• milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    There’s an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They’re arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.

    The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, “one third x cubed.'”

    “One ther desque,” she repeats.

    “One third x cubed,” the mathematician tries again.

    “One thir dek scubed.”

    “That’ll do,” he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. “I’ll prove it. I’ll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer.” The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.

    “My friend and I have a question,” the first mathematician asks the waitress. “Do you know what is the integral of x squared?”

    “One thir dek scubed,” she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.

    And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,

    “Plus a constant.”

    • nikaaa@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I would not consider integration to be basic maths, honestly. Basic maths is addition and multiplication, and maybe vector geometry.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Just yesterday I ran into some chucklehead here on Lemmy that had convinced themselves that the average person would interpret “crypto” to mean SSL rather than cryptocurrency.

  • moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    It’s insane how close that handwriting is to randall’s, did he make multiple versions of this comic or was this written by a professional forger?

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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    1 month ago

    I recently took a class on ARM assembly, and yet I don’t even know half of these x86 instructions.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

    …sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

    [looking up]

    …it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      My daughter told me the other day, “I bet I could figure out a Commodore 64 if I had one.”

      Good luck figuring out LOAD “*”,8,1 by yourself, kid.

    • palordrolap@kbin.social
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      1 month ago

      Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

      Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

      Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

      Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

      The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

      But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.

  • cows_are_underrated@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 month ago

    It still confuses what basic computer skills the average person lacks. Like, how are you even supposed to troubleshoot your computer, if you don’t know the basics about your computer?

    • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Everyone has a limited time on this earth. Some of us don’t mind or actively enjoy spending that time learning about the technology we use. Others, not so much. I think this comic is really spot on because it’s hard to understand as a tech literate person just how little other people may know. “What browser are you using?” “What’s a browser?”

      The foundational knowledge is not that tough, but when you’re just interested in getting the damn thing to work so you can get on with your life, it’s easy to get frustrated by having to take a crash course on what the hell a BIOS is before you can try to fix it. And when you learn all that just for it to still be broken, patience quickly runs out.

      As long as people have the general understanding that power cycling will solve a good 75% of issues, I’m happy. I hope people give me the same grace when I pay a someone to fix my car or replace my phone screen (I love building computers, but god I hate working on phones).

      • JustARegularNerd@aussie.zone
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        1 month ago

        For the phone bit, I started off with really old smartphones like a Galaxy S1, but basically any old old phones are really built like mini laptops and are usually pretty modular as they weren’t often water resistant or actively anti-repair

        However I fully get your point and fall into the same boat with cars

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I mean, cars can be demystified the same way computers can: By building and maintaining it yourself. Everyone is afraid to build their first computer, because it seems way too complicated and delicate. Then you actually build your first one, and go “oh hey this actually isn’t so bad after all.”

        Yes, cars (especially modern cars) have a lot more difficult-to-build parts. But modern cars are also a lot like computers in the sense that you don’t need to know every single component on an GPU to be able to install one. You don’t need to be able to build a car part from scratch. The same way you can slot a GPU into a motherboard, you can just buy the entire car part preassembled and bolt it into place. The important part is learning what the different components do, so you can troubleshoot them.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    1 month ago

    I’m pretty sure I’ve had this exact conversation. Took me a minute to understand what the point was.

  • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    They are talking about computer things, that’s about how familiar I am with whatever they are talking about.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, it’s intentionally obscure. Basically, x86 assembly code is a way of telling a processor what to calculate, at a very low level.
      So, it’s similar to programming languages, but those actually get translated into x86 assembly code, before it’s told to the processor. (“x86” is a certain processor architecture. Others exist, too, most prominently “ARM”.)

      But yeah, even with me knowing that much, I’d need to guess what ret and int3 might do.

      Everyone knows jmp and nop, though, of course. 🙃

      • cows_are_underrated@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        That’s the exact same thing. x86 Assembly Code isn’t that hard(to know what it is, understanding it is something different),but I havent heard of the other stuff.

        • mormegil@programming.dev
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          Int3 is a special single-byte (CC, if I recall correctly) form of the INT instruction (which is CD imm8, I think) to raise an interrupt. Interrupt #3 is the debugging interrupt, so by overwriting any instruction with CC, you place a breakpoint there.