PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

Hexbear’s resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>

  • 134 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2020

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  • I don’t know if it will help your test scores, but I found the 3Blue1Brown Youtube channel to be incredibly helpful in learning fundamental linear algebra and calculus. My interest in learning this was for 3D game development in Godot, but math is math I suppose. Around the same time I hit up my local library and checked out an “outdated” college textbook on calculus (which was also great, but I had to return it too soon).

    I generally prefer literature over video content, but these video series have absolutely fantastic visual representations of the concepts being explained. I think they are a great place to start before dipping into more rigorous literature. You must consider that the traditional way of teaching mathematics is on a chalk board, which is ultimately a visual medium.








  • It sounds like the interim repository you chose wasn’t exactly a mirror. It might have been a repository for a different distribution or something. In the future, it might be a safer option to leave the default mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list and list 3rd party mirrors after it, as alternatives (but it is still essential to make sure the repositories are actually compatible). Also, you should never need to add keys to your APT keyring for mirrors (if you do, they are not mirrors. It makes sense to do this for third party repositories, but not something which is supposed to be an exact copy of the distribution repository).

    The way APT (and most other package managers) work is by keeping track of a list of software which is has been installed explicitly. Some of these are marked (APT terminology) as “manual” by the distribution maintainers. These are installed when you install the OS. Every time you install a package via apt-get / apt / synaptic / gnome-sofware etc. these are also marked as “manual.” When software is installed or updated, the real goal is to satisfy the dependencies of these manual-marked packages. Everything else is installed as needed (marked as “auto”), and discarded as soon as no manual-marked packages depend on them any longer.

    By the sound of it, these relationships got cooked somewhere along the way. A lot of the software which was installed automatically as dependencies suddenly had no dependents, (because the package definitions changed and they probably depended on newer / older / different versions) and so they vanished. It’s actually impressive that enough vital things survived to recover this.

    Anyway, deep-frying a Linux box now and then is how you learn. big-cool


  • I am just guessing. I don’t know a single word of Farsi.

    I’m just thinking that while ‘file’ is clearly a poor translation, it is probably a literal translation of whatever term they originally used. In English we call the rows and columns on the board ranks and files, but these definitions are used pretty much exclusively either for Chess or infantry formations. Farsi might not have have a specific term for column in the context of a board game, or might use the terms more interchangeably.

    I just think like, in Spanish they call traffic lights semaphores (semaforo), which in English is technically correct, but most English speakers would have no idea what the hell you’re talking about if you said “turn right at the semaphore.” In English this word is used sometimes when talking about railroads, but mostly when talking about access control signaling in much more abstract situations like in computer science. It is probably a situation like that.