You have to write out a lot of exercises and there is no getting around it. You can’t learn the violin by watching videos or reading a book. You have to practice. It’s the same with math. But as people said, Khan Academy lectures are very good in steering you through a topic.

Besides algebra, I think it is important to know a bit about probability and a bit about logic. Don’t worry about stuff like covariance matrices, but understand what conditional probability is (be able to explain the “prosecutor’s fallacy”) and write out some of those annoying exercises about urns full of colored balls. Also, show how to write e.g. “you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time” in predicate logic notation, and see how the parts of the sentence involve switching the order of quantifiers.

Empirically, 42.25 instead of 42.

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

I don’t know what to add, I haven’t used Matrix so I’m unfamiliar with it and might be misreading it. But it seems to have an aura of “look how cool and hip this is”. Irc is old and comfortable even though it has a bunch of annoying limitations.

The interesting thing is if the manufacturer is shipping them that way by default.

I’m on ml and it seems pretty general. It has a bit more fringe contingent than world, but everything else is there too.

Irc works fine, people I know are there, and matrix has always seemed too attention -seeky for my tastes.

Irc still. No matrix so far.

How about elephant jokes? There are so many of those.

Two angry men on separate occasions have made comments to me about masking and how I don’t need to do it. I just stare right through them and ignore,

I just say thanks, I prefer wearing it and I’m more comfortable with it on. That generally works.

but why are they so angry?

Might go back to the conflicting and stupid instructions we got when the pandemic started. The public health establishment lost all its credibility and continues to mess up.

I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

Anyway, as a development snapshot I guess OM is pretty nice, but I can’t call it a finished product,

I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Well, a good scandal might have come along to take out a few of the candidates, though that didn’t happen afaik. Other than that, I mean, what is the hurry? I don’t follow politics all that closely anyway, but there are a few local organizations that I like, so I figure on mostly going by their endorsements. It usually takes me about an hour to fill in the ballot.

I’ll try to fill mine in today. It wouldn’t have been any easier to do it earlier, and it’s preferable to do it on election day or close to it, so you have all the information available. The main contested elections in my district are local ones, and stuff is always happening.

I’m an antifan of Apple but the M4 Max is supposed to be faster than any x86 desktop CPU, and use a lot less power. That’s per geekbench 6. I’d be interested in seeing other measurements.

This is about installing on a Nexus 5 which is from 2013. Sounds painful.

I just meant the amount of computation required of a gps receiver isn’t huge by today’s standards. Remember that gps was designed in the 1970s for use with the technology of that era. Today’s stuff is 1000s of times faster.

GPS decoding is less computationally difficult than you seem to think, and in any case, in phones it’s done by a hardware module. The Garmin Geko handheld GPS was made in 2003 and ran on two AAA cells for 12 hours or something like that. Today’s GPS’s fit inside wristwatches and use even less power. It’s just not that big a deal. The cpu load of mapping applications on phones is dealing with the maps, computing driving directions, etc.

I wouldn’t worry about map updates by internet. The roads don’t change that often. You can update from a USB-connected computer once a year or so and be fine.

The other stuff doesn’t sound too bad, though idk why you want a phone for the purpose. If the GPS is for road navigation you can get an old dedicated unit that runs on 12 volts do you don’t have to mess with batteries. Those were nicer than phones in some ways. I still have a couple of them kicking around.

Browsing on a phone or with Debian works ok for me with Firefox, though I don’t like Firefox that much.

I found Organic Maps preferable to OsmAnd but neither are that great. It should be possible to do something reasonable without a lot of CPU demands, given how dedicated GPS map navigation devices existed ih the early 2000s.

Yes if you ditch Youtube and anything else that requires modern codecs, that solves another issue. I’ve found Newpipe has broken a few times but it usually works, so that is what I use.

Modern apps and games (requiring GPU even) are another story, but let’s assume you don’t want to run them.

This leaves the question: if you want a BIFL smart phone but you don’t want to make phone calls with it, don’t want to run a web browser, and don’t want to watch videos on it, what DO you want it to do?

You could try Organic Maps as an alternative to OsmAnd though it’s not so great either.

The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing, because of the mutually recursive escalation of web sites’ and browsers’ appetites for machine resources. A 2005 laptop that tops out at 512mb of ram simply can’t run browsers needed to use the modern web. I’m still using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011 with 4gb of ram, but I have older ones that are no longer viable because of memory and CPU limitations.

Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up, and the reasons for that are somewhat more valid than web bloat. The new codecs really do have better video quality at a given bit rate, in exchange for the increased cpu cycles.