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Yeah, MU123 is basic (high school) mathematics. The reason for that is that the way the Open University works, they have no formal requirements to join, so they cannot assume that students know even the basic stuff (because they might have left school earlier, or they might be out of formal education for years, or be from a different domain, etc), so the aim of that course is to quickly help you catchup regardless your background.

If you are above this level, you would start with the "intensive start", which skips MU123 (allowing you to pick another module in its place) and then starts with MST124 (precalculus, trigonometry and single-var calculus, roughly), moving you on to MST125 (intro to proofs, number theory, more calculus, linear algebra, etc), in a faster pace.


Yeah I get the part about filling in some missing foundation. But it's the level that surprised me. Some of the MU123 content is covered in 5th grade in the US, i.e. around age 10 or 11.

But I guess there are people who will have forgotten that stuff, if they're not using much math day to day.


I'm studying the Q31 (BSc Maths) on Open University.

I can second this recommendation. The maths books are _excellent_.

It's hard to explain how, but let me try: most of the maths textbooks I possess (plenty of them) are written with the assumption that you attend lectures at a classroom and use them for extra material/exercises/reference.

The OU books are written with the assumption that you learn from them as the primary material, so they go a lot further with regard to explaining things as well as producing them from first principles.


Jesus Christ mate, they're talking about personal finance, not political economy.


Basic personal finance, like interest rates, simple statistics (namely about casinos), sure.

BUT, during the European austerity footgun days, they put an animated talking bear on tv teaching this “financial literacy” and illustrating the “run your country as a thrifty household” tale as meritorious and not a fallacy, among other stuff like that.


I saw this YouTube video recently that said there are four main categories to spending money:

A. Your own money A1. On yourself A2. On others (not necessarily the same others)

B. Other people's money B1. On you B2. On others (not necessarily the same others)

It is kind of a wordy way to describe the principal agent problem.

Problem is that we can't really wrap our heads around large numbers. I get overwhelmed just thinking about how the relatively small town I live in manages its finances. I don't think I have the mental model to fit how the US economy functions much less how it should function.


Talk to some political scientists. You're never getting a polity that understands the issues and votes largely based on policy. Won't happen, not even remotely close. They'll always be voting on forehead-slappingly dumb shit like "running government like a business is a good idea", or more likely on a dozen extremely stupid misconceptions at once, plus just "do I perceive that bad things are happening, generally, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the office I'm voting for".


I've seen that point made before. In Portugal for example the left wing parties are openly against financial literacy in schools exactly because they say it is political. I get the point, if you're a socialist or a communist, having everyone participating in the stock market puts your goal further away. They also have an argument that financial literacy is correlated with losing money on the stock market. In general I don't think it's that separate of an issue, even though I'm not as left.


> They also have an argument that financial literacy is correlated with losing money on the stock market.

I think that the issue here is the definition of financial literacy that classifies people who effectively engage in gambling "financially literate".


It seems you have studied that exact tv talking bear’s lesson very well :D


I didn't get the reference unfortunately.


Unfortunately.

May I recommend a book by an Economics Nobel Prize winner?

Here:

"Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future" by Paul Krugman (2020)

And maybe even better:

"Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea" by Mark Blyth - 2013


I'm not sure I get your point still, I was merely describing the arguments of one side of the aisle of my country, did it give you the impression I'm somehow pro austerity? I'm not sure how you made that jump. And you still didn't explain the bear reference. Descriptive comments aren't endorsing something.

Recommending two books to someone that asks you to explain a short expression is a bit rich though. Good luck with that.


Simple: pro-austerity people made the bear show and used similar blanket generalizations to yours.

The books debunked them.


I'm not pro austerity! I didn't even make any generalizations, my whole comment is about the position of a few political parties in my country. Are you unable to distinguish relaying the position of a third party from relaying your own beliefs?

Is the bear show the kitchen TV series? I'm still trying to understand what the heck you are referencing but I'm starting to realize you are very difficult to talk to so this is me giving up. I'm sorry I don't have more patience you seem like you know some stuff but are too preoccupied with sounding smart rather than speaking plainly.


Ad hominem all you want - but I don’t really know what to say anymore.

Did you read our complete chain of comments / debate?


It is political of course, because the left would like to provide to the financially illiterates, such that they don’t have to manage their own money. If everyone is saving/investing, the socialist system is mostly redundant (except for the extremely poor, non-working, ill or disabled people).


Sure: poor people are usually guilty of being poor.

Nice thinking ;)


I've just tried the first example on iOS 18.3.1 and it absolutely reproduces perfectly for me.


Oh no- I stand corrected. I tried it again and you are right. I had just woken up when I did my initial test and must have typoed something. I can no longer edit or delete my original comment :(


I see this written a lot, and I don’t get it.

What matters for an award is that people recognise it as a prestigious accolade.

The economics prize, while not “official”, is still recognised by everyone in economics as the highest honour in the field. Who cares if it’s “official” or not?

Awards and prizes derive their value from their social recognition, which it has a solid amount of, at the very least.


One could even argue it has all of the benefits and less of the dynamite scent.


There is nothing wrong with their connection with dynamite. Nobel designed it to prevent deaths in construction and mining, because nitroglycerine was way too dangerous (and way too useful to be abandoned). It's bad reputation comes from it's use in warfare, which is undeserved because it was not very well suited to that use and was quickly replaced by other solid explosives.


Depends on how much you consider that particular odour offensive :)


The significance is that it's not a Nobel prize. Saying that is simply formally wrong. It's a prize lobbied in (with a hefty donation) almost 70 years after the establishment, trying to raise the status of Economics as a scientific discipline by basking in the reflected glory of the actual Nobel prizes.

You may not care about the distinction, and if so that's your prerogative, but this Memorial prize in Economics, despite sharing in the festivities, is not in the same category and that's what you keep running into seeing pointed out.


The General Public and Economists hold it in the same regard as other Nobel Prizes so appeal to 'formality' is pointless. The social recognition is the point of these awards so if it has that and is also often called the "Nobel Prize in Economics" then it's a Nobel Prize. They're literally announced and awarded together.

Nobody but a few nitpicks care about your distinction because it's not a real one. Might as well say "Money is not valuable because the material it's made up of has little intrinsic value". Well no, Money is valuable because society has decided it is.


It is also my prerogative not to care about your opinion. You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it. I just told you. Take it or leave it.


>It is also my prerogative not to care about your opinion.

Sure

>You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it. I just told you. Take it or leave it.

I'm not OP. And i don't think a few comments on Nobel prize threads is a lot in the first place. Nothing for me to "take".


Apologies to NlightNFotis for implicitly accusing you of being the griefer. I replied quickly between other tasks and evidently didn't pay due attention to the username. No misplaced offense intended.


Do they get to go to the ceremony with the other laureates, meet the king, etc?

Of course that doesn't matter to anybody else, but I could see it mattering to the laureates themselves.


> Do they get to go to the ceremony with the other laureates, meet the king, etc?

Yes.


I've recently come across a spectacular number of regressions on my M3 Max MacBook Pro, Sequoia as well as previous versions included.

The most workflow breaking one (which really tempts me to throw the computer out of the closest window I can find in the room) is a Safari bug that basically randomly fails to open any website with a

> Safari can't open the page. The error is: "The operation couldn't be completed. No space left on device" (NSPOSIXErrorDomain:28).

Which is embarrassing, as this is a clear regression and it breaks all functionality in the browser - restarting it doesn't fix it, and I need to restart the whole machine for it to _maybe_ get fixed (and it's not really a space issue, both RAM and disk I'm nowhere near their limits).


Some other things that devs should know about Sequoia:

- If you're sticking to Sonoma for stability, be aware Apple doesn't backport all security patches. Apple's release notes show 79 security issues fixed in Sequoia, and only 37 fixed in Sonoma 14.7. Maybe some vulns were only introduced in the Sequoia betas, but based on previous years, that's mostly not the case. Apple only keeps you safe on the latest version.

- macOS Sequoia, released days ago, still includes vulnerable years-old binaries like LibreSSL 3.3.6, curl 8.7.1, and python 3.9.6. https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/apple-still-leaving... (I've tested it's still true on the final 15.0)


> Apple's release notes show 79 security issues fixed in Sequoia, and only 37 fixed in Sonoma 14.7.

Not an Apple fan myself (don't touch the stuff at all) but my first thought there would be to check if the "missing" fixes are for things broken in the new release that don't need fixing in the prior one.

> still includes vulnerable years-old binaries

Are these stock builds, so definitely have the problems you are concerned about, or could there be security updates backported as Debian do with older versions in their stable release?


I promise, you will be just fine without the security updates.


This is probably misguided. Apple includes the OS version number in the user agent, so an attacker can actually pay to have code delivered only to users with vulnerable versions of MacOS. (advertising marketplaces allow bidding by user agent)


Are you thinking of a safari exploit that allows JavaScript to get out of the safari process? What’s the attack scenario?


The user agent is defined by the browser.

And it only contains: Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7 irrespective of what Mac you are using.


I’m seeing Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 14_7). What do you think the 14_7 stands for on MacOS 14.7?


I currently use M3 Max MacBook Pro. Mac OS 14.6.1(23G93).

Firefox 130.0.1

  "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:130.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/130.0"
Safari 17.6

  "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.6 Safari/605.1.15"
Seems like a Google Chrome-specific behavior, but I don't have Google Chrome installed to test.


> Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7.

This is on an M4 MacBook Pro running 15.0.

So not correct.


Heya, I couldn’t find a way to contact you privately but I’d assume you want to delete your comment until (presumably) next month! Correct me if I’m wrong tho :)

Alternatively, a mod could help to edit it instead


Why would they want to do that?


To be honest, I’m not entirely sure.

It’s a product that isn’t officially announced yet. Anyone could mention that they own that device of course, but it’s the extra credibility of him being an ex-Apple SWE (judging from his comments) that convinced me to drop that comment.

Dunno if there could be any legal implications, if not - all good!



I had a very similar issue some time back that was caused by LSP.

Long story short I had multiple long running LSPs (fragmented projects) in Emacs that would open many handlers and keep them open. At some point same error started happening and I thought only restart could resolve it.

But then I was at the hotel where merely switching network made this issue to appear (I suppose binding was somewhat related to and switch made pool exhaust pool quicker) so I decided to debug it.

It turned out that restarting Emacs was enough to close file handlers and resume operations.


What's your particular use case to keep using Safari if it's not working for you and there are alternatives available?


The only reason of having a Mac (sorry "real" Mac fans ;) is to be able to test your stuff with MacOS. Especially using Safari and the Iphone and Ipad simulators.


Not GP, but:

iOS Safari dev tools

Testing for compatibility


I (think) I have a fix for you.

1. Open Activity Monitor 2. Find "Safari Networking" 3. Force quit 4. Refresh Safari tab (that didn't work)

Works on M1 MBP w/Sonoma 14.5


Have same issue. The above solution did not resolve the issue. It doesn't bother me much because I mostly use Firefox, but it causes problems when I'm testing front-end stuff on Safari.


Bummer. Agree w/workaround solutions. I've just flipped to other browsers for most situations.


I get this too



This is a big problem, especially for people new to a field who can't easily tell AI-gen books from human-authored ones.

It also saturates the recommendation system, massively lowering the quality of recommendations that you get for a quality book. This used to be great, because it helped discover other high quality titles. Now, I'm conditioned to automatically skip the list of recs on the basis of it being mostly useless.


My favourite computing book.

Very highly recommended.


Do you have any other favorite recommendations?


Yeah, I’ve also enjoyed greatly the following:

* Computer Science, an interdisciplinary perspective by Robert Sedgewick * Code by Charles Petzold * Good Math by Mark C. Chu-Carroll


"binding" is a PLT term, denoting the association between a name and a value.

It's a higher level concept than the variable - a mutable binding is what people usually refer to as a variable, and an immutable binding is the correct term for what people refer to an "immutable variable" (an oxymoron, if you think about it).


Immutable variable isn't a oxymoron. It can still vary between instantiations. If you have (a)=>{const b = a}, b can have different values even though it can't be reassigned.


In the case of the code that you have cited, these are all different elaborations of the binding at the invocation of the lambda, due to the interplay between activation records and scope rules.

It's not really an "immutable variable" - it's a local binding getting bound to different values on each scope entry.

EDIT: By the way, the `b` binding in your code can be modified. Did you mean `const b = a;` ?


> it's a local binding getting bound to different values on each scope entry.

It is, I just wanted to point out that the term "immutable variable" is sensible. I think a good way to put it is that b is a variable, and when the statement runs a value is bound to b. So the value bound to b varies yet b can be immutable, in contrast to a constant which is a binding to always the same value.

> Did you mean `const b = a;` ?

Fixed, thanks :)


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