Bill Moorier. Originally from the UK, now living on a sailboat and exploring the world. Math PhD and the 2nd employee at Justin.TV (aka Twitch), where I worked for about a decade. Now I'm a stay-at-home dad and homeschool teacher.
I've been admining our family minecraft servers for about 5 years, and just handed off that job to my 12 year old daughter who now knows more than enough of the linux command-line to do it. I thoroughly recommend it, it's been great!
There are many ways to get it done. What worked best for us was choosing java over bedrock, renting a cheap linux vps, and writing some very simple shell scripts for starting, stopping, changing worlds, etc. Happy to talk you through anything you get stuck on!
These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.
A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it was impossible to do a really good job of it back then. This sounds like it might finally make it doable!
It's nice to see peoples' success stories with diagnoses. I've been suffering from something for more than 20 years now. I was healthy until 2005. Then it seemed like I got sick with some kind of virus and just... never got better. I have unpredictable good stretches and bad stretches. During my bad stretches I can't get out of bed. I've mostly given up on the idea of a diagnosis myself, after seeing dozens of doctors over the years, with the most positive interactions being Stanford researchers telling me I'm a really "interesting" case.
A question I enjoy asking myself when I'm wondering about this stuff is "if there are alien mathematicians in a distant galaxy somewhere, do they know about this?"
For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.
Sure, but I think there's plenty of room for people to say "I found this pattern that looks really interesting!" without analyzing it further themselves.
I started my kids on turtle graphics. There's a good implementation that comes with python that's very easy to get up-and-running, to the point where it quite reminds me of BASIC on the kinds of microcomputers I got started on as a kid.
Honestly my first reaction to seeing these photos was to wonder if they were AI-generated (I'm not suggesting they are, I just have that response quite often now).
It's been a long time since I've been a regular reader of any newspaper, but when I was (admittedly at least 20 years ago!) I don't remember it being that way at all. Can you suggest a good example of a recent Guardian article that's ragebait?
Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation.
My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.
http://abstractnonsense.com
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