I'm fine with the repeated addition. My objection is the OR in your statement. Apparently not. The question was 5x3 and the kid wrote 5+5+5=15 and got marked wrong with no explanation because the teacher wanted 3+3+3+3+3=15. So I guess that you would have had a 50% chance of being marked wrong on a 2nd grade arithmatic worksheet as well, as absurd as that is. Correct answer notwithstanding.

BTW, that's not at all new. We covered multiplication that way in the 3rd grade back in 1975. Memorizing the table was just to make it quicker. I quickly "discovered" the commutative property while looking at the multiplication table and cut my memorization load in half. The part that confused the father was why is 5x3 = 5+5+5=15 "wrong".

As for 37+55, we decomposed that in the '70s as well, but I soon decided the easier decomposition was 37+55= 87+5 = 90+2=92. So I would say that meme was just someone wanting to complain. Of course the "old way" ends up in 30+50+10+2 anyway.

Shut up and memorize was not in practice during the education of the parents of today's students.

I can't see them selling email accounts for $9 per month. That's just too small of a service for that much money. $1.50 per month maybe (paid annually to lessen CC processing fees), but not $9 per month.

They keep wanting to turn the OS into a bunch of non-optional, deeply-integrated, unremoveable, application-layer talkie assistants.

It's been the same for decades - Active Desktop, the little paperclips and wizards, etc. Microsoft Bob infected them and they're still trying to make it happen.

If Windows was an OS, and Copilot was an optional app that you could download for free or buy, and which any similar AI assistant could plug into your OS in the same way (e.g. so you could choose Gemini or ChatGPT to help in your OS instead), and there was an option to just say "No, none of that"... I'd probably stick with Windows.

But my last 10 machine at home is coming to its end, and its replacement is not going to run Windows. Purely because... you forgot where the OS ends, and my data and my applications begin.

I just want the OS. I'm not interested in ANYTHING ELSE that you have to push. I don't have Office. I don't use Teams. I couldn't give a damn about Copilot or AI. I just want something that boots to a desktop and lets me click the icons of programs that *I* have chosen to put on there.

It's simply not possible on Windows. They proved with IE, literally broke the same laws again with Edge, now it's Copilot, etc. No. And now you're not just being a pain in the butt, intercepting my web traffic to pop up ads for your browser ("There's no need to download a different browser..."), but now you're actually reading all my data and taking screenshots of my screen.

I'm done. Make an OS and the rest as applications and not only would it reveal quite how many people WANT Copilot etc. but it would also mean that you wouldn't be literally breaking the anti-monopoly laws like you have for several decades now.

No, because a surgeon can tell you WHY he washes his hands and point to the historical evidence for the practice. He won't say "God tells us to wash our hands".

I wouldn't call it a GOOD solution, more a default if nobody comes up with something better.

It would have reduced it to an extent that it would be as good as stopped.

The fact that surgeons today wouldn't think of operating without washing their hands. I never said it was a quick victory.

It was my example. It came from a photograph of the worksheet posted to Reddit by the child's father, who was wondering why the answer was 'wrong'.

Surely you don't expect the 2nd graders to start on Clifford algebras any time soon. They need to learn to walk before they run. Note that by the time you're multiplying vectors and matrices the process involved is sufficiently different from multiplying real numbers that not being commutative is not going to be an issue. I recall my high school math teacher demonstrating non-commutative multiplication. I was not confused in spite of having figured out the commutative nature of simple multiplication in elementary school.

Sure, under the hood, but the end user is more concerned with the application than he is with how it got there.

The speech to text can be nice (even if my phone keeps writing "free cat" when I say FreeCAD), but it clearly has significant limitations. I still can't even guess why my phone can respond to "flashlight on" but fails at "flashlight off".

It's also amazing that it's possible to draw a metal wire thinner than a human hair and even more amazing that it's possible to drill a neat hold through it's width without breaking it, but I really don't have much use for that day to day.

As for image generation, quick, how many fingers am I holding up on my right hand? (hint: not 6).

The thing is, it wasn't lying. First there wasn't much evidence for the myocarditis, then it was confounded evidence. Did the kid get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, or was it from the beginning of a COVID infection aborted because the immune system was already actively reacting to spike protein at the time.

Of course, over-arching all of that, COVID causes myocarditis too, and often worse so it wasn't all that clear if mild myocarditis from the vaccine would even matter. Try explaining that to people ready to eat horse paste and unsure why people are laughing at Trump's suggestion to inject bleach.

Then there's a question of how much of the distortion came from scientists and how much from journalists (mis-)quoting them?

Now that the data is in, we can see that there is some possibility of mild myocarditis from the vaccine.

The thing about science is that as more data comes in, theories change and so actions suggested by those theories also change. In emergent situations such as the COVID pandemic, data and change can come fast.

Perhaps a sports analogy. After the first baseball game of the year, plenty of batters have an average of 1.000 for the year. Plenty have .000 for the year. That will change a LOT in the next day. By the end of the season, batting averages don't move that much in a single game.

Naturally vaccines increase your risk of shark attack. Sharks don't attack dead people. By keeping you alive through a disease outbreak, you are left vulnerable to shark attack later in life.

At this rate, I wonder if the only remaining solution is Darwinian (which they also don't believe in). Hopefully some of the unfortunate children of anti-vaxers will learn the truth and get their doctor to give them the shot anyway (but I'm guessing MAGA will move to make the punishment for that worse than for murder).

They were challenged by other doctors and scientists. The challengers won the day. The MAGA cultists would have been demanding a dose of horse paste before surgery and no Tylenol after.

Vaccines certainly did cut down on transmission (stopping it cold was a media exaggeration). Some teens got mild myocarditis, but many unvaccinated teens got COVID and more severe myocarditis or just plain died.