this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Those same people do math incorrectly and shout at everyone else to do it their way.

[–] sfgifz 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

2+2=5

Don't take my word for it research about it yourself there are lots of good videos on YouTube the government and science liars don't want you to know the truth /s

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

2+2=5

For extrem values of 2.

[–] cynar 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For those confused

2.25+2.25=4.5 rounds to 2+2=5

2.5+2.5=5 truncates to 2+2=5

Both can crop up in programming, depending on the situation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

2.25 + 2.25 = 4.5

If you add two floats together then the output is a float, if you add an int and a float together the output is a float. Computers will always perform the calculation as is, unless you explicitly tell them to perform a rounding operation.

[–] cynar 6 points 1 year ago

However, if you stuff them into an int at the last minute, you can get that effect.

Under the hood, it's floats. On the output, it's ints.

It's obvious and silly with small examples. The problem can creep in when you are using larger libraries or frameworks.

[–] afraid_of_zombies 0 points 1 year ago

A few months back I had a floating point that had a single 1 like 16 digits past the decimal place and I couldn't get rid of it.

[–] tabris 8 points 1 year ago

Remember when Terrance Howard tried to explain how 1x1=2 because bird people from Atlantis tricked us? Good times.

[–] Zekas 4 points 1 year ago

There are four lights

[–] hushable 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just look at those viral math problems. I recently saw one that was something like (1+2*3)*(1*0) and most comments were arguing if it was 7 or 9

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you mean (1+2*3)*(1*0).

Escape your asterisks, kids.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I was going to claim 9 because I though there was some markdown that italicised things with a single ^, and your intent was (1+2³). Before the (1•0) of course.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It does if you forgot everything you learned in school

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

And I agree. You're completely missing my point, though

The only advice I can give is to re-read the thread, starting from @[email protected]'s comment. If the source of your confusion is that you don't know what escaping the asterisks means, then just ask

[–] Pipoca 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Of course, there's also the times where we just make the research hard to do.

Like, we teach kids PEMDAS, but then don't actually follow PEMDAS in the original textbooks that introduce it and definitely not in common math or physics texts.

Like, you'll see 1/2√r in Feynman's lectures being written not to represent ½√r = √r / 2 as pemdas would suggest, but 1/(2√r).

Similarly, the original textbooks that introduced PEMDAS, if you read them, actually followed what you might call PEJMDAS, where multiplication via juxtaposition is treated as binding tighter than explicit multiplication, so 1÷2(2+3) would be interpreted not as ½(5) but as 1 ÷ (2 * 5), but they considered that so obvious they didn't bother to explicitly spell it out in the rules.

And now we have Facebook memes and tiktok livestreams arguing about what 1÷2(2+3) actually means.

[–] Ultraviolet 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also by the time you've learned order of operations, you've outgrown the ÷ operator. You would never write 1 ÷ (2 * 5), you would write it with a proper numerator and denominator like anyone outside of elementary school would.

[–] afraid_of_zombies 3 points 1 year ago

I hate these math problems you see on social media. No one would write that way or code that way. It is ambiguous, and even if it weren't it is still hard to figure out. I think in my entire career I have seen one single line of code that took PEMDAS to sort out, I remember that line and the programmer told me that they were exploiting a feature of the complier to get slightly faster results. He was an annoying person

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] TeaHands 1 points 1 year ago

In the UK it's (or at least was) BODMAS. Just to complicate things further.