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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • As others have mentioned, how much and what kind of math you need depends heavily on what you do. And while I wholeheartedly encourage you to do what you enjoy, be it with or without maths, I would like to offer another perspective: A loveletter to maths.

    Math in general gets a lot easier and more fun the longer you do it and the more interest you can build. Often the people that teach math are extremely good at it, and maybe because of that they suck at explaining it. There is a lot to doing it right.

    First of all, I think you need to build excitement. Math strives to describe the world! Math is the foundation of science, math is history, and many of the concepts and techniques arose out of necessity… Or sometimes spite! There are many funny stories or interesting people behind the formulars and concepts you encounter. Learning why the hell some math was even invented and how the guy or gal got the idea is 1000x more interesting than just getting an example for the application of it. It helps you remember stuff.

    Then there are a dozen ways to explain every single concept and then some. You will find some much more intuitive than others and the sum of them will sharpen your understanding of them. Looking for different explanations for the same thing can be a great help. Did you know many things in maths where discovered multiple times? That happens a lot, because even brilliant mathematicians don’t properly understand each other, or even themselves.

    Another thing you should do is to always develop your vocabulary for every domain/concept you encounter. People will throw around made-up words and symbols like no tomorrow. Often, there are simple concepts behind them, hence they are casually abstracted away. You need to understand the concept and then translate it into your own words and then draw a connection back to the made up stuff. Maths is a lot like programming. 1 + 1 is just a function, returning a result. So are integrals, formulas in vector algebra, and every single damn other thing in maths. Just follow the chain!

    And finally, there are also some amazing insights hidden in maths. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems might send a chill down your spine once you grasp their implications. Computability and information theory will shape your view on the world and yourself.

    I went from getting Ds to Bs to advanced theoretical CS courses and you can do it too. You don’t have to, but you can.



  • Compared to Arch(-based): Accesing the latest packages. It’s not impossible, especially if you go for Debian testing repos, but it’s definitely extra work.

    Compared to special-purpose distros (i.e. gaming, portable, high security/privacy, pen-testing): Whatever their special purpose is will usually be harder to achieve.

    Compared to huge corpo distros (SUSE/Fedora and derivatives): Ease of more intricate setups and maybe some security testing.

    Compared to Ubuntu: Paying a corporation to not withhold security patches from you.






  • In short: No. It’s getting better, but Flatpak is by no means secure. Think of it as a Windows .exe or .msi with some (not that hardened) rights management.

    In addition, Flatpaks afe often community made and not even “signed” (which is not really a thing in Flatpak to begin with (yet) ((afaik))).

    Something really secure would be a container, something really, really secure would be a VM, something really, really, really secure would be a separate machine. Flatpak is less secure than the least secure thing in this enumeration.