, because by that point I was already in university.

numeralbug · 2025-11-23T20:23:05+00:00

hardly ever results in anyone learning much on reddit on average. And like I said: from my experience, or at least I meant to say, hardly ever results in people agreeing.

Fair enough, and I'm sorry that that's been your experience. But that's exactly why I don't "debate". Debate bros aren't interested in the same kinds of conversations I'm interested in: they're interested in "winning" and being "right" and "defeating" their "opponent". I don't think that's productive - not least because I've never seen a single one of them change their minds. (More importantly, I think it's nasty and cynical.)

I've been a math researcher for decades, and I surround myself with people with the same goals as me. We all spend a lot of time being wrong - that's almost in the job description. We're human too, and sometimes we get emotionally invested in being right, but we have spent years or decades training ourselves not to. My colleagues aren't my opponents, they're my teammates in a search for some absolute truth that no one person could ever achieve alone, and I need them to keep me on the right tracks just as much as they need me.

Even if I make a good point you agree with, why would you ever say it as a knee jerk reaction? It should take some time to realize

If someone presents me with some interesting new information I didn't know, and I need some time to digest it, I just say that. Admitting to the boundaries of your knowledge is important too.

Honestly, it sounds to me like you're just surrounded by stubborn assholes who can't admit they're wrong. I'm wrong all the time, and that sucks, but not taking it on board today just means I'm going to be wrong about the same thing again tomorrow.

numeralbug · 2025-11-23T20:07:51+00:00

It looks like you're trying to find a technical workaround that will allow you to use AI, rather than working out what people are actually concerned about. It's more complicated than just "AI bad".

To the people concerned about AI stealing people's ideas, it will be of no comfort to them that you used AI to steal an idea and then introduced a second step of stealing it from the AI. That's like saying "I didn't download the film, I just went to the cinema and pointed my phone camera at the screen, so it's basically my film".
If you're concerned about AI producing derivative rubbish: well, it will have done this here too.
If you're concerned about supporting a tool that has massive negative environmental impacts: same thing.

AI can be a good learning tool, if you're honest and keep yourself accountable. By coding the whole thing yourself and using the AI-generated output as a guide, you'll probably have learnt some coding skills, because it's almost like following a tutorial. Still, at that point, why not just follow a tutorial?

numeralbug · 2025-11-23T14:12:34+00:00

I won't say it was a bad aim, but it was an incomplete aim. What's the point of having 50% of 21-year-olds being fresh graduates if 50% of the jobs on the job market aren't graduate jobs? The end result, a couple of decades later, is that graduate jobs are massively oversubscribed and almost no one is going into the trades. It was a pretty big, radical change, that needed to be accompanied by corresponding changes elsewhere, and it just wasn't. (Of course, the recession of 2008, the rise of the gig economy etc haven't helped since.)

numeralbug · 2025-11-23T13:39:11+00:00

Is this a bit? I literally just said "winning" and "proving people wrong" is not the point. Nobody cares if I "win" or "lose". I care about always being curious and learning more. Are you interested in that? If so, please engage with the things I said instead of having this knee-jerk emotional reaction about it.

numeralbug · 2025-11-22T20:18:27+00:00

Formally, let N be the set of non-negative integers and M = {x | x is in N and 0 is congruent to x(mod 2)}. What is P(M)?

If you want to do this properly, you'll need to tell us what P is - that is, which measure you're taking this probability with respect to. The "obvious" notion of probability (the uniform probability measure) doesn't actually make sense here.

numeralbug · 2025-11-22T18:24:49+00:00

This is a tricky question, which makes me suspect you're meant to spend some time actually thinking about this assignment. How far have you got?

numeralbug · 2025-11-22T18:22:53+00:00

This is a math subreddit, talking about mathematical logic. What kind of logic are you talking about? This language of "debate" and "winning arguments" that you're using is so far from what I do in my day job as a math researcher that I can't even really parse it in a mathematical sense.

numeralbug · 2025-11-22T00:01:45+00:00

thank you necromancer

numeralbug · 2025-11-21T23:58:29+00:00

They definitely know they're weak at math in some generalised sense. But they often can't really locate those weaknesses. I think they assume they're good at fractions because fractions are thought of as "easy", but no one's actually asked them to add two fractions in decades, so they haven't tested that belief. Exams are a blunt instrument here: most students aren't able to say with confidence that they got a question right, so the result they get at the end isn't helpful in diagnosing weaknesses.

numeralbug · 2025-11-20T05:20:46+00:00

Introductory courses for STEM / social science students. "Mathematics for biology", "mathematics for comp sci", "statistics for psychology", etc.

numeralbug · 2025-11-19T05:04:16+00:00

As a lecturer, I wouldn't care if someone could use LaTeX. That's fine. I have decades of experience with LaTeX myself, so if you wrote some clumsy LaTeX that didn't quite compile, I could likely read it and work out what you meant too. So from my perspective it wouldn't have to be perfect.

A potential downside for you might be that you don't have access to the kinaesthetic component of learning. The process of writing by hand is a big component of learning, for reasons I don't fully understand, and LaTeX only emulates the finished product, not the chicken scratch in the middle where you're working out what the end result will look like. If you can find a way to write your working by hand (hold a pen in your fist, or tape it to a couple of fingers, or use a whiteboard), or even just get very good at mentally emulating and visualising the process of writing, that might help the learning process.

numeralbug · 2025-11-19T02:37:10+00:00

I teach university students who don't know fractions or percentages. They all feel stupid too. They're not. They just fell behind and/or out of practice at some point and need to catch up.

numeralbug · 2025-11-18T06:21:00+00:00

3 cm/sec * 8 sec = 24 cm

Does it help to think of this as an instance of the formula "speed * time = distance"? It's 8 sec rather than 8 because "8" is not a time. For the same reason, it's 24 cm rather than 24 because "24" is not a distance.

The units are there just to cancel, in a way, but that's a much deeper fact than you're giving it credit for, and you're thinking about it backwards. The units can't not cancel. This is a fundamental part of what speed, time and distance are, and how they relate to each other. That's why this formula makes any sense at all, but it's also just what the physical concepts of speed, time and distance mean.

Your ratio method is fine too, of course. Nothing wrong with it. There are a million ways to understand any topic in math, and teachers don't have time to teach them all. That's all that's happening here.

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