FishFace
@FishFace@piefed.social
- Comment on X could be banned in UK amid sexualised AI images concerns 10 hours ago:
Right, so it’s being upset for no good reason.
The OSA was always a shit law, but the fact that it has not forced twitter users to undergo ID verification is not reflective of that. It’s not a problem that the law doesn’t force all sites that host adult content to age-verify all users because those sites can instead just not show the adult content to those unverified users.
But because it’s a bad law, people will validate literally any complaint about it because it aligns with their other opinions.
- Comment on X could be banned in UK amid sexualised AI images concerns 10 hours ago:
Do you mean that Twitter itself is not forcing all users to undergo ID verification, like for example Pornhub does?
Because that can be explained by the law not requiring a site which hosts adult content to go to those lengths if such content is not shown to those whose age is not reliably known. If you think the law is being applied unfairly maybe it would be worth being specific about what exact provision of the law is being applied to porn sites and not to twitter.
- Comment on X could be banned in UK amid sexualised AI images concerns 11 hours ago:
Fair enough. But it also (I just checked) requires age verification like regular porn sites, so I don’t really get the raising of the treatment of twitter as some kind of double standard.
- Comment on X could be banned in UK amid sexualised AI images concerns 11 hours ago:
As far as I understand (going from what was reported on this in the last couple of days) Grok’s ability to create porn is recent, so that explains that.
I don’t use it, but my impression was that, Grok aside, the content is primarily not porn, which would make it not a porn site, surely.
- Comment on X could be banned in UK amid sexualised AI images concerns 11 hours ago:
Eh? It’s the exact same law that’s being used, with the exact same problems. The reason it’s not been done yet is because Twitter is not - or was not - a porn site, so it escaped scrutiny. But the sites failing to comply with the Online Safety Act aren’t just deleted from the internet immediately, there’s an investigation first.
- Comment on The forbidden fourth leche 20 hours ago:
Literally posted less than 24h ago to the same community and heavily upvoted?
- Comment on Auto update 1 day ago:
What?
- Comment on Why joining the local library is the best thing you can do in 2026 1 day ago:
Part of our library has an access barrier that you need a library card to get in. I scanned my card but it had been deactivated because I hadn’t been in like 10 years :(
- Comment on Right to protest is under attack in England and Wales, reports warn 1 day ago:
The PCSC act was a real chunk out of the right to protest and it’s been biting lately. But with Palestine Action, it was the Terrorism Act, whose abuse was predicted at the time but few people cared about, which was abused to arrest over a thousand innocent, peaceful people. I hope this is taken seriously and learnt from when warnings about breaches of fundamental rights to free speech and other freedoms are raised now.
- Comment on I dunno 1 day ago:
It’s amazing that you think these are explicit references. Notice how the text never says “you MUST use the distributive law”? It always says some variation of “*in order to simplify*, you must…”?
No, you don’t notice, because you’re blind, and don’t understand what distributivity actually is.
You also got me confused with someone else trying to explain in short words how you’re wrong, but that won’t be a problem now you demonstrated such abject failure to hold a productive discussion - bye.
- Comment on I dunno 2 days ago:
I haven’t been able to follow the entirety of that conversation so I don’t remember what exactly he said about combining (implicit) multiplication, brackets and powers.
I think their fundamental confusion is in thinking that the distributive law is something you must do instead of a property of multiplication that you can use to aid in the manipulation of algebraic expressions but don’t have to. Folded into their inability to understand that some aspects of maths are custom and convention, whilst others are rules fundamental to the operation of the universe. Somewhere along the way he seems to think that distributivity is something to do with brackets instead of something to do with addition and multiplication - I really don’t understand how that has happened!
I’m pursuing a tack where I’ll see if I can get him to actually cop to any of his verifiable mistakes, or back up any of his whackadoodle claims with direct references. If he can’t, I’m out - but I do like to give people an opportunity to demonstrate they’re not trolling. The nice thing is that it doesn’t really matter whether they’re trolling or not - someone who is able to admit mistakes is someone worth trying to convince they’ve made a mistake, and someone who isn’t is not. So if you can test the waters with a simple mistake, even if it’s not central, you can establish whether there’s any point persevering.
Tomorrow I’m expecting another wall of text responding to every single word except the ones where I ask for such an admission, and I’ll have satisfied myself he’s a lost cause. I’ll try and watch out for his spam on future arithmetic-ragebait threads so I can help the effort to head him off though :P
BTW did you go on his mastodon profile? He’s had a bee in his bonnet about this, and been pushing his wrong ideas of what the distributive law are, since 2023.
- Comment on I dunno 2 days ago:
Couldn’t resist:
but when multiplications are denoted by juxtaposition, as in 4c ÷ 3ab
Damn, and I thought they were called “products” not “multiplications” 🤔🤔🤔
No it doesn’t. If you meant ab², then you would just write ab². If you’ve written a(b)², then you mean (a×b)²
If you can find an explicit textbook example where writing a(b)² is said to be evaluated as (a×b)² then that’s another way you can prove your good faith (When I say “explicit” I don’t mean it must literally be that formula; the variables a and b could have different names, or could be constants written with numerals, and the exponent could be anything other than 1). Likewise, if you can find any explicit textbook example which specifically mentions an “exception” to the distributive law, that would demonstrate good faith.
I’m not saying that such an explicit example is the only way to demonstrate your claim, but I’m just trying to give you more opportunities to prove that you’re not just a troll and that it’s possible to have a productive discussion. You insist you’re talking about mathematical rules that cannot be violated, so it should be no problem to find an explicit mention of them.
If you think this insistence on demonstrating your good faith is unfair, you should remember that you are saying that the practice of calculators, mathematical tools, programming languages and mathematical software are all wrong and that you are right, and that my interpretation of your own textbooks is wrong. While it’s not impossible for many people to be wrong about something and for me to interpret something wrong, if you show no ability to admit error, or to admit that disagreement from competing authorities casts doubt on your claims, or to evince your controversial claims with explicit examples that are not subject to interpretational contortions, the likelihood is that you’re not willing to ever see truth and there’s no point arguing with such a person.
By the way, sorry for making multiple replies on the same point.
As my own show of good faith, I do see that one of your textbooks (Chrystal) has the convention that a number “carries with it” a + or -, which is suppressed in the case of a term-initial positive number. If you demonstrate it worth continuing the discussion, I’ll explain why I think this is a bad convention and why the formal first-order language of arithmetic doesn’t have this convention.
- Comment on I dunno 2 days ago:
Do you teach classes like this? “That’s not a product, it’s a multiplication” – those are the same thing. Shouldn’t you, as a teacher, be explaining the difference? I’m starting to believe you don’t think they’re is one, but are just using words to be annoying. Or maybe you don’t explain because you don’t know.
You could argue that “product” refers to the result of the multiplication rather than the operation, but there’s no sense in which the formula “a × b” does not refer to the result of multiplying a and b.
Of course, you don’t bother to even make such an argument because either that would make it easier to see your trolling for what it is, or you’re not actuality smart enough to understand the words you’re using.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that you never provide any reference to your textbooks to back up these strange interpretations. Where in your textbook does it say explicitly that ab is not a multiplication, or that a multiplication is different from a product in any substantive sense, eh? It doesn’t, does it? You’re keen to cite textbooks any time you can, but here you can’t. You complain that people don’t read enough of the textbook, yet they read more than you ever refer to.
In the other thread I said I wouldn’t continue unless you demonstrated your good faith by admitting to a simple verifiable fact that you got wrong. Here’s another option: provide an actual textbook example where any of the disputed claims you make are explicitly made. For example, there should be some textbook somewhere which says that mathematics would not work with different orders of operations - you’ve never found a textbook which says anything like this, only things like “mathematicians have agreed” (and by the way, hilarious that you commit the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent on that one).
Likewise with your idea of what constitutes a term, where’s your textbook which says that “a × b is not a term”? Where is the textbook that says 5(17) requires distribution? (All references you have given are that distribution relates multiplication and addition, but there’s no addition) Where’s your textbook which says “ab is a product, not multiplication”? Where’s a citation saying “product is not the same as multiplication and here’s how”? Because there is a textbook reference saying “ab means the same as a × b”, so your mental contortions are not more authoritative.
Find any one of these - explicitly, not implicitly, (because your ability to interpret maths textbooks is poor) and we can have a productive discussion, otherwise we cannot.
My prediction: you’ll present some implicit references and try to argue they mean what you want. In that case, my reply is already prepared 😁
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
Yeah, I’d make most stuff explicit in programming. You’re rarely gonna do more than two arithmetic operations at a time anyways so you often get it for free. The most common one for me is % which I expect to bind weakly. I guess it binds tightly because it follows division, but I read “a + 1 % n” out loud with a “modulo” and when you say that in a mathematical context the modulo would apply to the entire expression to the left.
- Comment on If it fits... 3 days ago:
Huh. Certainly not where I am (though it’s advised against).
- Comment on If it fits... 3 days ago:
No worse than parking on the opposite side of the road though
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
While reading some of his linked textbooks I found examples which define the solidus as operating on everything in the next term, which would have 1/ab = 1/(ab) = 1/(ab) = 1/ab. This is also how we were taught though as I recall it was not taught systematically: specifically I remember one teacher when I was about 17 complaining that people in her class were writing 1/a·b but should have been writing (1/a)·b (we generally used a dot for multiplication at this point). But at this point in our education, none of us remembered ever being taught this. I suspect what happened was that when being taught order of operations some years before, we simply never used the solidus and only used ÷ or fraction notation.
Anyway, if you have a correct understanding of what the order of operations really are (conventions) you can understand that these conventions all become a bit unwieldy when you have a very complex formula, and that it’s better to write mathematics as if there were no such convention in those cases, and provide brackets for disambiguation. Thus while you might write ab ÷ bc and reasonably expect everyone to understand you mean (ab)/(bc) not ((ab)/b)c (which is what the strict interpretation of PEMDAS would say!) because “bc” just visually creates a single thing, the same is not true of the expression ab ÷ bc(x-1)(y-1)·sin(b), even though bc(x-1)(y-1)·sin(b) is a single term, and so the latter should be written more clearly.
Because DumbMan doesn’t understand mathematical convention, he doesn’t understand that these things really depend on how they’re perceived, so is incapable of understanding such a way of working.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
This ain’t a shitpost
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
Boy racers don’t “automatically resolve themselves” through gaining experience. Without intervention you have to rely on reckless drivers gaining maturity, which is far from guaranteed, or having an accident that kills them or scares some sense into them, neither of which is desirable. The interventions currently are things like police catching them, which again is not desirable if an intervention earlier could prevent it escalating to the point where police have to get involved.
But my point is really that there are options to improve safety of younger drivers. If you want to reduce road deaths by 100, shouldn’t you target the group that is causing the most accidents, and the most severe ones too?
Morbidly you could just as well argue that the elderly are going to die soon anyway so the issue “automatically resolves itself” in the majority of cases too.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
So, you want to discourage people from taking tests, which will result in: fewer people driving and, of those who do drive, more of them driving without a license? How do you plan on replacing the transport for those people who decide they aren’t going to drive - will that be improving public transport? How would that happen?
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
But the statistics are per (billion) miles traveled, not per person.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
Sounds annoying to me, rather than dangerous - just like driving unnecessarily slowly.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
I’ve never seen a middle-lane hogger responsible for anything dangerous either - I’d put them firmly in the “annoying” category. Once in a while you see someone responding dangerously to someone driving in an annoying but otherwise basically safe way, and I also see this when the “annoying” way people are driving is driving at the speed limit, or waiting for a safe gap to pull into after overtaking, so I don’t feel like that can really be blamed on people hogging the middle lane.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
The accident statistics (I can help find them if you want) are that accident risk goes down steadily until (IIRC) mid 60s, and only increases above the risk of 20-30 year olds at a very advanced age in your 80s.
There are two things going on:
- Young people, especially young men are on average significantly more reckless than older people. This is a direct way in which age “grants you better driving capability” - you just become less of an idiot.
- Young people on average have less driving experience than older people. That’s not a direct result of age but it does correlate.
These are different processes but they can both be targeted for safety measures.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
🙃
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
Doesn’t sound stupid, but it’s important to remember that old drivers are vastly safer than young drivers. If you can do something small like eye tests (which a lot of old people need and ought to be having anyway) then that’s sensible, but if you want to improve road safety it’s not the place to look.
Old drivers stick in people’s minds for some reason - maybe because they’ve been stuck behind them at 30mph on a national speed limit road for a few minutes - but the more regular dangerous occurrences slip by. The most common bit of dangerous driving I see is tailgating which is absolutely ubiquitous, followed by distraction leading to weaving - which I assume to be phone usage. Neither is the domain of the elderly.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 3 days ago:
How are you going to recruit new examiners? (there is currently a shortage)
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
I actually forgot the most obvious way in which Order of Operations is a set of conventions… Some countries say “BODMAS” (division then multiplication) whilst others say “PEMDAS” (multiplication then division)…
- Comment on I dunno 4 days ago:
An algebraic expression written as a product or quotient of numerals or variables or both is called a term
So b * c, which is a product of the variables b and c, is a term, according to this textbook.
You seem to be getting confused because none of the examples on this particular page feature the multiplication symbol ×. But that is because on the previous page, the author writes:
When a product involves a variable it is customary to omit the symbol × of multiplication.
That means that the expression bc is just another way of writing b×c; it is treated the same other than requiring fewer strokes of the pen or presses on a keyboard, because this is just a *custom. That should clear up your confusion in interpreting this textbook (though really, the language is clear: you don’t dispute that b×c - or bc - are products, do you.)
Elsewhere in this thread you are clearly confused about what brackets mean. They are explained on page 20 of your textbook, where it says that you evaluate the expression inside the (innermost) brackets before doing anything else. Notice that, in its elucidation of several examples, involving addition and multiplication, the “distributive law” is not mentioned, because the distributive law has nothing to do with brackets and is not an operation.
Thus the expression 3 × (2 + 4) can be evaluated by first performing the summation inside the brackets to get 3 × 6 and then the product to get 18. The textbook then says that it is customary to omit the multiplication symbol and instead write 3(2+4), again indicating that these expressions are merely different ways of writing the same thing.
The exact same process of course must be followed whether numbers are represented by numerals or by letters designating a variable. You cannot do algebra if you don’t follow the same procedure in both cases. So consider the expression 2(a+b)². You have suggested that you must evaluate this as (2a+2b)² because you must “do brackets first”, but this is not what “doing brackets” means. You haven’t produced any authority to suggest that it is, and your own textbook makes it clear that “doing brackets” means do what is inside the brackets first. Not what is outside the brackets. Distributing 2 over a+b is not “doing brackets”; it is multiplication and comes afterwards.
If 2(a+b)² were equal to (2a+2b)² let us try with a=b=2. Let us first evaluate (2a+2b)²: it is equal to (2×2+2×2)² = (4+4)² = 8² = 64. Now let us evaluate 2(a+b)²: it is 2(2+2)² and now, following your textbook’s instruction to do what is inside the brackets first, this is equal to 2(4)². The next highest-priority operation is the exponent, giving us 2×16 (we now must write the × because it is an expression purely in numerals, with no brackets or variables) which is 32.
The fact that these two answers are different is because your understandings of what it means to “do brackets” and the distributive law are wrong.
Since I’m working off the textbook you gave, and I referred liberally to things in that textbook, I’m sure if you still disagree you will be able to back up your interpretations with reference to it.
By the way, I noticed this statement on page 23, regarding the order of operations:
However, mathematicians have agreed on a rule to fall back on if someone omits punctuation marks.
it does rather seem like this rule is one established not by the fundamental laws of mathematics but by agreement as they say, does it not? Care to comment?
- Comment on Fetish 2026 goals 4 days ago:
I too prefer people with two buttcheeks.