17 results for “textbook”
Pan-Arab content in Syrian school textbooks replaced with Islamist ideology
An in-depth review of 130 Syrian school textbooks implemented under the administration of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa shows…
#EuropeSays #Headlines #News #Europe #Europa #EU #Syria #Ahmedal-Sharaa #Damascus #Islam #islamism #Islamists #MiddleEast #muslims #president #school #Sunni #Textbook
https://www.europesays.com/iran/334585/
Hungarian mathematician Dénes Kőnig, who died OTD in 1944, wrote the first textbook on the field of graph theory https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/hungary/budapest/?s=mb #travel #math #mathematics #Hungary
🚀🎉 "3blue1brown has declared the golden age of #math upon us! Because, you know, #calculus textbooks were just waiting for a #YouTube endorsement to become *cool* again. 🤓📚 Spoiler: Math is still hard."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc #3blue1brown #goldenage #education #HackerNews #ngated
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gazagirll/117463652246426853
@adamvs1
@glmxndr
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@DailyGaza
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@redsad
@textbook
@JessMahler
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#Gaza #Palestine #Donation
#FediHelp #FediForGaza 🍉
#FreeGaza #FreePalestine 🍉
#MutualAid #MutualAidBoost
Freshman year of college, first week, there was a table where we could sign up for a #DiscoverCard in front of the textbook store
So I've had a #discover card for decades, even though it's a bit shit as a card. Memorized the number. Was pleased with them.
Then I went to use it this week and it was shut down, and they "can't reopen closed accounts".
Apparently I hadn't used it in more than 90 days. Apparently they sent me one piece of physical mail.
Meanwhile, a word game app sent me three separate emails when I was at risk of losing a 50 day streak.
A credit company that makes mad money can't even send an automated phone call? Not one single email to retain a decades long relationship?
Fuck Discover.
“ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM” by Lawrence Miles
They lied. They told us that you cannot elect a leper monarch. It goes against everything we were raised to believe, they said.Everything we stood for.Everything we fought for.Everything we read in our textbooks And then the leper king won.Many said because of the hand of God. And everything he touched became diseased. And you had two choices.You diedOr you became a disciple. The ones who reached out to him became his disciplesThey already had the mutant geneThey just needed the […]https://latinosenglishedition.blog/2026/10/17/antidisestablishmentarianism-by-lawrence-miles/
If one day our voices fall silent, know that hunger has silenced us. 💔 We are crying out for food, for survival, for one more day. Please, don't let the world forget us while we are still her
@adamvs1
@RFancio
@davidculley
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@amber
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@lashman
@JeffreySmith
@mbletmathe
@delsaulnier
@eldadoinquieto
@brabo
@robosnixemo17
@DailyGaza
@gartioli
@BlackAzizAnansi
@redsad
@textbook
@JessMahler
@sb
@danie1
@CanvasesByPeter
@DrSprockets_
@Peter_Link
#Donation
#FediHelp #FediForGaza
You order coffee in flawless Italian. Then the barista replies, and you’re lost. Why does knowing vocabulary feel so different from understanding real-life conversation?
Recent research from UCL and Tohoku University explores how sensitivity to subtle sound differences relates to language learning. My personal conclusion is that passive exposure builds the auditory foundation that textbooks alone cannot replicate.
https://www.movetheneedle.news/brands/why-learning-a-language-doesn-t-always-mean-understanding-it/
💔 Rats chewed through our tent and ate the little flour we had left to feed our children. Now, we’re left with almost nothing. 😢
🙏 We urgently need $50 to buy flour and feed our family. Even $10 can help. Please don’t let my children go hungry. If you can’t donate, please repost. ❤️
https://gofund.me/4d998a9f7
#FediForGaza
#Gaza #Humanity #SaveChildren #Hope #childhood #Palestine #genocide
@textbook
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Machine Tool Design Vol. 4 by N. Acherkan ( Ed.); N. Ignatyev; A. Kakoilov; V. Khomyakov; Yu. Mikheyev
This fundamental four-volume work was written by scientists and specialists on the teaching staff of the Machine Tool Engineering Institute in Moscow. The editor, Prof. N. Acherkan, D.Sc. (Eng.), is an eminent Soviet specialist in machine tool design and the author of over fifty scientific works and textbooks in this field. Prof. Acherkan holds the title of Honoured…
Linux malware from scratch: understand the OS, write better malware.
After almost a year of teaching cyber security, I've realised how much it matters to actually make sense to beginners: to teach what they need, not waste time on trivia, and not skip the blockers that stall their progress.
I just published the first post of my "Linux C2 from Scratch" series.
Most Linux content hands you a reverse-shell one-liner and stops. The textbooks copy each other and never explain the things that actually confuse beginners. This is the opposite: plain English, from the ground up, everything you need for a solid foundation in Linux malware research.
Lesson 0 walks through the stuff people nod along to without really understanding:
• what a process is, why memory is virtual, and what a page actually is
• W^X, and the write-then-execute dance every in-memory loader does
• machine code vs bytecode, VMs vs JITs, and why your Java process has executable anonymous pages too
• syscalls: the ABI, the vDSO, and why indirect syscalls only defeat the lazy check
• libc is not the OS: glibc vs CRT, and why Go agents are 10MB+
• TLS: don't ship a stack, borrow the system's, and why that fixes your fingerprint too
• ELF, and how a stager runs code without a loader
The theme: on Windows the OS hands you a stable API for almost everything, so tiny malware is easy. Linux does not, and that is the whole challenge. Know the OS and you stop fighting it.
For anyone who wants to learn Linux internals and malware development, I hope this short course helps.
https://jm33.me/linux-c2-from-scratch-0x00-processes-syscalls-libc-and-tls.html
Leaning in to proper #UkrainianLanguage learning - this arrived yesterday, all the way to Australia from Ukraine, even during the war!
https://studyukrainian.org.ua/books/yabluko-ukrainian-elementary/
I like Memrise, particularly their Ukrainian team, but it's a relief to have a textbook with explanations (even if I'll need a translation app to read the instructions). First exercise is the vowel sounds I've been struggling to differentiate ...
America at Its Crossroads: Where Do We Go From Here?
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Anatomy of a Monster
I was scrolling through social media recently when I ran across a video clip from one of my favorite comedians, Josh Johnson. He was performing one of his stand-up routines, “When you strip away humanity”. I’ve always appreciated his sharp, observant perspective on society—the way he cuts through superficial noise and lands directly on the raw nerves of the human condition. In this particular clip, he stepped away from easy punchlines and addressed something chillingly fundamental: the mechanics of dehumanization.
He broke down how easily humans strip away another person’s basic humanity. The moment society labels an individual or an entire group a “monster,” we stop caring about how they are treated. We no longer flinch when they are subjected to conditions we wouldn’t wish on an animal. Johnson pointed out that this is the prerequisite for cruelty. Once you become skilled at that—once you convince the public that someone is an aberration, a pest, or an existential threat—you can do whatever you want to them. And the terrifying reality is that this machine never stops with its first target. Eventually, it expands to consume everyone.
Dehumanization is not the byproduct of cruelty; it is the prerequisite.
His observation crystallized a question that has been weighing heavily on my mind: How did we get here?
Look around. In New York, federal immigration agents recently opened fire into a vehicle on a neighborhood street—with a five-year-old child sitting inside. Across the country, communities have been shaken by a disturbing pattern of Black men and women found hanging from trees in public parks and wooded lots, cases met with swift suicide rulings by local authorities before families and civil rights advocates could see a comprehensive forensic inquiry. Marginalized people go missing every single day without the benefit of national news chyrons or mobilized public resources. Meanwhile, millions walk past unhoused neighbors shivering on steam grates, or look at entire continents struggling under the weight of famine and ask with casual indifference: “Well, what did they do wrong?”
How does a society filled with people rooted in moral foundations and religious traditions look directly at atrocities and shrug?
It starts with the lie. It starts because we have fashioned victims into monsters so that our own consciences can sleep through the night.
Part I: The Ledger of a Fractured Nation
America is standing at an existential crossroads.
We have arrived at a junction where two irreconcilable futures diverge. Down one road lies our historic default—retreating further into cognitive dissonance, institutionalized fear, and the violent scapegoating of our neighbors to preserve old hierarchies. Down the other road lies the painful, long-delayed work of looking in the mirror, reckoning with our foundational contradictions, and choosing universal dignity over comfortable lies.
Before we can choose which path to take, we have to look honestly at where we are actually standing. If you listen to political stump speeches, you are told that our economy is an unstoppable engine and that America remains an unchallenged beacon of liberty. But paper metrics like the stock market hide a profound physical and social rot.
Life itself is stalling. In peer democracies across Canada, Japan, and Western Europe, life expectancy has climbed steadily over recent decades. In the United States, it has stagnated and fallen. We are losing hundreds of thousands of our brothers, sisters, and children to “deaths of despair”—fentanyl overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and suicide. At the same time, we carry the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, with Black mothers dying at nearly three times the rate of white mothers regardless of income or education.
The economic chasm is widening into an abyss. The top 10% of households now command roughly two-thirds of all national wealth, leaving the bottom half to fight over scraps. A generation ago, a median home cost roughly three to four times the median annual household income; today, that ratio sits above five nationally and surpasses seven to ten in major metro areas. Basic survival—a roof overhead, preventative medical care, a decent education—has been financialized into a speculative luxury out of reach for everyday families.
Alongside our bodies and pocketbooks, our social trust has evaporated. Confidence in our public institutions, the courts, and the federal government has collapsed from over 50% in the late 1990s to below 20% today. Sociologist Robert Putnam’s warning in Bowling Alone is no longer an abstract academic thesis; it is our lived reality. We have fewer friends, belong to fewer physical community spaces, and live isolated in digitized silos designed specifically to monetize our collective outrage.
We are wealthier on paper and more technologically connected than at any point in human history, yet we are sicker, more precarious, and more alienated from one another than we have been in generations.
Part II: The Myth of the Dual System
How did we arrive at this precipice? Historically, America convinced itself that it could permanently run on two parallel tracks: lofty ideals of liberty and equality for the chosen, alongside systems of cold dehumanization for everyone else.
The Founders wrote soaring declarations of universal human rights while enslaving the very people who built their wealth and expelling Indigenous nations from their ancestral lands. Because their moral conscience knew better, they resolved the cognitive dissonance by codifying racial hierarchy into law, religion, and science. They decided that Black and Indigenous people weren’t fully human—they were “monsters” or property, exempt from the guarantees of the Constitution.
For centuries, this contradiction seemed to work for the dominant class because of two safety valves:
Those pressure gauges are gone.
The wealth is no longer expanding outward to placate the working class; it is consolidating violently at the top. The decentralized digital age means that official press releases are instantly disproven by phone footage broadcast to millions within seconds. And our young people, equipped with decentralized knowledge and clear eyes, flatly refuse to buy the foundational myths of exceptionalism. They judge institutions strictly by their fruit: Are you feeding people? Are you keeping us safe? Are you telling the truth?
When the old lies fail, the power structure panics. We see that panic in book bans, rewritten curricula, aggressive voter suppression, and the militarization of domestic law enforcement. Those in power recognize that you cannot sustain a system of minority rule in a diverse republic without turning to raw coercion.
The engine has seized. The idea that we can simply “keep doing what we’ve always done” is a death sentence.
We have to change now not out of soft sentimentality, but out of cold survival: a country that poisons its own soil cannot expect to keep eating the harvest.
For generations, we treated our common civic ground as if it were an inexhaustible resource—dumping toxic rhetoric, state-sanctioned cruelty, and systemic neglect into the dirt, convinced that our exceptionalism would insulate us from the consequences. But the rot has seeped deep into the root system. You cannot saturate the earth with dehumanization and expect to harvest healthy children, stable communities, or enduring democracy. What we are living through today is not a sudden accident; it is the inevitable yield of contaminated ground.
Part III: Where Is the Unpoisoned Soil?
If our national soil has been poisoned by decades of greed, fear, and division, it forces an urgent question: Where do we go from here? Where is the unpoisoned soil, and where is the hope?
If you look for clean earth at the national marquee—in 24-hour cable news cycles, debate stages, and high-dollar political campaigns—you will find only more toxicity. National politics has become an industrial operation designed to monetize our terror and protect consolidated capital.
But the unpoisoned soil has always existed in a completely different place: underneath the pavement, in the places where everyday people refuse to let systems dictate how they treat one another.
In agriculture, when topsoil is depleted and choked with contaminants, good stewards do not simply abandon the land and walk away. They practice bioremediation—introducing deep-rooted cover crops, cultivating healthy microbes, and breaking up the hardpan layer by layer until the earth can breathe and sustain life again. Society heals through that exact labor:
1. Radical Localism – Breaking the Hardpan
We have been conditioned to believe that civic participation begins and ends with pulling a lever in a voting booth every two to four years, leaving us feeling paralyzed the other 364 days. Real power must be built from the ground up:
When your roots are tangled deep into the local community, no national political storm can easily tear you out of the ground.
2. Truth Before Reconciliation
No physician heals an infected wound by sewing dirt and gravel inside of it. The traditional American impulse following episodes of racial terror and systemic violence is to immediately call for “unity” and “moving on” without ever naming the crime. Healing requires the moral courage of true accountability:
3. Cultivating Interdependence – Rebuilding the Root Network
We must finally dismantle the toxic fiction of “rugged individualism.” Nobody paved the streets they drive on, purified the water they drink, or grew the food on their table in isolation. We move forward by shifting from a culture of transaction (“What’s in it for me?”) to a culture of interdependence (“How do we keep each other whole?”). When an unhoused veteran or an undocumented family stands before us, our guiding question cannot be “What did they do wrong?” It must be: “Where has our collective structure failed, and what is our shared duty to safeguard their dignity?”
Part IV: The Voter’s Litmus Test
Refusing to pin our salvation on electoral politics does not mean abandoning the ballot box; it means refusing to surrender our leverage. Moving forward politically, we have to recognize that the damage of the last thirty years was a bipartisan relay race. Both parties governed under a consensus that commodified human essentials while keeping the public divided over identity. If we are to break this cycle, we must stop giving away our votes out of fear and start applying a strict, non-partisan litmus test to anyone seeking public office:
Conclusion: We Have Risen From Ash Before
Despair is understandable in this climate, but it is historically shortsighted.
The soil of this nation was soaked in the blood of chattel slavery for two and a half centuries. Yet men and women who were legally forbidden from reading and deliberately stripped of property walked off plantations, organized the Black church, founded Historically Black Colleges and Universities, created the public school framework across the South during Reconstruction, and dragged federal law toward basic civil rights.
That same ground was poisoned by Jim Crow, convict leasing, and lynchings for another century. Yet domestic workers, sanitation laborers, preachers, and students organized carpools, faced down attack dogs and high-pressure firehoses, and broke the legal back of state-sanctioned segregation.
Those who came before us did not possess instant communication, modern legal safeguards, or the demographic winds at our backs today. If they could plant gardens of justice and human dignity in the suffocating shadow of outright terror, then looking at our current struggle and claiming we cannot move forward is an insult to their sacrifice.
The harvest does not arrive on its own, and it will never be delivered to us by an election cycle or an executive order. The harvest is the community you build, the truth you tell, and the human beings you refuse to let this society fashion into monsters. That work begins the moment we turn our gaze away from the national spectacle, take off the blinders, and dig our hands into the soil right in front of us.
Glossary
Bibliography & Source Documentation
Sociology, Political Philosophy, & Civic Culture
Public Health, Mortality, & Demographics
Economic Metrics, Wealth Concentration, & Housing
Public Opinion & Media Commentary
Most LLM code I see is written as if a human is staring at a spinner. Every request is synchronous, every job fans out into 50 parallel workers, and the bill comes in at full price.
But a lot of that work runs at 3 a.m. Nobody is waiting for it. And all three big vendors will cut the price in half for exactly that kind of work — you just have to tell them you're willing to wait.
Two words first. A token is roughly ¾ of a word; models bill per million of them, with input (what you send) cheaper than output (what the model writes). A Batch API is a separate endpoint where you upload many requests at once, walk away, and download the answers later.
The deal, as written by the vendors (checked 15 Oct 2026)
Same lever, same size, everywhere: you give up the guarantee of an answer in seconds, and you get half the price. That's the whole trade.
What it looks like in dollars
A realistic background job: every night, summarize the day's 20,000 support tickets for an internal dashboard. Each ticket is about 1,500 tokens in and 200 tokens out. I'll use GPT-5.6, whose official price is $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output.
TICKETS, IN_TOK, OUT_TOK, NIGHTS = 20_000, 1_500, 200, 30
PRICE_IN, PRICE_OUT = 2.00, 12.00 # GPT-5.6, $ per 1M tokens, official
def monthly(discount):
m_in = TICKETS * IN_TOK / 1e6 # 30M input tokens per night
m_out = TICKETS * OUT_TOK / 1e6 # 4M output tokens per night
night = m_in * PRICE_IN + m_out * PRICE_OUT
return night * (1 - discount) * NIGHTS
print(f"sync: ${monthly(0.0):,.0f}/month") # $3,240
print(f"batch: ${monthly(0.5):,.0f}/month") # $1,620
$3,240 versus $1,620 a month, for the same summaries landing on the same dashboard before anyone arrives at work. The only code change is where you send the requests and when you collect them.
Notice what parallelism does to this number: nothing. Fifty workers finish the job in twenty minutes instead of three hours, but they pay full price for every token. Concurrency buys speed; batch buys price. At 3 a.m. you don't need speed.
Which jobs can wait
A quick test: if the answer arrived tomorrow morning, would anyone notice? If not, it belongs in a batch. Typical candidates:
One objection I'd raise myself: "24 hours is too unpredictable for a nightly job." In practice the vendors say most batches return far sooner, and you can always fall back to the synchronous API for whatever hasn't returned by your deadline. You pay full price only for the stragglers.
Where waiting loses
Batch is wrong whenever the next step depends on the previous answer.
The rule: batch the wide part of the job (thousands of independent items), keep the narrow part (dependent steps, humans waiting) synchronous.
What this doesn't solve
Batch doesn't make a bad prompt cheaper — a 1,500-token ticket you could trim to 600 is still waste at half price. Results can come back in any order, so you match them by your own ID. Anthropic notes that batch and prompt caching discounts stack, but cache hits inside a batch are "best-effort", so don't budget on them.
And an honest gap on our side. We run a gateway that resells these same models 10–25% below the vendors' official prices — GPT-5.6 at $1.70/$10.20 against $2/$12, which puts the job above at $2,754 a month. We have no batch endpoint and no embeddings. A gateway discount and a vendor batch discount are different levers: ours applies to synchronous, interactive traffic; batch's 50% applies only to work that can wait, and right now you get it only by going to the vendor directly. For the 3 a.m. job, vendor batch beats us.
Open your billing page and find the job that runs while everyone sleeps. Then ask it whether it really needs an answer in seconds.#ai #llm #cost #beginners #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Your nightly LLM job pays double — every big vendor gives 50% off for waiting a day
The problem
A dependency blips for 400ms — a deploy, a GC pause, a brief network partition, doesn't matter which. Every client with an in-flight request fails at roughly the same instant. They all do the responsible thing: back off exponentially and retry. And yet the service doesn't recover cleanly. It gets hit by a second, sharper outage a few seconds later, caused entirely by the retries that were supposed to be polite about coming back.
I've watched this pattern take down a freshly-recovered service harder than the original blip did — not once, but as a repeating pattern, every few seconds, for the better part of a minute, while everyone stared at dashboards wondering why a "fixed" service kept re-breaking.
Why it happens
Exponential backoff fixes one problem and leaves another completely untouched. The problem it fixes: a client that fails shouldn't hammer you immediately and repeatedly — waiting longer between attempts reduces total load. The problem it doesn't fix: synchronization. If 2,000 clients all fail at t=0, and every one of them runs the identical formula delay = min(cap, base * 2^attempt), every one of them computes the identical delay. They don't spread out. They retry in lockstep.
Walk through it with base=1s, cap=32s, 2,000 clients that all fail at t=0:
Five attempts later, you've had five synchronized full-fleet spikes, each one arriving exactly when the service was most fragile — right after the previous spike knocked it back down. The growing delay buys you less frequent storms, not smaller ones. Every single storm is still the full 2,000 requests, because nothing in the formula ever desynchronizes the clients from each other. Pure exponential backoff makes the disease chronic instead of acute.
What to do about it
The fix is jitter — randomizing the delay instead of computing it deterministically — but which kind of jitter matters more than people assume:
delay = cap/2 + random(0, cap/2)): spreads clients across half the window. Better, but still guarantees a minimum synchronized floor every round — half the fleet is still packed into the back half of the window.delay = random(0, cap)): each client's retry lands uniformly anywhere in the window, including near zero. With 2,000 clients spread across attempt 3's 4-second window instead of landing on one instant, you get roughly 500 requests/second of smooth, absorbable load instead of 2,000 at once — and the spread widens geometrically with every attempt, so the tail trickles rather than detonates.delay = min(cap, random(base, previous_delay * 3))): approximates full jitter's spread without needing to track attempt count, which is convenient in stateless retry wrappers.Full jitter is the one to default to unless you have a specific reason not to — it minimizes both total requests sent and the time until the last straggler succeeds, because it never re-synchronizes clients that failed together. The implementation cost is one extra random() call; there's no excuse for skipping it once you know the failure mode exists.
One more lever worth pairing with jitter: cap the maximum number of retry attempts and fail fast past it, so a client that still can't get through after, say, 5–6 attempts gives up instead of circling forever at the cap value, quietly contributing to a permanent low-grade storm.
Key takeaways
random(0, min(cap, base * 2^attempt))) unless you've measured a reason to deviate.
#reliability #backend #architecture #performance #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Exponential Backoff Isn't Enough: The Retry Storm Hiding in Your Recovery Path
Über #Arbeitsethos in der #Grundlagenforschung als biographisch bedeutende #Triebkraft:
>Sternstunde Philosophie - Die Welt retten mit Chemie? Nobelpreisträger Omar Yaghi
#Frankreich und #Deutschland haben sich heute auf das Aus für die #europäisch|e #PKW - #Industrie geeinigt.