Computer programming books … Lol we don’t print them any more, they’d be obsolete before hitting the shelves.
Do be fair, that’s less because the fundamentals behind programming are changing and more because the specific implementations are changed all the damn time.
Yep, I got that “introduction to algorithms” (1100 pages tightly written, love it) and it still holds up ofc. I should have stayed in uni…
Mathematics teacher: That textbook was written thousands of years ago, and it is still as useful and relevant as ever, but I want you to buy this one I co-authored instead for the mere sum of $120, otherwise you won’t pass.
Conflict of interest detected
This really happened?
I took an environmental science class in college, and the professor was a former president of Shell. As part of the curriculum, we had to read his book, Why we Hate the Oil Companies. Predictably, it’s a corporate non-apologia, which—hilariously—completely avoids engaging with why we actually hate the oil companies.
Did people stand up to call the bullshit? I guess in this kind of situation you feel threatened that if you talk, you get penalized heavily
Not that I recall. I didn’t know anyone else in the class, and I don’t remember anything coming up in the class group chat. I did get quite heated with him at a couple of points, but I’m pretty sure he still gave me an A.
environmental science class … the professor was a former president of Shell
Do they also invite Nazis to teach the elective in human rights?
Iirc, it was an energy/environment focus, so it was all about analyzing and comparing different energy sources wrt their usefulness, feasability, environmental impact, etc. This was in Houston, so the oil industry plays a huge role in the local economy, and funds the university endowments.
But yeah, the whole thing was pretty farcical.
I admit I exaggerated a bit. It hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve had some teachers that strongly suggested buying their textbooks and frowned if you didn’t.
Fucking disgusting behavior
Not the original commenter, but I briefly had one professor in college that did that (their book was $50, though). It was an elective course for me, fortunately. I was able to switch for a different class that fit the same requirement without being forced to buy a book the professor wrote.
Science is validated by the new information replacing the old. Al-Khwarizmi worked out numbers so we don’t have to,
Reality: The universe was spontaneously created last thursday and there is no way for you to disprove it.
Nah mate, it was already in existence by last Tuesday afternoon and there is no way for you to disprove it.
Since you made the claim, the onus of proof is on you. Go on, it’ll be interesting to see your proof.
This was made by someone who doesn’t understand any of it.
It’s called a joke.
Very funny, I’m laughing so hard. So true /s
I can tell you are just the best of conversationalists, try to leave some charm and charisma for the rest of us.
Poor you. I will make sure I laugh next time. Don’t you worry.
So, what’s it like living up your own asshole?
Sorry, too busy waiting. Not laughing yet. Have you tried asking yourself that?
Easy as
I/II= ,V(OK, that was confusing, it’s
I/II= .Vin barbaric` )deleted by creator
Religious Texts: … that text was written by some half literate guy living in a desert who heard tenth hand folk stories from his community from people who had died about a hundred years before his time, mixed in with legends, myths and fairy tales that are thousands of years old … but it’s all true because it came from God, believe it or you will burn in hell forever.
The hypocrisy of any religious book being the words of their all powerful master while they give themselves the option to cherry pick which rules they wish to follow is astounding.
It’s one of the first things that convinced kid me that it’s all made up bullshit to control gullible people.
The funny part that is … which book are you talking about? … Christian bible? Jewish Tanakh? Islamic Koran? … and if its Christian - is it just the Old Testament? New Testament? … which version of the Christian bible? - King James? New Standard? English Standard? Anglican? Baptist? Lutheran? Methodist? Presbyterian? Roman Catholic? Mormon? Protestant?
Mormons use the King James version. Or at least used to. Wouldn’t surprise me if they started rewriting their own version, though… it’s kinda’ 99% of religions’ MO.
I don’t see any difference between cults. It’s all a way to control uneducated people with fake magical thinking and the threat of eternal damnation.
Same here … and they’re all cults as far as I’m concerned
The only difference between a cult and a religion is time
Time and mass acceptance
Don’t forget about all the apocrypha.
And don’t worry, it definitely wasn’t completely written a thousand years later to push the preferred political agendas of the time.
That wouldn’t be true for Christianity as 3 of the 4 Gospels were cribbing off the 4th one. Heck the Gospel of John and the Revelation unto John were written by at least two different people and the Revelation likely was included at the Council of Nicea because they both had John in the name. Christianity would be very different without revelations.
Electron was discovered in 1897. If you own a textbook on chemistry which is older than that, put it up on Ebay in the antiques category.
Newton lived in the 17th century, so if you got a textbook older than that give it back to the museum
I’ll drop it off for anyone if needed.
I’m very trustworthy.
Very.
I promise.
Web development: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written last year before Angular v18 was released.
Was just watching a kubernetes tutorial recorded a year ago, and the entire website / package repository it uses doesn’t exist anymore because modern devs can’t go six months without changing everything.
A colleague called it “Hype driven development” the other day and I have to say that describes it perfectly.
*French SpongeBob voice
“2 hours later”
Whoops, 18.1 just released breaking changes
But math does change, and it has a lot in the last 1000 years.
Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.
The mathematical knowledge we had thousands of years ago is still true, and it always will be.
Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.
Isn’t that true of almost all the sciences?
Not quite. Science is empirical, which means it’s based on experiments and we can observe patterns and try to make sense of them. We can learn that a pattern or our understanding of it is wrong.
Math is inductive, which means that we have a starting point and we expand out from there using rules. It’s not experimental, and conclusions don’t change.
1+1 is always 2. What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions. 1+1 is 10 in base 2. Now we have a new, deeper truth about the relationship between bases and what “two” means.Science is much more approximate. The geocentric model fit, and then new data made it not fit and the model changed. Same for heliocentrism, Galileos models, Keplers, and Newtons. They weren’t wrong, they were just discovered to not fit observed reality as well as something else.
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
A mathematical discovery doesn’t do that. It might make something more clear, easier to work with, or provide a technique that can be surprisingly applicable elsewhere.You’re contradicting yourself.
What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions
Is no different than:
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
Science isn’t changing, our understanding of it is. Same with math.
Those are entirely different. Peano developed a system for talking about arithmetic in a formalized way. This allowed people to talk about arithmetic in new ways, but it didn’t show that previous formulations of arithmetic were wrong. Godel then built on that to show the limits of arithmetic, which still didn’t invalidate that which came before.
The development of complex numbers as an extension of the real numbers didn’t make work with the real numbers invalid.When a new scientific model is developed, it supercedes the old model. The old model might still have use, but it’s now known to not actually fit reality. Relativity showed that Newtowns model of the cosmos was wrong: it didn’t extend it or generalize it, it showed that it was inadequately describing reality. Close for human scale problems but ultimately wrong.
And we already know relativity is wrong because it doesn’t match experimental results in quantum mechanics.Science is our understanding of reality. Reality doesn’t change, but our understanding does.
Because math is a fundamentally different from science, if you know something is true then it’s always true given the assumptions.There’s a difference between an advance that repudiates prior understanding and one that doesn’t. You can, in maths - and I assume this is the point - know that you are right, in a way that you can’t with a more… epistemological science. Of course it’s more complex than that, and a lot of maths is pretty sciency, like deriving approximate solutions for PDEs is more experimental than you might imagine, but even though we might make improvements there, we’ll never go ‘oh actually those error bounds are wrong’. They might be non optimal but they’ll never be wrong
This is missing a lot of historical intrigues and “mistakes” in mathematics. Firstly, the way modern mathematical theorems and proofs are built up from axioms is relatively new (a couple hundred years or so). If you go back to Euclid, there are in fact contradictions that can be drawn from his work because he was defining his axioms inappropriately.
In more modern times we have discussions around the “axiom of choice”, and whole fields such as set theory and Fourier analysis faced some major hurdles in just being established.
My point is that math is constantly changing, also on a fundamental level, because new systems and axioms are being introduced. These rarely invalidate old systems, but sometimes they reveal a contradiction in terms that puts limitations on when some system is valid.
This is very similar to when Einstein developed a new framework for describing gravity: It didn’t “disprove” Newton in the sense that Newton’s laws still apply for all practical purposes in a huge range of situations, it just put clearer limits to when they apply and gave a more general explanation to why they apply.
A lot of sciences find core assumptions were not complete or based on the wrong thing. Health practices that have been around for millenia, like like food safety and sanitation, were successfully implemented using the wrong causes because they addressed the real causes. While they were not called science, they still used the same practices of comparing outcomes in the ways available at the time.
Bloodletting was originally to let out evil or something, then was used in formal medicine successfully but the cause it addressed was incorrect. Now we have much better ideas of how and when it helps to make it even more effective, but the underlying reasons and the methods changed completely.
Bloodletting is still a thing, but it’s called therapeutic phlebotomy.
Source: I have too much iron in my blood so I have to be bloodlet
yeah, and physics changes as a science because the actual physics of the universe changes. what are you on about. “we just learn more about it” is pretty much the definition of all sciences.
Has anything changed in Euclid’s Elements?
We discovered one of the postulates was really interesting to fuck with.
It’s better to say that we’ve discovered more math, some of which changes how we understand the old.
Since Euclid, we’ve made discoveries in how geometry works and the underpinnings of it that can and have been used to provide foundation for his work, or to demonstrate some of the same things more succinctly. For example, Euclid had some assumptions that he didn’t document.
Since math isn’t empirical, it’s rarely wrong if actually proven. It can be looked at differently though, and have assumptions changed to learn new things, or we can figure out that there are assumptions that weren’t obvious.
Yes, some of the shit he wrote was basically meaningless (the “definitions” before the axioms) and we would just leave it out.
Nope. Thats why I gifted it to my son, who studies math.
Oh that book is outdated. That’s the second edition, you need the third addition to complete the one math problem I am basing your entire grade on for the course.
Computer Science:
Oh, that textbook is outdated. That was before NodeJS 22.
Or: “The algorithm and data structure theory stuff is still pretty relevant. However, all of the examples are written in a language no one really uses any more. If they can get away with it.”
Or: The new version is reimplemented and incompatible, so everything you learnt about it from the previous versions is wrong.
Oh, you use the MediaWiki engine, too? The documentation is always a few versions behind, and between there and now they broke the interface three times…
One of the best programmers I’ve ever met told me, “All you need is Knuth everything else is just syntax.” And I don’t know if that’s 100% true, but can say I learned more from reading The Art of Computer Programming than I have in basically any other textbook/textbook series I’ve read on the subject.
Philosopher to the right of the mathematician: “You’re welcome for the axioms”
Computer Scientists: Physics is just the application of discrete state machines.
The other way around. Computer Science studies the implications of physical laws - the relation between space and time, what’s ultimately knowable given the make ups of our universe, etc.
As nearly always, there is a relevant xkcd.
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
