• 4 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure how it works in the US but where I’m from, the way lessons are conducted are typically like this:

    1. Professors hand out lecture notes, typically in the PDF format. So, students will either print or just use their phones/laptops to follow along the lectures. It’s either this way, OR
    2. Professors will list out recommended readings for this course, and it’s up to you how you obtain the source material. Most people will probably just download the PDFs and take down notes during lectures.
    3. We were never required to buy any books.

    So I’m personally unfamiliar with the “shilling” of textbooks which cost up to hundreds of dollars for practically the same content, which, from what I’ve heard, is quite common in US colleges. This seems to be a very strange concept to me.



  • I think I get that as well. I used to talk quite a bit about open-source to my friends, but looking back, it seemed quite preachy (maybe because I was quite young at the time), and it never really changed anything. This is especially the case since open-source (or free software) is a philosophical approach to technology that many people might be unfamiliar with or simply don’t care about. I just simply use open-source software, supports devs/foundations, and only will talk the necessary bits if someone asks me about it.


  • I mentioned it to a couple of friends, but I think I didn’t get it across well to them that GNU Octave is supposed to be syntactically compatible with MATLAB. Also, they’re more comfortable using established software since everybody else is using them anyway.

    Speaking about numerical analysis courses, I feel like one should be able to choose what programming languages they wish; the course should just aim to teach the fundamentals/principles of numerical methods, not what language to use. I get that it is much more convenient to streamline software choice, but still, why not use Python over MATLAB for undergraduate introductory courses?