Septimaeus
Right, and that clue IMO unravels the more troubling aspect of why this content spreads so quickly:
It’s deliberately aimed at people with a rudimentary math education who can be made to feel far superior to others who, in spite of having roughly the same level of proficiency, are missing/forgetting a single fact that has a disproportionate effect on the result they expect.
That is, it’s blue-dress-level contentious engagement bait for anyone with low math skills, whether or not they remember PEMDAS.
Agree but I’d add “unnecessarily” or something, because yeah many common aliases and smaller convenience functions offer meager cumulative time savings in trade for the skill atrophy, but script files can also contain seriously lengthy and/or complex logic that would simply be counterproductive to attempt typing line-by-line into a terminal without any mistakes, especially for scripts that are run often.
A repeated and inexplicable desire to do something you think you shouldn’t is often called a “compulsion.”
A compulsion to expose your inner thoughts, specifically, is often called “not having a therapist.”
Honestly that’s my pet peeve about this category of content. Over the years I’ve seen (at least) hundreds of these check-out-how-bad-at-math-everyone-is posts and it’s nearly always order of operations related. Apparently, a bunch of people forgot (or just never learned) PEMDAS.
Now, having an agreed-upon convention absolutely matters for arriving at expected computational outcomes, but we call it a convention for a reason: it’s not a “correct” vs “incorrect” principle of mathematics. It’s just a rule we agreed upon to allow consistent results.
So any good math educator will be clear on this. If you know the PEMDAS convention already, that’s good, since it’s by far the most common today. But if you don’t yet, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you’re too dumb to math. With a bit of practice, you won’t even have to remember the acronym.
I like it because in some places it’s a common euphemism for fart that’s only used unironically by young children, so every time I hear it the twelve-year-old in me gets another cameo.
I tend to brace myself for shenanigans when reading articles about math with more than one buzzword in the headline, but was pleasantly surprised here. Author achieved approachability without veering off-course. Good read. Thanks!
I know. I was clowning on the dude mad about the arrows by offering one of numerous other meanings outside Boolean Algebra that sounded even more absurd in that context.
OK I take most of these on the chin but I gotta push back on this one because NTs could use it too.
Every picture in the database gets OCR + fuzzy-alt-text + facial-rec + geo-location + timestamp etc etc, all of which are indexed and searchable. Yet the entries themselves are effortless to produce once you’re in the habit.
Those breadcrumbs ultimately augment your functional capacity for recall, and can help you turn an incredibly vague hint of a memory into… voila! …an actual snapshot of that thing from the past.
So it’s not some kind of magpie hoarding behavior necessarily.
It’s note-taking, receipt-keeping, evidence-gathering, and journaling that’s effortless and constantly useful.
Old internet thing. Hotly debated at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
I’ll add the contextual link above for others, since it’s been awhile.