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shana
@shana@mastodon.gamedev.place
mastodon 4.7.3Making games, hacking tools, porting stuff. ex-GitHub, ex-Unity, ex-Xamarin, indie dev, unity ninja, open source hacker. she/her.
805 Followers
294 Following
31 Posts
Joined December 04, 2017
This muppet of a floof snatched a whole mocca chocolate brownie square off of the table and I had to shove both my hands down his gullet to retrieve it. He was very proud of himself.
Ok y'all I'm jumping back in here, air is definitely fresher in these parts. Need to spruce up my timeline though, who should I be following?
oh wow IGF voting is open already??!? You're killing me with this schedule
Happy Towel Day! You do know where your towel is, right? #towelday #douglasadams
hey fam, me and my hubby are at our anniversary dinner discussing which linux os would be best for gaming - as one does during anniversary dinner - and I know for a fact that you're all a bunch of gaming nerds, so can a helpful soul send distro recs for gaming? 🙏
Replying to
@xerz If only someone had just put a couple of for-loops as footnotes in my school texts! It would have been such a time saver.
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@nyx Super nitpickity, if you don't have a stop condition, a for-loop will happily go on until the death of the universe (or your pc, whichever comes first)
But in general, the sigma is the abstract definition, the for-loop is a possible concrete implementation of that definition, in a language that the target of this PSA (non mathy programmers) can understand and go "oooh ok I get it now". It would have saved me like half a semester if someone had shown me this up front, no other words needed.
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@j_bertolotti hey, whatever gets you to a place of understanding is ok by me, even if it is weird! 😆
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@nyovaya @nyx Of course, that's neither the point of the infinite summation nor the point of the translation of the math notation into the for-loop.
The point is that there is a translation from the notation to a computer language format that allows a person not versed in maths to understand the underlying concept of the math notation in an intuitive way, as a starting point. If you can't understand what sigma does at its most basic, you cannot understand its actual math purpose as a whole.
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@tautology That might have been why my high school math teacher made me promise I would not go into maths in exchange for a passing grade.
I ended up in computers instead which totally has no maths whatsoever!
(in hindsight, not the best maths teacher)
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@hjvt hey, why have one for-loop when you can have Parallel.ForEach() and turn *all* your cpu cores into one toasty personal heating unit!
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@cyberspice yeah, I think I've seen it in passing but never actually engaged with the thing at all, zero clue what it meant until Freya's post tbh :-P
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@jupiter for (sum=0, k=0;;k++) sum+=pow(a*r,k)
Now if you had left the starting index out of the notation, that would have been a stumper 😜
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@nyx I was expecting someone to point out that you can just omit a starting point in the sigma notation, because it doesn't necessarily need one because it's not really a linear evaluation mechanism, which would completely shatter the silly programming analogy and bring the whole house of cards down! 😝😅
Alas.
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I can be as nitpicky as you like, and point out that the sigma also lacks information on the stopping conditions, and it is only by unspoken shared understanding that mathematicians agree on what the infinite summation is doing/what information they're getting out of it, and you can encode that unspoken shared understanding in the for-loop by coding up a stop condition when a convergence is detected.
But, again, not the point of Freya's original point, nor of my posting of it.
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@arielmt "give me a couple of weeks" is an amazing response to a request to remove all of the misleading and deceitful naming and logo pretending that this thing is an official notepad++ release.
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@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange I had something like that happen once as well (well, uh, twice at least?), it's just really weird. I always just think "there's 8 billion other people on this planet, I don't need to deal with this one" and throw them mentally in the trash.