JustSomeGuy1

iPad finally has a Calculator app - Here's everything it can do

June 2024

Unfortunately, as currently implemented, Math Notes is just a toy. It might be useful at some points for grade school and high school math, but not always. Pretty useless at a college

… (more)

level and later. But I have some hope that it will grow a lot - the groundwork is done! Tacking on a much more capable backend is almost trivial, in that it's a problem that's already been solved multiple times. The front end would still need some work, but I think most if not all the hard problems are solved, or well on their way.

At the moment, it understands arbitrary variables, but it's not clear how smart it's going to be about them. It *doesn't* understand subscripted vars - or rather, it does, but it refuses to work with them! It's also not clear how it will handle ambiguity, like, what if you declare n, m, and p, and then declare np? How does it calculate "3np"? That's obviously a user error, so hopefully it will have a smart way to help the user fix it.

It has no idea what matrices are, AFAICT. Much more problematic, it doesn't support function declarations.

Part of me feels optimistic about this - it could be an AMAZING showcase for useful AI tech supporting a general-purpose tool. But part of me remembers the Mac graphing calc app sitting in the utilities folder for so many years without getting any love.

brianus said:

Can anyone with the beta confirm that this supports slideover?

Yes, it does. There are a few small display bugs that I've noticed, none significant.

mikethemartian said:

Can you write a second order polynomial and have it give you the roots using the quadratic equation?

...sort of. You can write a a second-degree poly as y=... and it will offer to graph it for you. Look at the intersections of the X axis and you have your solutions. No actual application of the formula though. And certainly no factoring. It will graph higher-degree polys but it does not support 3-d graphs, or generally any of the cool stuff that's in the graphing calculator on the Mac. I really hope that they will merge the two codebases, or at least borrow a lot.

dewme said:

Without having used the new iPad calculator, if they provide a result stack or memory register/buffer save and recall it should be easy enough to solve a complex formula incrementally by rolling the result from one sub-expression into the next.
[...]
It seems like the Magic Trackpad and Apple Pencil would be an awesome pairing.

Variables are better than a stack. The trackpad is useless. ThePencil is great if your handwriting is decent. It's semistupid about bad writing- not terrible, but not good.

dewme said:

[...] This sounds like it will be easy enough to break down a complex formula or proof into separate parts by using the variables from one or more sub-expressions to calculate the final result, with each of the saved variables holding the intermediate results. This would be interesting for writing a document that has a textual description of a problem and then using the hand drawn math formulas for each step along the solution to make the results come to life within the document itself. Truth be told, this sort of capability implemented as an embedded component would be equally at home in Pages, if there was a way to embed handwritten formulas on a Mac.

Yes, this would be great for writing out long-form high school algebra problems. Trig too. I expect this will work well with Pages but I haven't tried it.

I wonder how portable these Math Notes will be? Will there be an export to PDF or something similar so I can share the entire text + math worksheet with others?

Since it's in Notes, which allows exporting to PDF (and others), the answer is it'll be fine, though if you want shared editing, you'll have to stay inside Apple's ecosystem.

(less)

iPad Air (2024) review: Not the cheapest, and not the best, but still great

JustSomeGuy1

June 2024

AppleInsider said:

[...] but overall the line still lacks excitement.

You're not reviewing a vibrator. It's an iPad.

Apple's new diversity exec hails from Bank of America

JustSomeGuy1

May 2024

9secondkox2 said:

[...] white people contribute to diversity,

No, we don't. We are the default. By definition, as the majority, diversity means those who … (more)

Apple's new diversity exec hails from Bank of America

JustSomeGuy1

May 2024

9secondkox2 said:

JustSomeGuy1 said:

… (more)

9secondkox2 said:

DEI is a sham and waste of money.

Hire the most qualified applicants and reap the rewards.

It’s really that simple.

And yet a lot of smart and successful people think that it's not. They think that having a diversity of viewpoints and life experiences among their employees is a strength.

Diversity is great. But so is Unity. That’s strength.

Humans are by nature diverse in appearance and viewpoints. You don’t need a DEI department to create the talent pool. It’s already there. All you do is hire the best out of interested humans. It’s really that simple. Real life 101. If that means the more qualified person is not the preferred skin color, so be it.

Heck, some of these dei department heads are blatantly racist, posting crazy anti-white garbage all over social media. They think DEI means “not white” when white people contribute to diversity, deserve equity, and should be included as well.

I’ve worked at hewlett-packard, ATT, Verizon, and a number of enterprises and diversity was never lacking. No one needs a DEI department. It’s literally a waste of money. Affirmative action was ruled illegal. DEI is the exact same thing. Just wearing different clothes.

I've hired maybe 200 people in my lifetime, almost all more than 10 years ago. And I didn't think about DEI at all, because I believed I was colorblind. In retrospect, I mostly was, but it's absolutely certain that I had hidden biases. They're almost impossible to avoid. If I were going to start hiring a bunch of people again in the future, I'd pay a lot more attention to that. I'd also make a significant effort to look for a more mixed crowd than I got previously. Yes, technical competence is critical, but I would definitely assign value to diverse experience and background. It's harder to measure than "how fast can you fix this Python?" but worth doing.

The whataboutism you're displaying by talking about anti-white DEI officers is just misdirection. Say you're right, so what? That just means the wrong people are doing the job. Not that the job shouldn't be done.

The fact is, in this imperfect world, no attempt to move the needle on social injustice is going to be harmless. Sooner or later you will find an example of an innocent white man harmed by such efforts. I'm legitimately sorry for that guy, but it doesn't matter. Our society is horribly out of whack and tons of minorities suffer from this daily. If a few white people suffer in the effort to make our society less horrible... it's bad, but it's *less bad* than doing nothing.

The rulings against AA were some of the vilest and most evil to afflict our society in the last few decades. The notion that you can't take any steps to fix a terrible problem, if a much smaller problem is the consequence, freezes us in place. It fails to recognize that the failure to act is also an action, and it produces terrible harms.

(less)