My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years.
Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.
Me in math class in 1996 - I had a TI-82 things are programmable so I have no formal education, my parents are illiterate, and taught myself to program, and I begged them to buy me one.
I spent time learning how to code on it, writing from scratch, the game Spyhunter.
I couldn't figure out how to draw with lines or pixels so I used ASCII or text.
I presented this to my teacher who told me "these aren't for games". I was crushed.
Makes me realize how lucky I was to have teachers who pushed me to actually excel in areas I was gifted in (and also pull me back in areas I was not gifted in :))
When I was in 7th grade I was getting 100% on all my math exams so my teacher had me test into 8th grade math (algebra). Then when I was a sophomore I was supposed to take precalc but my teacher thought I obviously didn't belong there either so she put me in her Calc AB class, which was the highest math class my school offered, but had me self-study for the Calc BC AP test during class time, taking her own time to sit down with me whenever I had questions.
A couple years later I TA'd for her precalc class and I spent most of my time in that class playing with my TI 8x (can't remember the exact model, maybe 84?) and programming very basic games on it. I showed her what I made and she was so impressed she said I should study computer science.
Guess what I did? Not that. I studied something completely different in college but now I've been a programmer for ten years and wonder why I ever doubted her at all.
Just goes to show how much impact a good teacher has on a student's life.
Some teachers, like many of us, have caveman emotions, live under near medieval systems and have access to god-like tech. (My version of a quote I read earlier this year.)
It's typical. They're supposed have authority and be better than you. That is the purpose of their position and their identity.
Don't be so quick to judge, because most people, including you would react the same way in similar contexts, for example if you were the top engineer at a company and someone started showing you up and being a hundred times better than you.
Not really? I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them. Some people are status driven. Some are not. Some are apparently pathologically status driven such that they'll compete with a literal child.
In any case refusing to nurture such a child (even in effectively passive ways like letting them quietly do something more advanced with no specific instruction) and not being reprimanded for it would reveal that the actual purpose of their position is daycare worker, which should be a bigger strike to the ego.
That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Now. That being said, the drive can be suppressed. But suppressing the drive doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and that you don’t feel it. Also many people feel the drive at different levels of intensity that much is true.
Anecdotally your response to me indicates to me that you have not suppressed status seeking drives completely. The key hints are you’re referring to how you’re drawn to people who do high quality work. That is orthogonal to status seeking. Your status and identity is tied to a certain type of work you do and you take pride in. Have you worked with anyone who was so powerful that their work invalidated, crushed and basically humiliated anything you did. And let’s say this person is not malicious. He’s just so much better than you that your work and identity is inconsequential and eclipsed by his work.
If you said that you wouldn’t feel anything in the face of that then I would say that you truly do not seek status. I would also say you’re not human.
That being said a teacher holds his identity as someone who is better than children. He needs to be better than children in order to transfer his betterment (aka knowledge) to children. His role in society and identity rests on that foundation. If children are better then him and know more than him then that is inadvertently an attack on his identity. His reaction is natural and expected. It’s not that he has anything against the child, it’s self protection mechanisms to protect his identity via deluding himself. Very typical.
You see much of the same stuff with LLMs and programmers. A huge portion of HN was in denial for the longest time about the capabilities of LLMs calling these things stochastic parrots and thinking it’s impossible for the AI to take over. HN was just completely wrong about that and they were also wrong about driverless cars. The reason why they were so wrong is not because they’re making a logical and rational prediction… no they are choosing the prediction that most aligns with protecting their identity and skill set as programmers which is in the process of being replaced by agentic ai.
Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.
To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it. Work is a means to provide, and it does well enough that I don't need to chase it anymore. Actually the marginal pay for the increased responsibility kind of doesn't make it worth it, but like I said I'll do it if they need that. And so my focus is generally thinking about "how do I get one of my team members in a place where they can replace me?"
If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.
Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.
On LLMs, I found them to be useless but interesting right up until December, at which point I started a hard push for my team to adopt it (and get excited about it). I'm very explicit that my mental framing with them is "how do I get it to do my job". I'm well aware that "programmer" per se is not going to be a job in the future. That much seemed obvious as far back as the original chatgpt release. That's fine, and just means we have to ask ourselves what else needs doing. If we ever get to the point where the answer is "nothing" then I guess we're all doing pretty well.
>Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.
Read carefully the part about science. Status seeking is inherit in biology... it's tied to serotonin levels in your blood. When you say you don't seek status it is not only false, it is unscientific. You're a liar or delusional. End of story. I can literally cite science around this.
This tracks not only in humans, but across multiple species including the lobster. Status seeking is in built into biology and society. Saying you don't status seek is like saying you never felt the emotion of sadness or happiness. At your job, in society, the social hierarchies are everywhere and we are ALL wired to recognize and respond to these things and to SEEK it.
Additionally there is extremely high correlation with women and status. Men with the highest status tend to get the most women. And women are attracted to the men with the highest status. It's directly tied to sexual selection and evolution. Like... this isn't even just a measurable thing via serotonin... it's tied to the theory of evolution and anthropological origins of humans. You literally have no argument other than a pathetic attempt to counter science with anecdotal bullshit.
Saying you don't seek status is in itself status seeking. You're claiming to be holier than thou but it's all just bullshit status signaling because it flies in the face of scientific reality. I think you're more of a person who is unable to obtain status in the human social hierarchy... you're probably among the lowest of society so you might've just given up and called yourself a person who never felt the emotion to status seek. Understandable... but again not realistic.
Also when I say you're pathetically on the bottom of the barrel in terms of status. You shouldn't be offended... because you don't seek status... it's not intrinsic to your character.. You should feel nothing when I call you an utter social outcast with no status whatsoever.
>To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it.
Bro this is another form of status signaling. "Everyone wants me to be their manager but I don't care for it." lol. It might be true but then again it very well might not be since your statement is a bit braggy here. If you could share with me something people and society will find pathetic and shameful about you... that's more solid proof that you don't care about status. Something like, "Everyone hates me, I've tried to be manager all my life but nobody likes me." That's a more true signal of zero status seeking. But I don't see this in you at all.
To put it in perspective, I think I believe you don't actually want to be manager... but that has nothing to do with not caring for status. It's more likely you're balancing "status" with the extra responsibilities that come with higher status. You can't handle the price that needs to be paid to reach that level so you "settle". Again, very common. You maintain a baseline level of status high enough to keep your wife around (she will leave if your status goes low enough as your status is tied to your ability to raise your family) but it doesn't demand to much out of you. If status was given to you without cost... you would take it without hesitation because... again... you seek status, like all humans do.
>Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.
No. You're just someone who can't face reality. You have to talk about everything in idealist terms. If a teacher thinks all children are smarter, more educated or better than him, what identity does he have left? How is he even qualified to teach children? A teacher or any human does not think of his job as some selfless charity to society where he is at the utter whim of sacrificing himself for the class room. He has identity and gains status from the role as a "teacher" and that is a huge part of it. It's the same with being a doctor... if you think people become doctors solely just to save people and that it has nothing to do with status... you're out of touch with basic reality.
You not only fail to empathize from the teachers perspective but you succeeded in twisting your response into a direct attack on me. Manipulative. But pointless. This is just an internet forum... winning the crowd doesn't mean shit. This is one of the few opportunities you have to say things that are True and real with no affect on your status.
Anyway what I present is CLEARLY not a narcissistic concept. I am clearly not a narcissist and neither are you. It is a basic concept of basic intelligence. Something you're lacking.
>If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.
When I referred to humans I was more trying to illustrate how your claims don't make sense. Humans seek status period. End of story. If you don't seek status, you're not a human... you're an alien... you clearly aren't an alien... so you're clearly wrong. That was the point.
I'm talking from a hard scientific perspective. You're well outside of that right now and you're only thinking from the perspective of your family. But status seeking is still there, but it's more passed to the status of your children which is still inline with natural selection and biology.
You care for the status of your children, do you not? If your children grew up poor and homeless but extremely happy with their life style would you be content? Or do you care about the status of your children and not want them to grow up ending up in the lowest possible strata of status in human society?
You use research as an argument, which is valid in a conversation where nobody has any information about specifics. E.g. in the pre-life, before a soul is about to be incarnated, you can point to that research and say: you are more likely than not to behave this way. Were the soul to reply, “no I am not, I know myself”, you could call them delusional.
But you’re talking to a person who can point at their actual life and say: I have been in that exact situation and I can confirm that I did not behave that way.
That’s a new observation, and afai understand Bayesian statistics, this is the moment where we must update our priors: how likely is someone who has observed themselves in the past not to behave that way, to behave that way?
Your argument is now incomplete.
Maybe someone with real understanding of Bayesian statistics can frame this better, or tell me why I’m wrong XD
Well how is his experience valid? He may be lying or unaware or delusional or lying to himself. All very common human behaviors.
> Your argument is now incomplete
If my argument is scientific and it’s incomplete then are all scientific arguments incomplete? If science is our best way of determining fact from fiction in reality then based off of the aforementioned logic isn’t the best possible way for humans to determine truth incomplete?
Also in Your attempt to prove me wrong have you thought about how MORE incomplete his argument was?
Everyone can be lying. But I’ve been around human beings long enough to know that there are two very different types of self delusion: valiant assumptions about what you will do in a never before seen situation, and observations about what you have done. GP’s was an objective statement:
> I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them.
Neither type of statement is perfectly trustable (nothing is) but IME there is a categorical difference. Your paper (and first comment, “don’t be so quick to judge”, which imo was ironically prescient) are about the former type.
Of course if you disagree with me on this fundamental distinction then we have found our contention :) which would be a nice end to this debate. Don’t you think?
Aren’t my statements exactly in line with what “he has done”? Why don’t you read it more carefully. I never denied what he “did”. More like I requested better evidence and I denied his rationalizations behind his life choices. I never claimed he didn’t do what he said.
If he’s drawn to people who do productive work that’s fine. I turned around and asked him for instances where someone’s work humiliated him or completely eclipsed any utility his work offers. Imagine he worked 10 years to invent the slide rule and some genius invents the electronic calculator in one day right after he showed his invention to the world. That’s devastating status damaging stuff. That’s the type of example I asked him for. Not “oh I’m drawn to work with productive people” lol. That kind of comment he made leaves room for him to imply he’s “more productive” than the people he wants to work with. He’s a poser but then that’s not abnormal… tons of people pose and are fake as hell.
Literally look at what he writes. He’s just incapable of admitting any trivial fault. He’s fucking controlled by status above a normal extent for sure. We don’t even have to get into the pedantics of science for this just use your common sense brain.
I have plenty of faults. Depending on your perspective, my entire point is a "fault": I'm lazy and unambitious and decided to top out and coast in my career when I was like 30.
I'm simply happy with that. I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened. I've never seen anyone get humiliated at work. Most work is honestly pretty boring and straightforward. I'm not Leonardo da Vinci here hoping I don't get scooped.
I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
But then I do that to myself all the time too. I have some first approach, and then like a week later notice some simplification I missed. That's normal? I just join stand-up that day and day "good news I realized this problem is way simpler so I can delete half the work I did."
In fact that's why I like working with smart people. They can help see things you missed when you accidentally get stuck in a rabbit hole. I'm not going to be mad at someone for making my life easier. And as I've said, I go to work to support my family, not to fulfill some existential need. Whatever makes work simpler is good in my book. That's also why I've enjoyed adopting LLMs this year: they make it so I don't have to spend as much mental energy on things that are fundamentally not that interesting to me
>I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened.
Then how do you even know what the emotion of "humiliation" even feels like if you never been humiliated before? Perhaps you felt such emotions in childhood but as an adult you've never been humiliated ever? Or perhaps you're going to tell a story of slight trivial humiliation when you accidentally used the wrong gender pronoun and that's the totality of your understanding of humiliation?
Your story is too perfect. It's fake-ish and as you tell more of it you're starting to see holes in it like your claim that you've never been humiliated before.
>I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
this is your least tame example yet, but it's still not humiliation. I in actually can't believe you felt perfectly fine and serene when the other engineer schooled your approach. I think if you were more honest with the story you would've admitted to slight to mild feelings of embarrassment and you just ended up humble about it as most humans would.
At this point you're just trying to show off your claimed non-status seeking personality... but your signaling has gone to the point where it's just a little too perfect. You should probably reply and add more realism to that story man, go ahead if you want:
Everything behavioral or psychological science adjacent tends to be "barely science" but sure.
Don't know what to tell you. I'm not the first person to not be interested in "the rat race" (hence the pejorative term for it existing). People like Emerson have probably made the case better than I can. I'm not interested in getting the most women. Actually that sounds gross to me. I instead found the best woman, and fortunately she's also not big on status seeking, and agrees she'd rather have more time with me than me making more money or having a bigger title. My work is a side plot in our lives; my primary title is "Dad".
Unclear how my criticism of a theoretical teacher (or more generally adult) who competes with the children they're supposed to be supporting is a direct attack on you? Self-report? If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving, and there are always new things to learn. Or just be happy for their good fortune. Hamstringing them to make up for one's own hangups is clearly narcissist behavior.
It's also not just management. I don't want to climb the IC ladder either. It means more work, more stress, more responsibility, etc. for a relatively small amount of more money. I already make enough money, and I work for money, not status. That money is to pay for things we need like a house. Then once we have what we need, I plan to retire early and spend more time with my family. Maybe find some volunteer work that we could do together. That's it. Work is a side chapter, not my life.
My wife is also on board with this. She was unsure what it would be like when I transitioned to full remote, but then I did and she realized she likes being around me all the time, and wants me to quit once we've paid for the things we need.
I don't think they would be happy homeless so it's somewhat of a silly question. I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy, but that of course includes showing them how to stay grounded. I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
>Everything behavioral or psychological science adjacent tends to be "barely science" but sure.
Your arguments aren't even science. Barely but sure? What about your own anecdotal statements? That's even less reliable. If the science is all we got, then it's the best we got.
>Don't know what to tell you. I'm not the first person to not be interested in "the rat race" (hence the pejorative term for it existing). People like Emerson have probably made the case better than I can. I'm not interested in getting the most women. Actually that sounds gross to me. I instead found the best woman, and fortunately she's also not big on status seeking, and agrees she'd rather have more time with me than me making more money or having a bigger title. My work is a side plot in our lives; my primary title is "Dad".
We can frame it in terms of the science. You do seek status, but like many you have the inability to pay the cost of reaching higher social status levels, so like many settle for some sort of middle ground. It's extremely common. When you have kids, a huge portion of your "status seeking" shifts to the status of your kids. You work to promote their status in life and you derive a lot of pride from that. In the end it's still status seeking. Whether you seek it for yourself or your genetic future, evolution built you that way.
>Unclear how my criticism of a theoretical teacher (or more generally adult) who competes with the children they're supposed to be supporting is a direct attack on you? Self-report? If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving. Or just be happy for their good fortune. Hamstringing them to make up for one's own hangups is clearly narcissist behavior.
It's very clear. You said I sound like a narcissist. That is clearly an attack. It's like if I said your statement sounds like it was said by an idiot. That's also an attack. But it's sort of indirect attacks that skirt around the rules. I didn't say you were an "idiot"... I said your "statement" sounds like it was said by an "idiot". I just cut through the bullshit and went for the intent of the statement.
>If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving.
No one is insecure about a child's abilities. They're insecure about their OWN ability to help children. That is the source of the person saying that calculators are "not for games". The person saying that needs an excuse for himself to qualify as a teacher. It happens so fast the person saying that doesn't even realize why.
>It's also not just management. I don't want to climb the IC ladder either. It means more work, more stress, more responsibility, etc. for a relatively small amount of more money.
I've already pointed this out. You're not willing to pay the cost so you settle.
>My wife is also on board with this. She was unsure what it would be like when I transitioned to full remote, but then I did and she realized she likes being around me all the time, and wants me to quit once we've paid for the things we need.
She settled too. Most people in life settle. Top alpha status is hard to get and their are huge costs in getting that status. Everybody wants it, but they just don't want to pay the price.
>I don't think they would be happy homeless so it's somewhat of a silly question. I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy, but that of course includes showing them how to stay grounded. I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
So they seek status. Because they won't be happy homeless as being homeless is low status.
>I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy
So you think success (aka status seeking) is intrinsically tied to your children's happiness. Stop signalling bro. You're own language and statements reveal yourself.
>I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
Again this is the evolutionary strategy of "settling". Your passing your own status seeking strategy to your children. And your strategy is based off of "cost" it is not based off of a lack of desire for status. Again, you think optimal cost/benefit ratio is to be a SWE or something. Some people target something lower then that like janitorial engineering. But if status fell on each of your laps for free, you'd take it.
Also it's not just cost/benefit. Status also measures capability. You and your children may be incapable of getting the statuses you want so you settle. When a person is unable to talk about their own weaknesses and lack of ability to get the status they want, then I know they intrinsically seek status. That's why your anecdotal statement of how you turned down a management opportunity even though everyone wanted you to be manager is kind of off. You were humble bragging and bragging is a form of status projecting.
Again, if you truly don't seek status... tell me about something shameful and pathetic about you that if people in general knew about it would lower your status.... can you do that? If not, then that's my point. You, everyone, and that teacher seeks status and the way they talk and what truths they admit to themselves is a result of THAT status seeking. To characterize that teacher as some kind of narcissist or evil person is a complete lack of empathy and misunderstanding of human nature.
Keep in mind, this is the internet, anything you say here doesn't really affect your status in real life. So you're not doing anything in reality to affect your status. But it's still tangible evidence because I believe that status seeking in biology is so strong it will affect your ability to even say something extremely shameful and pathetic on an anonymous forum. Your genetics and behavior were evolved for a time when humans didn't have internet so it doesn't account for this loop hole where you can write and say things publicly that don't affect your status... hence why I'm sure you're gonna maintain your idealistic frame here.
If the best you have is garbage, then you just say that you don't have anything useful. It's like exercise science: there's almost nothing useful there. Don't pretend there is.
If you accept that premise, then you can't frame it in terms of science. You can frame it instead in terms of culture and philosophy, and just say that status obsession is bad. Especially, again, if it turns into literally competing with or feeling threatened by children.
And really, not everything is about status. In fact, if you want something status lowering I guess, we're kind of Billy No-mates, so I don't even have people to compare status with. I've got no Jones' to keep up with! And that's fine.
Again, I've "settled" precisely because I have exactly what I want. It's not the "costs" so much as it is the absence of value. You could argue that I wouldn't pay $100 for a turd because the cost is too high, but the real point is I don't want the turd. You'd have to pay me to take the turd. Like you'd have to pay me to take the higher status job, except they can't pay me enough, and if they did, it would be because I'd be able to save enough to quit shortly thereafter. So really there's just no sustainable world where I keep the higher status position. Because I really, truly, don't want it. It can only distract from what's important to me, and fill my head with things that are not.
Being homeless is an unhappy affair because it's some combination of cold, rainy, snowy, hot, sunny, and stinky, not because it's low status. And because you have nowhere to store e.g. food or clothes, so your situation is precarious. And nowhere to cook, so difficult to eat healthy meals. I highly doubt most homeless people have social status as a top concern.
I'm not sure what I could say that's "shameful" because I'm generally a pretty happy person. In techie circles, I suppose one thing is that my kids are all girls, and I'm going to encourage them to be stay-at-home moms instead of chasing careerism, try to put them into social circles where promiscuity is heavily frowned upon and the primary reason to go to uni is to find a husband (an "Mrs degree"), etc. Very much against the zeitgeist in my work world (and on this site), but I think it's the best way for them to find happiness. So we moved to the South to stay away from West Coast values.
> If the best you have is garbage, then you just say that you don't have anything useful. It's like exercise science: there's almost nothing useful there. Don't pretend there is.
If you think my statements are garbage think about your own statements. You call me out for presenting valid scientific papers by denigrating the whole field of behavioral science which you then refute by pulling out random anecdotes which aren’t even backed by anything.
> If you accept that premise, then you can't frame it in terms of science
I don’t accept that premise. All science has the possibility of being wrong. It is often wrong. But it is the best we have and it has resulted in remarkable things such as going to the moon.
Anecdotes are weaker than science. If behavioral science is trash to you then the your anecdotes are raw shit.
> Again, I've "settled" precisely because I have exactly what I want. It's not the "costs" so much as it is the absence of value.
The foundation of economic theory is based on unlimited human wants and desires. We baked this assumption into theory because it’s so ingrained in human behavior that it’s the foundation of the financial world.
How about I give you an extra ten million dollars with no strings attached? If you say you don’t need it then I see it as more likely you’re just virtue signaling and lying. Bro be real.
> Being homeless is an unhappy affair because it's some combination of cold, rainy, snowy, hot, sunny, and stinky, not because it's low status. And because you have nowhere to store e.g. food or clothes, so your situation is precarious. And nowhere to cook, so difficult to eat healthy meals. I highly doubt most homeless people have social status as a top concern.
Oh let me change that to being homeless in sunny CA with free shelter and food. Most homeless people in SF have completely free access to food anyway. Or how about if your kids worked as a poor waitresses for the rest of their lives but were happy? Obviously that’s what I mean right? No point in getting pedantic about specifics when I’m talking about status.
> I suppose one thing is that my kids are all girls, and I'm going to encourage them to be stay-at-home moms instead of chasing careerism,
That’s a pretty tame one. Not really going to lower your status. You got any sexual kinks? Perverted stuff you like to do in bed that you’d never admit? Do you have any slight interest in men that you’d never admit? Anybody in your family you hate and you think should die?
That’s the level of things I’m looking for. If you truly didn’t care about status you’d be able to admit it.
But if your your perfect ideally on every level I find that harder to believe unfortunately.
We can end the argument here. You won’t be able to prove your stance (event though I’m not even asking you for scientific data) and the science I presented is the highest level of evidence anyone on earth can offer in an argument anyway. It’s not going anywhere so I’m happy to end the argument here but if you want to continue I’m still down.
As a side note, status is even more important to women than men. Your own daughters will date based off of status and they will by nature generally hold status of themselves in higher regard than you. Men are less concerned with status (though still concerned) and are not in actuality concerned with status when selecting a mate as opposed to women where status is part of the main criteria. If you want to empathize with your daughters and women in general than understanding status is part of reality. But of course like you, ironically, being concerned about status, is signal for low status so often people are in denial or they lie about it.
I was calling the science garbage (i.e. denigrating the whole field), not what you wrote. And yeah if the methodology and data are garbage, there's no point in using it. It's like saying chatgpt 2.0 is the best we have, so we should use that. No, we should just say we don't have anything useful. And no, psychology did not get us to the moon. Actual science does not have the problems behavioral and social "sciences" have.
Physics is founded on spherical cows. Doesn't mean it's true. But sure I'll take extra money. I already said I'm working to accumulate more of that. So I can quit. But I wouldn't take $10M if it e.g. meant I had to be CEO of a F500 or something for 10 years. You literally could not pay me to have to do that job for a decade. And if you paid me $5M/year or something, I'd quit after 3 months and be happy.
I wouldn't want them to be homeless in San Francisco either because it's dirty and unsafe, and again I don't think it's a road to happiness. If they really enjoyed waitressing, whatever, but the thing is I think if you're truly happy with life, you'll probably want to form a family and share that happiness. And then something like waitressing is likely a distraction from that, just like software is for me.
I'm pretty sure "actually I don't want my girls to go into STEM and want them to be homemakers" is way more status damaging in the software world (when my first was born a colleague literally asked if I was going to teach her to be a programmer. Uhh, sure) than sexual proclivities of all things lol. But alas, I can't even say I'm into butt stuff.
I don't think I'd characterize being gay as an "imperfection" or something to be ashamed of?
But wanting someone (especially family?) to die is uh pretty hardcore. So no I can't say I've got anything like that for you. I honestly just never need to interact with people I don't like. It's pretty easy to choose your own social circle once you're an adult.
I'm not at all claiming I'm perfect (e.g. I could probably lose ~10 lbs of fat. I could always stand to have more muscle), and I realize it's in vogue to have mental health issues, but there's a reason being normal is... normal. I have to imagine most people don't really have anything to be ashamed of, and most adults grow out of whatever insecurities they may have once had.
> That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Isn't that just a kafkatrap?
Consider the following exchange where a sane man finds himself in a psychiatric ward:
John: I'm telling you, I'm sane. I don't have any delusions of grandeur and I don't think that I'm Jesus.
Evaluator: I see, your subconscious delusion and erroneous insistence upon sanity are more pervasive than I thought. Your repeated attempts to assert that you're not Jesus is clearly a defense mechanism. I'm afraid I cannot recommend your release.
Something went wrong here.
Or to rephrase: suppose that a person existed who was not status driven. Would you be able to detect such a person if they existed?
Change your example too John saying he doesn’t have experience the emotion of fear. He has never experienced such an emotion in his life.
The thing many people do not understand is how ingrained status seeking is in not just human biology… but biology altogether. Even the lobster has serotonin and is status seeking. It is also in built into our society. Practically every facet of every culture across time has status seeking imprinted into it. Among academia and people who study the biology and behavior it’s unequivocal that people are status seeking.
Basically to help you understand where I’m coming from it’s like this guy is claiming he’s never felt jealous before. “I’ve never cared that someone has more than me or covetted what another man has. It’s just illogical! I’m baffled that other humans act so illogically”.
It’s like that. It’s fake and it’s posing a bit. A lot of HNers like to position themselves as super intelligent people who are incapable of being status seeking or jealous or even feeling scared because it’s “illogical”
Irony is lost on this guy ... :D
Edited to add: I comment on the guy you commented on, not you. Just in case. I did not want to reply to them to not give offense.
With Inform7 targeting the ZMachine VM you can literally say that =).
Inform6 it's a 'small' OOP language where with the English library the syntax it's dumber than VB6, Lua or anything else. Basically the objects and logic describe themselves as a dumbed down config file. You create a meta-object for rooms and light, and then copy and paste to create rooms, containers and tools based on atributes (again as if it were a simple config file).
Lib should be the English library, you can get it with
git submodule update --init --recursive
or copy informlib to lib/
To play the game:
frotz cloak-of-darkness.z5
Or LectRote under Mac... or WinFrotz under Windows, it will work the
same.
With Inform7 you just write clauses in English, the interpreter will write IF6 code for you and then call the inform6 compiler to create a Z5-8 game ready to run.
As you can see, no AI needed, no LLM's, no huge GB sized software,
just a Pentium MMX could be enough for i7, a 8-16 bit machine for Puny Inform games (kinda like Inform6 'lite'), a 16 bit machine for z3-z5 games and maybe a 'high end' 16 bit computer for Z8 games. A 386 PC would be enough to run 'complex' text adventures. And consistent enough unlike LLM's where the objects' enviroment is lost everytime.
I have an almost identical story. I wrote a few games: snake and a choose your own adventure fantasy thing. And likely others that I can't remember, but yeah, I had a teacher tell me basically the same thing. I was pretty sad because those really took a lot of time.
In high school our computer class was in BASIC. They taught us to swap two variables A & B like this:
h = a
a = b
b = h
But I knew the BASIC we used had the SWAP command. On an exam, I used SWAP A,B instead of the above. I got the lowest passing score, a 70%, and the teacher wrote, "Do it our way please". No thanks Mrs. Mott, I'll take the 70.
Those folks can FRO. The teacher my wife would have had for a Pascal class in high school refused to let her apply, saying it was not for girls. Her father said, you can take it at community college.
I do not learn from textbooks at all. I learn from playing. I played with all my toys "wrong" when I was a kid, or so I was always told. I always turned to the last chapter of a math book to see what I'm going to learn or to see if I could figure it out from what I already knew (what I would now call "first principles"). I took appliances apart and tried to put them back together. If I failed to do so my dad would help me put them back together, as long as I didn't tell my mom he was encouraging that behavior :) I watched my older sister play piano and learned the songs she was playing by ear, then asked her to teach me to read music.
This behavior often came out as rebellious or prodigy behavior in grade school but I don't think it's any of that. I think it was just a matter of giving a curious kid space to play and learn and grow. kids like me often don't thrive in rigid environments not because we don't like rules or think they shouldn't apply to us but because our brains just don't work completely linearly.
I'd wager that most kids actually learn better like this but it's not super efficient to cater to 30 different curious kids wanting to learn 30 different things.
How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing
I served 60 months of the 70 month sentence. I had a computer restriction, so I couldn't be around a computer.
Since I wasn't able to use computers or the Internet for that time, I did/read/learned a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise learned. Learned how to make hooch (prison wine), how the law works and how to maneuver the court system (useful for both civil and criminal cases), got more fluent in French by speaking with some native French speakers from Benin, learned how to work out & lift weights (which I still do), and learned the value of freedom.
Thanks for the reply, I see you are quite the legend and am all caught up now.
Are you still coding these days? Does AI instill any new sense of awe and wonder or a new found passion for coding/computers? Hope you are in a better place now. Cheers.
I'm not sure how much he actually used it after I wrote it for him, to be honest! But we did have access to daily newspapers, and some of us got weekly stock charts called "Daily Charts" by Investor's Business Daily (all paper, of course). Some of us were into trading stocks (this was during the Internet boom 1995-2000). Another weird skill I learned that is still useful to this day.
i created a program to make it appear like i wiped my formulas before before a calc 2 final in high school so that when the teacher witnessed us wipe the phones it seemed legit.
In HS, teachers hadn't even caught on to that possibility yet.
I programmed quite a cheat sheet worth of formulae etc into my calc. Right before the test, I dropped it onto the floor. The battery cover popped off and the AA batteries popped out.
These were TI-81s (IIRC) so no battery backup -- it was a full memory wipe every time you changed batteries. Sooooooooooooo... goodbye cheat sheet!
However, I aced that test anyway, legitimately. Creating the cheat sheet actually helped me to learn the material. There's a lesson or two in there somewhere...
They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.
The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.
I had a similar story -- just absolutely acing math with my TI-89 until one teacher finally learned that this TI-83-looking calculator could do symbolic stuff ... just an absolute nightmare after that
Spent some time on ticalc.org too, making some not-great stuff to get me thru those years
I was told that one of the designers graduated high-school in '81 and college in '85, so the HS calculator was an 81 and the college calculator was an 85.
They had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school.
All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules.
Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.
Huh. I have only good memories of this calculator. Would buy for my kids in a heartbeat. The fact that it barely changed is a feature to me. I know exactly what they’d be getting.
The scam doesn’t just work in the US. In The Netherlands most secondary school students had, and I think still have, to buy these. I imagine in other countries too.
There is an interesting side effect from having always used TI calculators. They use a dot as the decimal separator, not a comma like we do here.
There is usually some option to switch, but the hardware button obviously stays the same, so I’ve always been taught to just make that switch in my head, and it has become the natural thing for me to do.
I see 1,000.50 on a screen I write down 1.000,50.
When I use software that uses a comma as the decimal separator, I get annoyed and it takes some mental effort to enter the right values.
… that continues no matter what. I gave my kid my 89 from the late 90s—I was happy to avoid the TI student tax. Then a year or two back, the college board banned the 89 from certain tests/classes and so I had to cough up for an 84. Even if you take care of your stuff, treat it well to pass on to your kids, the Man finds a way to extract their cut.
Plenty of students succeed just fine without owning a graphing calculator (they can spend a few minutes learning the handful of test-relevant features and borrow one for the exam). Thankfully as of this year there is also a Desmos option.
I think you can flash a TI83 Plus ROM to a TI73 by using an exploit? One exploit was that flashing an OS writes all the ROM, then checks the signature afterwards, then erases it if it fails. Pull batteries at the correct time and...
One other factor that others haven't yet covered is that the different lines had different capabilities, e.g. the T-89 had Computer Algebra System symbolic manipulation meaning it could pretty much solve many types of math problems on its own, so it wasn't generally allowed in school. And then the Ti-85/86 was a step down, but had matrix support that the lower models lacked, so it was necessary for some specific types of classes.
My favorite was always the TI-85/86 line. I loved those F1-F5 buttons right beneath the screen, which made the interface overall better to navigate. The first programming I ever did was on one of those (either the 85 or 82, can't exactly remember at this point which I owned first). And, the only thing of note I ever had stolen from me was a TI-82, taken out of my unattended backpack by another student during gym class :( (And I had even carved my name into the back of it with a knife, so it would've been identifiable.)
This. The thread's confusion comes from looking at these as computers: more capabilities are always an improvement.
In common use, they're intended as mathematical learning aids, a function for which very specific sets of functionality (and no more) are required.
F.ex. basic matrix ops but no auto-solvers
Similar to how you wouldn't give a kid learning how to construct an argumentative essay access to a full LLM if the goal is learning how to perform the task.
From a product POV, sure. From an end user’s perspective, I strongly dislike that. There’s no room for growth there. Buy the model that does matrices when you’re taking linear algebra, and you learn that model through and through. Then take an engineering class where you need a solved, and now you have to use a different device that works subtly differently in enough ways that you have to learn all about it.
I just want one device that does everything so my new learning can build on my old.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere here, I love the TI-85 I used through college. I’m no partisan. However, I think that for anything outside a school context, that means skipping any device marketed as “ok to use on tests” and buying an HP. I scarcely need the cool stuff of the HP50g or DM42n I picked up along the way, but if I ever do, I know it’s already in there and waiting for me to discover it.
They were different lines. The numbers aren't mean to be chronological; similar to how AMD released some 5000 series AM4 Ryzen chips long after they'd moved on to AM5 and 7000/9000 series.
TI83 (1996) was a successor to the TI82 (1993) which was a refresh/update of the TI81 (1990).
TI85 (1992) was the second model they made, originally intended as a higher end version of the TI81.
Similar reasoning for the rest of their line up. Different models had different features, and then those models would get incremental updates/refreshes over the years.
I wasn't part of the team or anything, so if anyone has any insight to why exactly they called it that in the first place, I'd be interested to know, but generally speaking the answer is: When they released the first one in 1990, they didn't name it under the presumption that this family of devices would be a staple educational/academic electronics device for the next 3 decades with dozen(s?) of different iterations/generations over the years.
A lot of it had to do with capability. The TI 92 was considerably more capable than the 83. The 89 had better software than the 92 but with a smaller form factor. The 92+ was the 92 with the 89 software.
In high school my stats teacher told us we had to get a proper calculator. She didn’t set any upper limit so i went down the calculators rabbit hole… and got an used ti-86 from 1999 off ebay for 35 euros (this was in 2007 or so).
I programmed software to solve exercises in ti-basic and spent every lesson doing essentially software testing: basically whenever a classmate was called to the blackboard to solve an exercise I’d input the exercise data and verified I got the right results.
I got 9.5 out of 10 to the immediate next test. The teacher took off half a point because i miscopied a number (0.3 rather than 0.03, i still remember that after almost 20 years). It would have otherwise been a perfect test.
Fun times.
I still have that calculator, i turn it on every now and then.
I remember naming that calculator “Annarita”, like a girl I used to like and that (of course, lol) barely knew I existed at all.
My TI-85 story involves the fact that it only had 2D plotting (though I think newer models such as the TI-89 had 3D).
I had a 3D calculus class so I wrote a program in it to plot a 3D isometric mesh of a surface using the 2D rendering library. It was slow but got the job done. I used it to help pass a test or two.
I also experimented with drawing random surfaces and objects like a tire. They looked pretty cool for a calculator screen.
The math lab at the college had a cable which you could use to take data off or put it on so you could in theory have exchanged programs with others but this was before the internet so I didn't.
I still have mine and enjoy the sliding the cover off - a trip down memory lane.
Later I rewrote the program in QBasic on a PC for fun and it was lightning fast!
About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this story. Then last year I found a Ti84 in my parents attic...
My dad got a free palm pilot m125 or something and I used a ti/HP calculator emulator on it since my parents thought buying a $99+ calculator was too expensive. fun writing apps in basic for that thing and the games for it were the best mobile ones. I did envy people with Mario and drug wars on their calculators though.
Must have been closer to 20 years, 84(+) didn't come out until 2004.
Gonna be pedantic/crotchety about this because I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+). Guess who's the engineer now, and who's the NEET? Your kids pay attention to what (who) you value, folks.
Genuinely not sure. Are you the brother that spited your family with a successful career or the one whose life was was doomed by a graphing calculator.
> I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+)
I had a TI-85 (maybe 86), unlike the entire rest of my school who had 83s.
There was a difference: when programming in TI-Basic, variable names on a TI-83 are limited to a single character. On the 85, you can make them longer.
But that was pretty much the only difference, and it will never come up if you're using the calculator for school-related reasons.
(For calculus, I had an 89. The differences are much more significant there.)
The TI-85 also didn't have a lot of the built-in statistical functions that the TI-83 had.
I also was the one person with a TI-85 in a school of 83s. But by the time I took the statistics class I knew enough BASIC to write my own programs to replicate the functionality that was missing.
I was a self taught TI-Basic programmer and ran into the 26 variable limit on a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote. I ended up breaking it into 3 programs so I had enough variables. Programs could invoke other programs so I could navigate between states.
I don't remember there being much of a difference between the 83 and 84. Did you care about the amount of memory or the clock speed of the processor? Or was it more of a status thing.
NEET means "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The stereotype is an unemployed young adult living with their parents and playing video games all day.
I had a Casio as well because, IIRC, it was the only thing the shop had. Eventually I had to also get a TI because it allowed using imaginary numbers in a matrix operation. Not that that was used in more than one course after all. But I grew to like it and even had an emulator for a long time on my first smart phone.
But yeah, Casio was definitely more friendly and polished in UI, but dumber. You could only use "wizard" type things and pseudo gui clickies while the ti was crude and text-heavy but let you enter just about anything anywhere and seemed more symbol and language oriented. Which one was nicer in use? I guess it would depend on how much of that language you could memorize. Or browse a cheat sheet for.
I have a happy story about Casio and college. I started college with a very limited TI-55 calculator: 51 steps and no conditional branching. The rich kids got HP-41 calculators, the average ones got programmable Casios. I got a Casio PB-700, programmable in BASIC.
Best gift ever. I could finish all numeric methods tests in a fraction of the time it took for others to use or program the ordinary calculators. It was a huge qualitative leap.
Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
On 9 July 1537, Martin Luther wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Capito about a lost golden ring: "Pro annulo aureo gratias tibi agit mea Catharina, quam vix unquam magis indignatam vidi, quam ubi sensit, cum vel furto sublatum, vel sua negligentia (quod nec mihi verisimile est, licet usque ingerenti) amissum, quod persuaseram ei, hoc donum esse felix omen et augurium ei missum, tanquam nunc certum esset, vestram Ecclesiam cum nostra suaviter concordare; id mire dolet mulieri."[1]
When Luther's house in Wittenberg was excavated about 20 years ago, a golden ring[2] was found that must have been deposited there before 1540. It is therefore quite likely that this is the ring mentioned by Luther in 1537.
My Catherine thanks you for the golden ring, whom I have hardly ever seen more indignant than when she realized that it had been stolen or lost through her own negligence (which is not likely for me, although I still insist on it), which I had persuaded her that this gift was a happy omen and augury sent to her, as if it were now certain that your Church would agree pleasantly with ours; this grieves the woman wonderfully.
My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.
The ground pin, when "up", is higher than the hot, so in certain situations it can prevent something from shorting the hot and neutral. Code (?) or convention requires it if you have a metal faceplate, and hospitals require it. People generally like them mounted ground down because then they look like little faces. :-)
Wouldn't it short hot and ground then, and still turn the necklace into a short-lived fuse?
The more practical reason to mount ground down is that wall warts with ground pins or polarized prongs nearly universally arrange them so that they're hanging down when inserted into a ground-down plug. If the plug's flipped, the wall wart's upside down and its weight is trying to lever it out of the wall.
Yes, in that case it would short hot and ground, which is effectively the same and hot and neutral, since at the main panel hot and ground are bounded together. But if it were, say, a metal credit card or something rigid, it might just fall on the ground, or could hit the ground and neutral.
> 3x Processing Power - Matching one of the speculated options, the calculator appears to use an ARM Cortex CPU, finally retiring the z80 and ez80 family of CPUs that were used in three decades of TI-83 and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. It's running at 156MHz, compared to the 48MHz of the older calculators. It appears likely that in an unexpected break from over 30 years of TI's operating system codebase, the OS has been re-implemented with new features natively on the ARM CPU rather than using an ez80 emulator to run an updated form of the TI-84 Plus CE operating system.
It looks like TI is finally moving away from the Z80. This must have been a pretty big engineering effort on TI's part. Like the article says, up to this point all of TI's low-end graphing calculators have been Z80 based and use the same system software that has a lineage dating back to the early 1990s. They were previously so wedded to the Z80 that when they introduced Python programming to their calculators, they did so by adding an ARM microcontroller that runs MicroPython, while the main eZ80 CPU acts as a serial terminal.
Much nostalgia. The TI-83 Z80 was how I learned assembly as a teenager, so I could write better calculator games than was possible with TI Basic. Many others here had a similar experience, I’m sure. It’s been a couple decades, but I’m sure I’d still remember most of it if you put me down in front of a bunch of Z80 asm code.
One thing that I remember vividly was you had no MUL or DIV, so you have to implement them yourself with shifts, adds, subtraction, etc. This was an extremely useful learning experience
Same story here (basic was too slow for a phoenix/movable-ship-shooter game).
Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM? I looked at some old ASM I wrote long ago, and it's hard to follow the logic of the program, since most lines are messing around with the registers. But basics like 'ld hl,xyz' and 'jp/jnz' still make sense.
> Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM?
I find when you learn things at 15 they tend to stick around. (Stuff I learned last week, not so much!) Even just looking at your example, I remembered that HL is a 16 bit register and you can split it into two 8 bit registers H and L if you want. I think most of it would come back; I wrote quite a lot of it, both for the TI-83 and later for a Z80 that I bought and put on a breadboard and wired up to some RAM and EEPROM, about as bare metal as it gets.
> most lines are messing around with the registers
I learned much of what I know about computer and low-level systems engineering from Minecraft. Watched lots of videos making CPUs and built many components myself including a full ALU with a look-ahead adder and hardware multiplication.
Fun memory trip. Learned assembly on those old Z80s in middle school. I had to go re-dig up SafeGuard, a program I made by reverse engineering TI's TestGuard, to stop admins from wiping your calculator memory and all your games! https://mikeknoop.com/upload/safeguard/
Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only. For the educational market, this "security" is a selling point. It guarantees that a student isn't running unauthorized code or "cheating" apps. It also likely allows OTA auditing of the classroom's state.
> Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only.
This is substantially inaccurate.
1) Not all ARM Cortex series CPUs have TrustZone. It is absent on many Cortex-M microcontrollers, for example.
2) TrustZone is an operating mode of the CPU, not an "admin processor". Depending on the part, it is often made accessible to developers. (Whether that includes third-party software developers is, of course, up to the device manufacturer.)
There’s a discussion to be had on the absolutism of technology for decisions or security, and the slow erosion of a certain intangible “discretionary” element in day-to-day life.
We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable!
But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.
Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.
I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist.
I eventually figured out python too!
I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.
Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.
It wasn't the first time I programmed but it was first time I encountered problem solving with code.
I'm not one those (very admirable) people who build just to build, who make their own version of frogger or something. I need a problem to solve.
But making a program that would take the parameters of a physics problem and spit out all the other quantities or that formatted output the way my stats teacher wanted it was a huge timesaver and that motivated me.
In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.
I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.
We made multi-player games over the link cables in the early 1990s. We certainly learned a ton from building those. It's not clear how much the calculators added to the math and chemistry classes where we were supposed to use them.
It’s not that the calculator was more than what students need, it’s that even for what it was the TI83/84 was way overpriced. It could have been like $20 at the scale they were produced.
Current smartphones are highly optimized for content consumption a.k.a doom scrolling. Nothing serious exists for programming. On top of that, a touch keyboard and hard to reach special characters make programming on a modern smartphone a big chore. I miss the old days of smartphones that had a hardware keyboard with tactile feedback. I used to code up and maintain a PHP based dynamic website circa 2007 with a Sony Ericsson K770i and upload through a J2ME based FTP client that also had the text editor in it. If I remember it correctly it was called MobyExplorer
Not sure I agree. You can "blind type" on a physical keyboard, and even if it has less sophistication in the way of inputting large amounts of text (lack of auto complete, lack of fuzzy typing/auto correct), a calculator is purpose built with tons of shortcuts and contextual menus that you access from muscle memory without second guessing yourself. Right now, if I've got a mildly complicated mathematical expression to type, I'd rather do it on a last-century calculator rather than e.g. on Android's GeoGebra.
I did, in Java 2ME for my Nokia. That was a completely different experience and much harder to get going. I did make a color 2D game though in about a week.
The TI-200 was much more accessible and fun, creating small little programs during or after class. Only once you wanted to go assembly did it become a chore again.
I don't have a favorite. I do not feel like anyone that I am aware of has made proper investment to make a quality development app for mobile due to the low market demand. While development is better than on a calculator I think they are below my expectations.
I like Codea for iOS, though the free version has a soft-limit at 500 lines. If a project gets bigger than 500 lines you can still run code but it'll nag you to upgrade.
You're paying $100 for completely antiquated hardware where its core feature is "it doesn't do much".
Pretty much any professional environment that you will need calculations will have access to a computer that can do these calculations significantly faster and better.
I thought my HP was pretty cool in high school, but pretty much the moment I graduated I stopped using it because I figured out how to use Excel and/or a programming language to do number crunchy stuff. Even for CAS stuff, I would just use Wolfram Alpha or SageMath (depending on how ambitious I'm feeling with setting stuff up).
I can't remember the last time I used a calculator outside of showing someone else how to use it.
Well I'd add to that - the real core feature is that the teacher and usually the textbook show you exactly how to use it, that's why it gets listed specifically as a course requirement.
That unfortunately is also why they can charge so much and people buy them anyway, because at best you'll be on your own to learn how to use anything else (and at worst you won't be allowed to use it at all for tests and such).
There are many professional examples outside of teaching (construction, lab based science, field work, engineering, healthcare, retail) where a calculator, not necessary a programmable one, is useful because the environment restricts the use of computers due to safety, security or practicalities.
My buddy was a general contractor. They have books of pre-printed calculators for common beam lengths. For instance, say you have a room 30 feet wide and you're putting a roof on it with a 30 degree pitch. The book will tell you exactly how long to cut the roof timbers so that they reach from the edge of the wall to the crest of the roof.
Said friend was at a site and someone had misplaced the book. He pulled out a calculator and did some basic trig to give them the lengths and told them to get back to work. He said they were looking at him like he'd just conjured a demon or something. "You can... just calculate that?" "How did you think they made the book?" "But how'd you learn to do that?" "In that math class you dropped in high school."
Yeah I guess I should correct and say that I do use an HP 50G emulator on my iPhone cuz I like RPN.
But even still, the iPhone can do many things and is many times more capable, and you can buy a used iPhone 12 that works fine for about the same price as one of these calculators.
Also, one of the major (unique?) UX innovations of the physical HP48 (c. 1990) was that it could beam apps and data to other calculators over serial IR or RS-232 with a computer. (A DIY computer interface cable could be fashioned from Sony CD-ROM analog audio cable.) Furthermore, the IR LED on the HP48G(X) was so bright, it could be software-controlled as a very long range TV universal remote, and there was a learning universal remote app that could learn codes from physical remotes by reading from the IR receiver. It would take fast and ubiquitous wireless networking (WiFi, BT, and cellular) c. 2003 before the app store concept would arrive generally for smartphones and other devices.
I distinctly remember my teachers having a debate around whether or not the functions I had programmed into my calculator were "cheating". On one hand, it was a tool and notes that I had access to my peers did not. On the other hand, I had created those tools myself, and if school was supposed to train me for the real world, wouldn't I be able to use the tools I created in the real world?
I faced a similar issue with my teachers in high school - iirc I was able to argue that by programming the formulas, I was demonstrating an understanding of them. Being able to show that understanding in our testing was the concern from my teachers’ point of view.
Ha in my school's math department the cheating thesis won and my silly single variable CAS system (which in retrospect did nothing you couldn't do with the graph functions!) got calculator programs banned. Luckily enough my specific math teacher that year didn't care enough to enforce it and it was soon forgotten
Wow, there were actually principles behind the rules and they bothered to reason about them. That's way different than my experience with school teachers.
I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.
It's wild how much curricula within high schools must differ, because my school went out of its way to teach and encourage/require its use on nearly every quiz and exam. We joked sometimes class felt more like calculator class than math class. This was Texas, too, which I hardly consider a pioneer in education. Maybe TI pride?
Now that I think about it, this could have been a strategy my high school drilled into us as a way to increase SAT scores, since TI-84s were allowed to be used there.
Agreed, it's insane to me that in an era of Google Colab (et al) schools still require students to shell out >$100 for one of these. I'm sure there is some backroom arrangement with schools of some kind.
A lack of functionality is the point. You don't want a full CAS or Internet search results available, or many students will just take the easy route and not learn anything.
Neither teachers nor school districts have the time or resources to audit every new tool someone wants to use, or to help students figure out how to use their preferred tool to do something - find something that works and just use that
I had a cheap Casio fx calculator. It got me all the way through my exams in school and university. I had Mathematica at home.
While I can see that being very good on a TI-84 would help you complete exams faster and get better marks, is that a skill that we want students to learn? Being good on a fancy calculator is essentially useless in real life. In real life people use computers not fancy calculators.
IMO it's better to either allow only basic calculators, or to allow real mathematics software.
The ability to quickly graph functions and see them visually is an enormous aid to learning. Similarly, for various topics like statistics the ability to operate on a dataset is beneficial. Doing all of the raw arithmetic that goes into Chi Squared or whatever isn't particularly important for statistical analysis, and being able to get to the important bits faster is very beneficial.
Where to draw the line depends on the course. In general tools that "give the answer" for something where thinking provides insight are bad in education - for instance, a CAS which will simply compute derivatives isn't beneficial when taking Calculus. Things that eliminate grunt work not useful to that intuition - like computing the same formula 40 times to draw a graph by hand - are beneficial.
There’s no back room arrangement, beyond perhaps some amount of marketing from TI to math teachers. But nobody is getting a kickback to recommend the TI-84. Also, since so many people had to buy these things then stuck it in a drawer after a couple years, there’s a healthy supply of used ones on eBay and marketplace.
One perk I found is that if I kept it in RPN mode, people stopped asking to borrow my calculator, which was a valid excuse to learn how to use RPN, which is basically all I use now (and indirectly made me really love the Forth language).
Mine was a Casio fx-something. Teachers didn't like it but it didn't let me cheat and it was just the right amount of functionality to help me with math. Carried me through Pre-Cal, Trig, Calculus and Differential Equations.
That was my first graphing calculator in high school, because it was way cheaper than the equivalent TI. Like seriously 1/4 the price for "beginning of the school year" sales.
That thing was fine, and if I hadn't dropped it and broken it, I probably would have kept using it for the rest of high school. I eventually replaced it with an HP.
30 years ago, we had the option of the TI-82 Or (83?) and the 85. A bunch of the kids with the 85 were playing Tetris and some were writing little programs. I got the cheaper 82/83, and I don't actually remember using it for anything, even once, even though I did the IB track (stats, trig, algebra, calculus, etc).
I was in the not-TI-85 club for a while. I think I had the TI-84? You could still write programs but your variable names could only be one letter. When I upgraded to a TI-85 and got Tetris a friend who had the not-TI-85 asked if his could play Tetris. I checked out the Tetris code and saw there were less than 26 variables, so I figured it could be done. I spent several English class periods porting the TI-85 Tetris code to the not-TI-85 and I got it to work. All the not-TI-85 owners loved me, lol!
Back in the mid-90's we had a TI version of sneakernet where you would copy programs from one student on to your TI-85 via a link cable; this is how I got Tetris back in the day. I assume OP did the same.
IIRC there was a way to connect the TI-85 to your serial port and use some Windows or DOS software to copy files onto it. (Everyone's PC still had at least one serial port on it back then).
Was it that only the 85 could connect to a com port, but then you could connect the 85 to the 82/83? I seem to remember pleading with the one kid with an 85 (who didn't even care about games).
(Edit: I am assuming you were asking how it's possible I didn't use it, not how it's possible that people were copying programs onto their calculators.)
I don't know. It's been too long. We must have done graphing on paper.
I don't remember a lot of coursework in math that required me to produce a decimal value. For example, we wanted √2 instead of 1.414.
In physics, I think we used regular calculators.
I used to be bewildered at my parents not remembering certain things from high school. But, now I'm living it :).
Same. But I agree with the parent, I always got the vibe it was a giant racket between public schools and TI. Writing code for it was probably cool back in the 80s-90s but it's so dated now.
I don't know how the TI-85 compares to the other models without looking it up, but there's a forever soft spot in my heart for mine. It got me through a comp sci degree and still works flawlessly today.
>We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I suppose it depends if you took advanced math classes or not.
My high school required one for a math curriculum that was specifically designed with the idea that students would not need advanced math classes. It kids up for failure if they were hoping to move toward higher level math in college, as the fundamentals were never adequately taught. But at least they sold thousands of calculators to kids who would never use them again.
They actually started us on them in 7th or 8th grade.
This is probably right, but just to note that it's very much a generational thing. When I got a TI-83 (and then eventually an 89!) it was easily the most advanced handheld computing hardware I had ever been exposed to. The iPhone made sense to me, and I knew it would be huge, the day it came out because of these amazing calculators.
I know technology has moved on and all, but much nostalgic respect to these amazing calculators.
TI-86 is the one in my case. We had to buy it in high school, and I used it so much in high school and in university after (I still have it in a box), that it's the only calculator I've since used. I absolutely have to have a TI emulator on my phone, and have paid for multiple ones along the years.
I use my emulated TI-86 every other day, and prefer it to any other UI I've seen on calculators on phones.
When I have a laptop available, I of course use excel or wolfram alpha for anything demanding, but when on the go, I like my emulated TI-86.
Definitely. At the very least, given the slow change in which ones are accepted, a cheap rental setup seems like the baseline that should exist... but everyone had to buy their own for my schools.
I got a ton of value out of mine... but I graduated in 2011, when smartphones were only just taking off and relatively few people had them yet.
But my wife is also a high school teacher and one of the most consistent problems I hear about from her is smartphones being a distraction. If she lets a kid use their smartphone as a calculator, odds are they'll soon be scrolling content feeds, playing games, or chatting with others. If her school required students to have a graphing calculator with limited functionality, it would probably be a benefit to her classroom.
TI is like the Intuit of the education world. I want to love them but this is ridiculous - a N4120 celeron laptop is the same price as this new calculator - it might be a garbage laptop but it's doing a heck of a lot more for your $160 than this calculator is.
Well, the TI-83/84 are called a graphing calculators for a reason: you can plot equations and datasets with them and look at them right there[1]. Looking at graphs is huge for learning, or at least it was for me, and school isn't just about plugging things in and getting an answer (or shouldn't be, at least).
Doesn't mean it's not overpriced, but that's one reason and you can get a used TI-83/84 for like $30 or less. They pretty much never break.
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1. Okay, the Casio can QR-code-link you to a graph, but if I have internet/smartphone there are better graphing tools anyway, like Desmos.
I mean a laptop running windows can use the old power toy calculator or something like speed crunch to do graphing and I'm sure Linux has countless others, with Chromebooks probably having more for free online as well, I can only assume.
A graphing calculator is a fraction of the cost, has no security updates, is standardized, isn't connected to the internet, ... There is value in a thing that does one thing well.
Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.
If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):
I agree with you on the Casio fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition. I picked one up two years ago for $11.41. It naturally writes out equations, has a backspace and is generally excellent. I still love my HP RPN calculators, but the fx-115ES works nicely for anyone who isn't using RPN or sympy.
International Baccalaureate math has some stats questions that require a calculator that can do stats questions. Not really possible by hand in exam conditions!
My Casio FX-260 Solar IIs [1][2] (I recently bought 3 more of them) cost me $5 CAD a piece on clearance at Walmart. No battery, a modern solar panel that works great even in dimly lit rooms, and a modern SOC with all the standard scientific calculations, scientific notation, engineering notation, significant figures, and all the basic stats calculations too (sum, mean, pop stddev, sample stddev, permutations, combinations, factorials).
It’s my favourite calculator and the one I always reach for, despite having a bunch of more complicated 2-line calculators etc. It’s just so easy to use and very fast to do anything I’d want with a calculator. If I need graphing I’ll reach for Desmos. If I need algebra I’ll use Sage. I haven’t used Sage since my undergrad, however.
The basic $12 Casio scientific has stats like mean, standard deviation, regression... Stats is a huge field, we're talking highschool level. I think it probably covers it
Oh that’s neat! Probably should’ve checked your link. Not sure what the advantage of the Ti-84 would be for highschool math, but the UX on NumWorks calculators is completely a game changer, especially with stats and graphing questions.
Maybe everything is possible on the Casio, but it’s so much clearer on the NumWorks (especially for eg. Physics questions, where you might want to retrieve values you calculated earlier with full precision, etc). Genuinely felt like a cheat code when I was in highschool. I showed mine to my teacher and they swapped the whole’s schools standard calculators from the Ti-84 CE to the NumWorks, which is cheaper too.
There is no graphing problem that you'll be asked to solve before university that can't be plotted to a 'good enough for high school' level by hand in seconds.
Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.)
If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.
Life is not all about solving problems, high school life even less so.
Personally, I found great enjoyment in coming up with more and more involved plots in the Polar and Parametric modes, where yes I would predict what a graph would look like and then go over to see it. And then go back and iterate. Etc. Until I was painting pictures with functions and had a far greater understanding of the domain than I’d wager anyone who thinks graphing calculations are for finding roots of polynomials could imagine.
This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator. Besides, it is expected that a student can use a graphing calculator to be able to numerically solve for a root of arbitrary polynomial equation.
> This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator
It is not nonsense. I'll draft an example.
Any second degree polynomial is a parabola that is either pointing up (positive a term), or down (negative a term). That term is an indication of how curved it is.
-b/2a is the X coordinate of the parabola's inflection point.
Plug that value into the equation and it'll give you the Y coordinate.
You now know the inflection point of the parabola, you know which way it points, and how steep it is, and exactly where the polynomial's roots should live (and whether or not it has any real ones!). If you remember what the squares of 0.5, 1, and 2 are, you can now connect the dots on a 'pretty good' plot.
This took yuo longer to read than it takes to do.
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Similar transformations can be applied to sine waves, root functions, exponentials, logarithms, and reciprocals.
If you can't do this, or don't understand how to do this, you have not learned and understood the material. If all you've learnt is how to plug the formula into a magic $160 box to look at the pretty picture, and how to ask it to solve for roots, you and your teachers have wasted your time. The point of all this isn't looking at plots, the point is understanding how you can manipulate these equations, and what these manipulations do to them. This should all be drilled to the point of being intuitive.
Anything so complicated that basic algebraic manipulations won't get you the rough shape in seconds of work... Is more complicated than a high schooler is taught to solve.
> Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS
There isn't one.
The TI-83 is just a $160 tax on every high school student. There is precisely zero use in a graphing calculator before university.
If you ever need a plot of literally any function you'd be plotting in high school, you should be able to do a very quick, very rough approximation by hand. If you can't, you haven't learned the material.
Graduated high school in 1984, I don't think graphing calculators existed then but if they did nobody had them. Standard "scientific" calculators were what I used for all my high school and university math.
Ironically builtin smartphone calculators are really bad, and one of the best ones you can download might be Graph 89 (a TI-89 emulator).
Rant/Aside: Smartphones (or at least Android) are just generally really bad at being... smart, especially out of the box. No dictionary? No thesaurus? To say nothing of built-in encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). Calculator worse than the $1 scientific ones? It's astounding how obvious it is that they're meant to dumb people down and just sell you crap when you look at the complete absence of basic functionality anyone from 50+ years ago might expect them to have.
>kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?
Many tests will not allow you to use a smartphone. My son couldn't even use the school issued chromebook on his PSAT, he had to get a loaner Windows laptop or use an approved hard calculator.
I'm with you. Some open source app is all they need.
However to answer your question: phone rules in classrooms vary enormously and the dedicated calculator is faster to interface when you're drilling problems in a homework setting
I finished highschool in the (gasp) 20th century so the modern classroom is certainly something I've had to learn
* I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules
* I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming
My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat.
My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front.
The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs.
Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!
Our study hall in Junior High would wipe your calculator as you signed in to ensure you weren't playing games, god forbid. I would claim not to have my calculator, and often not do my math homework in study hall just to avoid getting my calculator wiped.
My experience is not much different then what you listed, except I discussed programming with my math teacher. She said as long as I was the one who programmed it, and that I didn’t share the program with anyone else, the I could use it.
Looking back on that experience, I’m very grateful to her, but she also probably didn’t realize I was programming it to also show the individual ‘steps’ to get the solution instead of just the solution.
Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.
Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college.
I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.
CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
They let you write python programs as long as it’s from memory though. I wonder what the code golf looks like for a rudimentary python CAS. If you could evaluate the equation without needing to parse it, I bet you could get a lot of mileage out of a black box gradient decent routine. The analog circuit solver I wrote for my nSpire (without CAS) was ~11kB. https://github.com/deckar01/pylacc
Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom".
When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator.
Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
That rules out classes of problem which we want to teach, or falls back to using lookup tables which is more arduous and limits the number of problems which can be put on an exam.
Teaching students to use lookup tables at all is a largely pointless exercise. Teaching students to graph or use statistical functions on an advanced calculator transfers very well to other environments.
> That rules out classes of problem which we want to teach
Does it? Could you give a contrived example of a high school problem that would be ruled out by a lack of a graphing calculator?
> Teaching students to graph
They should be able to plot any of the functions they'll be working with by hand, very quickly.
> statistical functions
If they are using statistics, they should be able to provide the relevant combinatorial coefficients as the answer (xCy, etc), without actually doing the computation.
Not to mention that scientific calculators all support basic stats functions.
You've already rejected elsewhere in the comments the style of problem these calculators are used for as either "more complicated than a high schooler is taught" or a "your teachers have wasted your time".
Which is fine, you have an idiosyncratic view of modern mathematical pedagogy (at least as it exists in the US). When you're a high school math teacher you can argue with your state dept. of ed. about it.
These calculators are also used at the undergrad level, fwiw, so the "high school level" (whatever limit you're putting on that, many high schools will accelerate students into undergrad stats and as far as Calc II), is not a factor in their use overall.
My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students.
Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out.
All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps.
I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to beat a large screen and full keyboard.
"Approved for Exams" make more sense when you take into account the history of the Ti family of calculators.
Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."
It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.
tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes
however:
- this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online)
- you have less muscle memory and often take longer
- harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction
- trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem
- some specific functions just don't exist
essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both.
this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question
ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though
Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
I am from an xUSSR country. And started school shortly after the dissolution. Not only calculators were forbidden in exams, they were forbidden in classes. So calculators in school seems so strange to me.
In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0].
One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.)
I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints.
I just put up with TiLP which I somehow figured out how to build on macOS. I think I still have cruft from that attempt on my machine years later somewhere
I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators.
For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps.
I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all.
Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program).
This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".
What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
Or are we all just using software on our computers now.
That would be sad.
(I've had a Casio fx-991EX on my desk for a few years, that replaced a broken Casio fx-991ES. Though designed for academia, its operation is burned into my brain at this point.)
I collect HP calculators: I have an HP 12C, an HP 15C Collector's Edition (there are a few of them left still for sale), an HP 32Sii, and an HP 48SX. I sometimes use them, but whenever I'm in front of a computer (which is almost all the time), I find myself using the Unix dc command.
Handheld calculators are nice, but outside of exam settings, I could use a smartphone or a computer, though calculators are nice when I want to work distraction-free through something that requires performing calculations. I believe this is why HP largely exited the calculator market: HP's target market was professionals, and cheap computers and smartphones killed the calculator market for them, similar to how electronic calculators killed the slide rule. Texas Instruments, however, is still in the calculator business, largely due to their successful courting of American middle and high schools, as well as ETS and other testing agencies, beginning in the 1990s. I don't know the situation in Japan regarding calculator usage, but I see Casio scientific and graphing calculators proudly displayed at electronics stores such as Yodobashi Camera and Bic Camera.
HP-35 (1972, first scientific, first in space) - in leather case
TI-30 (1976, first low-cost scientific)
HP-12C (1981, financial, c. 2000 remanufacture)
HP-15C (1982, advanced scientific) - in leather slipcase
HP-16C (1982, computer programming) - in leather slipcase with manual
TI-30 SLR (1982, TI’s first solar-powered scientific)
HP-17B II (1990, financial)
TI-85 (1992, TI’s first with link port)
TI-82 (1993)
TI-92 (1995, TI’s first with computer algebra system)
I use the HP-16C pretty regularly when I'm working on network protocol programming. I have good apps that do it, but there's something about having the calculator right in front of my keyboard rest and turning to it that I like more. In a pinch or outside the house I'll use JPRN instead.
I use emu48 on my phone emulating the HP-50g, which was almost exactly the same size as the phone so my muscle memory somewhat carries over (minus the tactile feedback of a real keyboard). I still have the physical calculator on my desk at home, with no batteries in it so it's only usable within reach of its USB cable.
Anything that goes beyond what that calculator's UI can reasonably handle is going to end up in a Jupyter notebook or something like that.
Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses.
> What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
I still have my TI-85, but I essentially haven't used it since I left college. For 99% of what I need, I use either Python, or what's built into Firefox (e.g. unit conversion), or DDG. For that last 1% (e.g. full CAS functionality), I tend to grab whatever web-based non-AI tool is handy.
The most common way for me to do basic arithmetic is by opening up a Python shell and using it as a calculator. This is what I typically do when I go through my finances every few months and calculate prices for things.
honestly, I think it makes no sense to spend more than 30$ on a calculator if it can't do symbolic math.
The way you input things like division, integrals, matrix, etc. on newer calculators like the nspire is far superior than the older calculators (eg. ti-84, ti-89, etc.). They look like how you write them on a blackboard instead of relying on purely parentheses or "," and ";" to separate parameters. It's like going from Excel to Mathcad
If I’m reaching for calculator, I’m reaching for my phone.
At that point I’m either using the stock iOS calculator or iHP48, HP48 clone.
It mostly depends on which page of apps I’m on and which is closest.
I like the unit conversion on the iOS calculator, easier to use for trivial calcs than the HP.
Biggest gripe on iOS is a single memory. On the HP I’m mostly hooked on the infinite stack, and that’s why I use it over the HP-42 clone app I have as well.
I used to keep my old TI-82 (or was it -84?) from high school and a simpler sturdy solar-powered calculator near my desk, but I realized I always just used either my computer (IRB in the terminal usually) or Apple's calculator app on my phone and never ever touched my physical calculators. So they've now been put in storage.
I still use my TI-89 from high school, but I'm interested to find if there are any open hardware/firmware calculator projects with basic engineering tools and a CAS.
> The keypad layout removes clutter and makes commands and shortcuts easier to see, so you can work faster with fewer steps.
I don't see it. I compared a screenshot of one of these to a older T-84, and it looks like they have same number of buttons, and the buttons are just as cluttered (except the EVO has secondary labels on the keycaps instead of the case).
That's a good thing, since one of the best things about calculators is they typically have a ton of buttons for quick access to a lot of functions.
On my favorite designs ever? The first TI-Nspire "battleship" keyboard. Mini alpha-symbol keys in the corners of actual keys. It looked so annoying, but my muscle memory got very good at it.
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.
I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.
Personally, I don't think I have much benefit in a new generation TI-84. I still own a TI-85, a model that was discontinued before I was born, and it is still an objectively superior tool for doing small calculations than any other alternative.
For instance, we compare the phone calculator. My phone fills a lot of really important roles besides being a calculator, ones that necessitate a password. So first I have to unlock my phone. Then I have to leave whatever app I had open before. Then I need to find the damn calculator app.
That's 5-6 seconds of friction, depending on how responsive my phone feels like being and how many times I fatfinger my password because the concept of "muscle memory" on a touch screen is practically an oxymoron. Not to mention, you cant just walk away from the desk for a moment with the calculator app left open on your phone, ready to come back at a moments notice, like you can with a dedicated calculator. Phones are just too important for that.
There's arguable pros and cons to using your PC over a calculator, but I think that discussion is a lot more nuanced. Either way, a PC is definitely less portable than your phone or a calculator.
Maybe I'll be convinced to upgrade at whatever point they add usb-c and a rechargeable battery to their lowest trim model. Not before that though.
I don't know either what they meant, but for comparison NumWorks calculators are clocked at 216 MHz (100 MHz for the older models, and 550 MHz for some of the latest ones, but not everywhere), so it doesn't look that much out of the ordinary, maybe a little underpowered from my experience with the first NumWorks but eh idk it's a calculator and unlike the first NumWorks they don't try to do CAS.
I'm not an expert in this department but I wonder if battery life is a factor here. My Ti-84+ has not fully died once since I was in middle school (as a college graduate now). It can survive an entire year out of use and would still have a usable charge when I would pick it back up for a new math class.
Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.
Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.
Electronics engineer here. I use my HP Prime G2 daily in the lab for basic things as well as quickly calculating complicated stuff, since you can pretty much program it to do whatever you want.
You might say why not use Python or Matlab?! It‘s true that you don‘t need a small handheld device to do engineering calculations where there is a ton of other much stronger and free options out there. But the thing is, a calculator is a pure dedication to one thing. You turn it on, you do your calculation, get the answer and move on. It gets out of your way. Plus it is a better feeling to type stuff using the dedicated buttons in a calculator than using a keyboard.
These have been standard equipment (that you buy, or the school loans out) in middle-class US high school math since the 90's (and gone basically unchanged since then). The math books even have content tailored to particular models so that you'll have to buy them instead of alternatives from other vendors.
IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.
Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles.
At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).
Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind.
But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.
In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do.
I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.
Why do you need an online calculator subscription? I can kind of get why you want a physical calculator, especially for a school environment, but why would you want a calculator online when you can just use... the rest of the web?
The comments on this are fascinating. Although, I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN."
2 dinners out for a family of four would cover the cost of this calculator. If my kid's school required this for math, I wouldn't bat an eye at purchasing one.
I needed a Ti-83 for school in 1996-1998. If you couldn't afford one, the school would loan you one for the semester. Band instruments were the same way.
I have 2 Swiss Micros and a pile of sapphire-chip designed-in-Corvallis USA-made HPs. The DM41x is pure joy in the hand. But I still texted the pink TI-84 EVO to my 16-year-old daughter because she doesn't like my stodgy TI-84 CE Plus (which I love).
I bought a DM42n last year. I didn't need it. I don't use it so often that I can justify its purchase. Still, wow, I do so enjoy working with it. It's one of those tools that just feels good to use.
I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school).
That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base.
Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI.
There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day
The Python inclusion is fascinating to me. I, like many other kids in the US, did a lot of calculator programming with the TI-84 back in school. It definitely taught me the basics in a way that made my CS classes much easier. I'm jealous of the kids who now get to make that journey with Python instead of TI-Basic.
It's a beautiful device so much that hacker inside me wants to poke into what CPU they have and design a similar one in Verilog myself then put it on FPGA with similar display and it's driver then a 3D printed case and keys too.
I learned to program on a TI-83 and later bought a TI-84+ with the cable that allowed me to transfer my apps and games between my device and other students devices. I have fond memories of hand typing into a TI-83 BASIC for hours using code I found online at the local library - games like Drug Wars and other similar choose this or that console based games. I would later get a USB cable that allowed me to download apps and games onto my device. Good times. Decades later and I'm still programming.
156MHz and 3,5MB user memory... Why do I feel like that is a joke these days.. I think some ESP32s are faster and have more memory, but not sure if they are fully comparable...
I briefly laughed out loud at another comment saying their lightbulb has more computing power than that, because that's completely plausible for a wifi bulb today.
TI calculators peaked with TI-89/92/v200. Functionality, low latency UX, long battery life. These are still readily available in the second hand market, at very reasonable pricing (thanks to them selling well back then).
Unfortunately, ever since, they seem to have decided to imitate smartphones and focus on making restricted devices for exam taking, rather than tools to empower the user.
I do have fond memories of my TI-82 (we couldn't afford the fancier 84 or 89). I wonder, though, after all these years did Texas Instruments corner the market and obtain an monopoly on allowed calculators for proctored tests or ... because it sure is a shame there's not competition here driving the cost of these things down and the features way up.
I'm an HP-12C guy since working on a trading desk and have 2 of the OG bronze colored ones and 2 of the HP-12C Platinum that are faster and silvery. But since I've been re-learning math with Math Academy I'm drawn to pick this puppy up. Should I be looking at an HP equivalent, though, since I'm an RPN convert?
I'll take my father's HP 49g to my grave.
but if TI wanted to flirt with me, all it would take is a setting to enable Reverse Polish Notation. (I did check the features, and no mention).
This has me pining for a future professional class CAS 3d graphing calculator.
I'm thinking something that could be a major upgrade in spirit to the long-in-the-tooth (released a decade ago) Casio FX-CG500.
Could use the soon to be released ARM C-1 Nano and Pro cores in an SoC with stacked 2GB LPDDR4, USB-C charging to a large battery, high-res transflective LCD...
The $0.03 LED, $0.04 diffuser panel and the extra 3 cents for manufacturing keys with transparency will eat into their 93% profit margin. Can't have that. The children will just have to use a desk light.
A TI-83 was about $100 in the year 2000, and it doesn't look like it's that much cheaper today. I would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging their very captive market.
But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001.
TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones.
FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.
Shrug. The SAT and ACT don't let you use an iPhone on their exams. $160 is what the market will bear. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and perhaps there's a market for a much cheaper competitor to beat TI here.
You can use any calculator that meets the restrictions for things like the SAT.
However.
The entire year, your textbooks, your teacher, your in-class practice, was walking you through the specific commands you need to select to actually do the things, like graphing and solving.
If little Timmy is unable to read the manual about how to do math he doesn't yet know with whatever his specific calculator is, he is at a severe disadvantage, and the teacher basically cannot help him.
A friend in high school bucked the trend and used a casio in our TI based education, and did just fine for himself, but he was apparently a smart kid.
You previously acknowledged it's a "very captive market" that you "would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging" :) "$160 is what the very captive market will bear until the state-sanctioned gouging backfires" is a less compelling argument.
"Shrug" is kind of gross. Seems like you're being reflexively cynical.
Edit: to be clear the problem here is really local school boards being antidemocratic and unaccountable, not TI being greedy.
I didn't have a calculator until my senior year of highschool. But since we weren't alliwed to use them in tests, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
As an engineering student at CMU, I had an HP 15c like everyone else. A few years back when I found out they are coveted, I sold mine on ebay. I have an emulator on my phone.
I assume that calculators will continue to evolve and that my grandchildren will have a Propædeutic Enchiridion.
I used to doodle and make pixel art on my TI 84+ in high school. I'd spend entire classes just clicking left, right, up, down, and enter to move and toggle individual pixels with a simple program I'd written.
https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html
I use Qalculate! quite a lot (but for rather simple things). However, I miss the "physical" aspect of having real buttons. How woud this Ti-84 Evo compare ?
I love that the first thing I see in the website (at least on mobile) is "Approved for exams", as if there was some other reason one would be forced to buy those pieces of garbage.
My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it.
Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.
I find it interesting that TI still seems to use custom ASIC chips for their calculators.
Any MCU out of their portfolio should be fully capable of driving the display, reading the keyboard. And the math should be lightweight for even the smallest processors nowadays.
Looking at the price of this and other calculators, I wonder if there's a market for "dumb calculators" analogous to dumb terminals: a device with the calculator form factor, keyboard, and display, but where the actual computation happens on a paired computer/phone or a cloud endpoint over WiFi/Bluetooth.
The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.
How is the battery life? Rechargeable sure is nice, but the older models lasted forever on 4 AAAs (at least my TI-83). That's one aspect that would justify the low processing power for today's standards for portable computing devices.
I still have my TI-83 plus. It's been with me for 25 years now! I've always kept it on my desk, despite the fact that I engraved 'KoЯn' on cover when I was 13 or 14.
As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny
"Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction"
They clearly haven't met a classroom of high school kids. Then again... I didn't have access to the internet in my pocket when I was in high school so....
I have no idea how on earth a scientific calculator costs almost as much as a cheap android phone. Do they use oled and snapdragon soc these days?
Back in my school days a 20$ Casio seems more than enough.
I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.
There is something impressive about a product line that can remain culturally relevant for this long, even if part of that durability comes from a very protected niche.
Is there any information on exactly what kind of processor is inside this thing? Since running python I'm thinking it's actually a low end mobile processor.
3.5 MB is pretty generous, actually! Some older TI-84 models had MicroPython running on a secondary ATSAMD21 processor with 32 KB of RAM - that was effectively unusable.
I think those were aimed at different market segments. And that would be engineers, professionals and working academics that is not students.
Generally limitations in education on what was allowed led to more limited feature sets. Where as full feature set that could be upsold with qwerty keyboard was aimed for different users.
I don't have a prime, but agreed on 48gx + dm42n without a doubt.
I'd add the 50g as another contender, doesn't depend so much on external memory cards (which have the tendency to fail) and is fairly aligned with the 48/49 line.
I don't get it. Who is buying these calculators nowadays? It's expensive and any plot it can generate is 1 prompt away from the AI that students are already using. Also why is there a calculator license? what even is that?
My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years.
Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.
You're a hero of mine so here is my story.
Me in math class in 1996 - I had a TI-82 things are programmable so I have no formal education, my parents are illiterate, and taught myself to program, and I begged them to buy me one.
I spent time learning how to code on it, writing from scratch, the game Spyhunter.
I couldn't figure out how to draw with lines or pixels so I used ASCII or text.
I presented this to my teacher who told me "these aren't for games". I was crushed.
Seems like everyone has such a story about a teacher. „No you can’t read more advanced books because the current ones bore you“ etc etc
What is the matter with these people.
Makes me realize how lucky I was to have teachers who pushed me to actually excel in areas I was gifted in (and also pull me back in areas I was not gifted in :))
When I was in 7th grade I was getting 100% on all my math exams so my teacher had me test into 8th grade math (algebra). Then when I was a sophomore I was supposed to take precalc but my teacher thought I obviously didn't belong there either so she put me in her Calc AB class, which was the highest math class my school offered, but had me self-study for the Calc BC AP test during class time, taking her own time to sit down with me whenever I had questions.
A couple years later I TA'd for her precalc class and I spent most of my time in that class playing with my TI 8x (can't remember the exact model, maybe 84?) and programming very basic games on it. I showed her what I made and she was so impressed she said I should study computer science.
Guess what I did? Not that. I studied something completely different in college but now I've been a programmer for ten years and wonder why I ever doubted her at all.
Just goes to show how much impact a good teacher has on a student's life.
Some teachers, like many of us, have caveman emotions, live under near medieval systems and have access to god-like tech. (My version of a quote I read earlier this year.)
What could go wrong?
rigidity
Personally betting on the "crab bucket" mentality.
It's typical. They're supposed have authority and be better than you. That is the purpose of their position and their identity.
Don't be so quick to judge, because most people, including you would react the same way in similar contexts, for example if you were the top engineer at a company and someone started showing you up and being a hundred times better than you.
Not really? I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them. Some people are status driven. Some are not. Some are apparently pathologically status driven such that they'll compete with a literal child.
In any case refusing to nurture such a child (even in effectively passive ways like letting them quietly do something more advanced with no specific instruction) and not being reprimanded for it would reveal that the actual purpose of their position is daycare worker, which should be a bigger strike to the ego.
That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Now. That being said, the drive can be suppressed. But suppressing the drive doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and that you don’t feel it. Also many people feel the drive at different levels of intensity that much is true.
Anecdotally your response to me indicates to me that you have not suppressed status seeking drives completely. The key hints are you’re referring to how you’re drawn to people who do high quality work. That is orthogonal to status seeking. Your status and identity is tied to a certain type of work you do and you take pride in. Have you worked with anyone who was so powerful that their work invalidated, crushed and basically humiliated anything you did. And let’s say this person is not malicious. He’s just so much better than you that your work and identity is inconsequential and eclipsed by his work.
If you said that you wouldn’t feel anything in the face of that then I would say that you truly do not seek status. I would also say you’re not human.
That being said a teacher holds his identity as someone who is better than children. He needs to be better than children in order to transfer his betterment (aka knowledge) to children. His role in society and identity rests on that foundation. If children are better then him and know more than him then that is inadvertently an attack on his identity. His reaction is natural and expected. It’s not that he has anything against the child, it’s self protection mechanisms to protect his identity via deluding himself. Very typical.
You see much of the same stuff with LLMs and programmers. A huge portion of HN was in denial for the longest time about the capabilities of LLMs calling these things stochastic parrots and thinking it’s impossible for the AI to take over. HN was just completely wrong about that and they were also wrong about driverless cars. The reason why they were so wrong is not because they’re making a logical and rational prediction… no they are choosing the prediction that most aligns with protecting their identity and skill set as programmers which is in the process of being replaced by agentic ai.
Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.
To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it. Work is a means to provide, and it does well enough that I don't need to chase it anymore. Actually the marginal pay for the increased responsibility kind of doesn't make it worth it, but like I said I'll do it if they need that. And so my focus is generally thinking about "how do I get one of my team members in a place where they can replace me?"
If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.
Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.
On LLMs, I found them to be useless but interesting right up until December, at which point I started a hard push for my team to adopt it (and get excited about it). I'm very explicit that my mental framing with them is "how do I get it to do my job". I'm well aware that "programmer" per se is not going to be a job in the future. That much seemed obvious as far back as the original chatgpt release. That's fine, and just means we have to ask ourselves what else needs doing. If we ever get to the point where the answer is "nothing" then I guess we're all doing pretty well.
>Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.
Read carefully the part about science. Status seeking is inherit in biology... it's tied to serotonin levels in your blood. When you say you don't seek status it is not only false, it is unscientific. You're a liar or delusional. End of story. I can literally cite science around this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01378-2
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11275287/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1606800113
This tracks not only in humans, but across multiple species including the lobster. Status seeking is in built into biology and society. Saying you don't status seek is like saying you never felt the emotion of sadness or happiness. At your job, in society, the social hierarchies are everywhere and we are ALL wired to recognize and respond to these things and to SEEK it.
Additionally there is extremely high correlation with women and status. Men with the highest status tend to get the most women. And women are attracted to the men with the highest status. It's directly tied to sexual selection and evolution. Like... this isn't even just a measurable thing via serotonin... it's tied to the theory of evolution and anthropological origins of humans. You literally have no argument other than a pathetic attempt to counter science with anecdotal bullshit.
Saying you don't seek status is in itself status seeking. You're claiming to be holier than thou but it's all just bullshit status signaling because it flies in the face of scientific reality. I think you're more of a person who is unable to obtain status in the human social hierarchy... you're probably among the lowest of society so you might've just given up and called yourself a person who never felt the emotion to status seek. Understandable... but again not realistic.
Also when I say you're pathetically on the bottom of the barrel in terms of status. You shouldn't be offended... because you don't seek status... it's not intrinsic to your character.. You should feel nothing when I call you an utter social outcast with no status whatsoever.
>To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it.
Bro this is another form of status signaling. "Everyone wants me to be their manager but I don't care for it." lol. It might be true but then again it very well might not be since your statement is a bit braggy here. If you could share with me something people and society will find pathetic and shameful about you... that's more solid proof that you don't care about status. Something like, "Everyone hates me, I've tried to be manager all my life but nobody likes me." That's a more true signal of zero status seeking. But I don't see this in you at all.
To put it in perspective, I think I believe you don't actually want to be manager... but that has nothing to do with not caring for status. It's more likely you're balancing "status" with the extra responsibilities that come with higher status. You can't handle the price that needs to be paid to reach that level so you "settle". Again, very common. You maintain a baseline level of status high enough to keep your wife around (she will leave if your status goes low enough as your status is tied to your ability to raise your family) but it doesn't demand to much out of you. If status was given to you without cost... you would take it without hesitation because... again... you seek status, like all humans do.
>Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.
No. You're just someone who can't face reality. You have to talk about everything in idealist terms. If a teacher thinks all children are smarter, more educated or better than him, what identity does he have left? How is he even qualified to teach children? A teacher or any human does not think of his job as some selfless charity to society where he is at the utter whim of sacrificing himself for the class room. He has identity and gains status from the role as a "teacher" and that is a huge part of it. It's the same with being a doctor... if you think people become doctors solely just to save people and that it has nothing to do with status... you're out of touch with basic reality.
You not only fail to empathize from the teachers perspective but you succeeded in twisting your response into a direct attack on me. Manipulative. But pointless. This is just an internet forum... winning the crowd doesn't mean shit. This is one of the few opportunities you have to say things that are True and real with no affect on your status.
Anyway what I present is CLEARLY not a narcissistic concept. I am clearly not a narcissist and neither are you. It is a basic concept of basic intelligence. Something you're lacking.
>If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.
When I referred to humans I was more trying to illustrate how your claims don't make sense. Humans seek status period. End of story. If you don't seek status, you're not a human... you're an alien... you clearly aren't an alien... so you're clearly wrong. That was the point.
I'm talking from a hard scientific perspective. You're well outside of that right now and you're only thinking from the perspective of your family. But status seeking is still there, but it's more passed to the status of your children which is still inline with natural selection and biology.
You care for the status of your children, do you not? If your children grew up poor and homeless but extremely happy with their life style would you be content? Or do you care about the status of your children and not want them to grow up ending up in the lowest possible strata of status in human society?
You use research as an argument, which is valid in a conversation where nobody has any information about specifics. E.g. in the pre-life, before a soul is about to be incarnated, you can point to that research and say: you are more likely than not to behave this way. Were the soul to reply, “no I am not, I know myself”, you could call them delusional.
But you’re talking to a person who can point at their actual life and say: I have been in that exact situation and I can confirm that I did not behave that way.
That’s a new observation, and afai understand Bayesian statistics, this is the moment where we must update our priors: how likely is someone who has observed themselves in the past not to behave that way, to behave that way?
Your argument is now incomplete.
Maybe someone with real understanding of Bayesian statistics can frame this better, or tell me why I’m wrong XD
Well how is his experience valid? He may be lying or unaware or delusional or lying to himself. All very common human behaviors.
> Your argument is now incomplete
If my argument is scientific and it’s incomplete then are all scientific arguments incomplete? If science is our best way of determining fact from fiction in reality then based off of the aforementioned logic isn’t the best possible way for humans to determine truth incomplete?
Also in Your attempt to prove me wrong have you thought about how MORE incomplete his argument was?
Everyone can be lying. But I’ve been around human beings long enough to know that there are two very different types of self delusion: valiant assumptions about what you will do in a never before seen situation, and observations about what you have done. GP’s was an objective statement:
> I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them.
Neither type of statement is perfectly trustable (nothing is) but IME there is a categorical difference. Your paper (and first comment, “don’t be so quick to judge”, which imo was ironically prescient) are about the former type.
Of course if you disagree with me on this fundamental distinction then we have found our contention :) which would be a nice end to this debate. Don’t you think?
Aren’t my statements exactly in line with what “he has done”? Why don’t you read it more carefully. I never denied what he “did”. More like I requested better evidence and I denied his rationalizations behind his life choices. I never claimed he didn’t do what he said.
If he’s drawn to people who do productive work that’s fine. I turned around and asked him for instances where someone’s work humiliated him or completely eclipsed any utility his work offers. Imagine he worked 10 years to invent the slide rule and some genius invents the electronic calculator in one day right after he showed his invention to the world. That’s devastating status damaging stuff. That’s the type of example I asked him for. Not “oh I’m drawn to work with productive people” lol. That kind of comment he made leaves room for him to imply he’s “more productive” than the people he wants to work with. He’s a poser but then that’s not abnormal… tons of people pose and are fake as hell.
Literally look at what he writes. He’s just incapable of admitting any trivial fault. He’s fucking controlled by status above a normal extent for sure. We don’t even have to get into the pedantics of science for this just use your common sense brain.
I have plenty of faults. Depending on your perspective, my entire point is a "fault": I'm lazy and unambitious and decided to top out and coast in my career when I was like 30.
I'm simply happy with that. I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened. I've never seen anyone get humiliated at work. Most work is honestly pretty boring and straightforward. I'm not Leonardo da Vinci here hoping I don't get scooped.
I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
But then I do that to myself all the time too. I have some first approach, and then like a week later notice some simplification I missed. That's normal? I just join stand-up that day and day "good news I realized this problem is way simpler so I can delete half the work I did."
In fact that's why I like working with smart people. They can help see things you missed when you accidentally get stuck in a rabbit hole. I'm not going to be mad at someone for making my life easier. And as I've said, I go to work to support my family, not to fulfill some existential need. Whatever makes work simpler is good in my book. That's also why I've enjoyed adopting LLMs this year: they make it so I don't have to spend as much mental energy on things that are fundamentally not that interesting to me
>I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened.
Then how do you even know what the emotion of "humiliation" even feels like if you never been humiliated before? Perhaps you felt such emotions in childhood but as an adult you've never been humiliated ever? Or perhaps you're going to tell a story of slight trivial humiliation when you accidentally used the wrong gender pronoun and that's the totality of your understanding of humiliation?
Your story is too perfect. It's fake-ish and as you tell more of it you're starting to see holes in it like your claim that you've never been humiliated before.
>I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
this is your least tame example yet, but it's still not humiliation. I in actually can't believe you felt perfectly fine and serene when the other engineer schooled your approach. I think if you were more honest with the story you would've admitted to slight to mild feelings of embarrassment and you just ended up humble about it as most humans would.
At this point you're just trying to show off your claimed non-status seeking personality... but your signaling has gone to the point where it's just a little too perfect. You should probably reply and add more realism to that story man, go ahead if you want:
You’re right, I was wrong. Thank you for your patience and for teaching me something new.
Everything behavioral or psychological science adjacent tends to be "barely science" but sure.
Don't know what to tell you. I'm not the first person to not be interested in "the rat race" (hence the pejorative term for it existing). People like Emerson have probably made the case better than I can. I'm not interested in getting the most women. Actually that sounds gross to me. I instead found the best woman, and fortunately she's also not big on status seeking, and agrees she'd rather have more time with me than me making more money or having a bigger title. My work is a side plot in our lives; my primary title is "Dad".
Unclear how my criticism of a theoretical teacher (or more generally adult) who competes with the children they're supposed to be supporting is a direct attack on you? Self-report? If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving, and there are always new things to learn. Or just be happy for their good fortune. Hamstringing them to make up for one's own hangups is clearly narcissist behavior.
It's also not just management. I don't want to climb the IC ladder either. It means more work, more stress, more responsibility, etc. for a relatively small amount of more money. I already make enough money, and I work for money, not status. That money is to pay for things we need like a house. Then once we have what we need, I plan to retire early and spend more time with my family. Maybe find some volunteer work that we could do together. That's it. Work is a side chapter, not my life.
My wife is also on board with this. She was unsure what it would be like when I transitioned to full remote, but then I did and she realized she likes being around me all the time, and wants me to quit once we've paid for the things we need.
I don't think they would be happy homeless so it's somewhat of a silly question. I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy, but that of course includes showing them how to stay grounded. I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
>Everything behavioral or psychological science adjacent tends to be "barely science" but sure.
Your arguments aren't even science. Barely but sure? What about your own anecdotal statements? That's even less reliable. If the science is all we got, then it's the best we got.
>Don't know what to tell you. I'm not the first person to not be interested in "the rat race" (hence the pejorative term for it existing). People like Emerson have probably made the case better than I can. I'm not interested in getting the most women. Actually that sounds gross to me. I instead found the best woman, and fortunately she's also not big on status seeking, and agrees she'd rather have more time with me than me making more money or having a bigger title. My work is a side plot in our lives; my primary title is "Dad".
We can frame it in terms of the science. You do seek status, but like many you have the inability to pay the cost of reaching higher social status levels, so like many settle for some sort of middle ground. It's extremely common. When you have kids, a huge portion of your "status seeking" shifts to the status of your kids. You work to promote their status in life and you derive a lot of pride from that. In the end it's still status seeking. Whether you seek it for yourself or your genetic future, evolution built you that way.
>Unclear how my criticism of a theoretical teacher (or more generally adult) who competes with the children they're supposed to be supporting is a direct attack on you? Self-report? If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving. Or just be happy for their good fortune. Hamstringing them to make up for one's own hangups is clearly narcissist behavior.
It's very clear. You said I sound like a narcissist. That is clearly an attack. It's like if I said your statement sounds like it was said by an idiot. That's also an attack. But it's sort of indirect attacks that skirt around the rules. I didn't say you were an "idiot"... I said your "statement" sounds like it was said by an "idiot". I just cut through the bullshit and went for the intent of the statement.
>If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving.
No one is insecure about a child's abilities. They're insecure about their OWN ability to help children. That is the source of the person saying that calculators are "not for games". The person saying that needs an excuse for himself to qualify as a teacher. It happens so fast the person saying that doesn't even realize why.
>It's also not just management. I don't want to climb the IC ladder either. It means more work, more stress, more responsibility, etc. for a relatively small amount of more money.
I've already pointed this out. You're not willing to pay the cost so you settle.
>My wife is also on board with this. She was unsure what it would be like when I transitioned to full remote, but then I did and she realized she likes being around me all the time, and wants me to quit once we've paid for the things we need.
She settled too. Most people in life settle. Top alpha status is hard to get and their are huge costs in getting that status. Everybody wants it, but they just don't want to pay the price.
>I don't think they would be happy homeless so it's somewhat of a silly question. I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy, but that of course includes showing them how to stay grounded. I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
So they seek status. Because they won't be happy homeless as being homeless is low status.
>I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy
So you think success (aka status seeking) is intrinsically tied to your children's happiness. Stop signalling bro. You're own language and statements reveal yourself.
>I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
Again this is the evolutionary strategy of "settling". Your passing your own status seeking strategy to your children. And your strategy is based off of "cost" it is not based off of a lack of desire for status. Again, you think optimal cost/benefit ratio is to be a SWE or something. Some people target something lower then that like janitorial engineering. But if status fell on each of your laps for free, you'd take it.
Also it's not just cost/benefit. Status also measures capability. You and your children may be incapable of getting the statuses you want so you settle. When a person is unable to talk about their own weaknesses and lack of ability to get the status they want, then I know they intrinsically seek status. That's why your anecdotal statement of how you turned down a management opportunity even though everyone wanted you to be manager is kind of off. You were humble bragging and bragging is a form of status projecting.
Again, if you truly don't seek status... tell me about something shameful and pathetic about you that if people in general knew about it would lower your status.... can you do that? If not, then that's my point. You, everyone, and that teacher seeks status and the way they talk and what truths they admit to themselves is a result of THAT status seeking. To characterize that teacher as some kind of narcissist or evil person is a complete lack of empathy and misunderstanding of human nature.
Keep in mind, this is the internet, anything you say here doesn't really affect your status in real life. So you're not doing anything in reality to affect your status. But it's still tangible evidence because I believe that status seeking in biology is so strong it will affect your ability to even say something extremely shameful and pathetic on an anonymous forum. Your genetics and behavior were evolved for a time when humans didn't have internet so it doesn't account for this loop hole where you can write and say things publicly that don't affect your status... hence why I'm sure you're gonna maintain your idealistic frame here.
If the best you have is garbage, then you just say that you don't have anything useful. It's like exercise science: there's almost nothing useful there. Don't pretend there is.
If you accept that premise, then you can't frame it in terms of science. You can frame it instead in terms of culture and philosophy, and just say that status obsession is bad. Especially, again, if it turns into literally competing with or feeling threatened by children.
And really, not everything is about status. In fact, if you want something status lowering I guess, we're kind of Billy No-mates, so I don't even have people to compare status with. I've got no Jones' to keep up with! And that's fine.
Again, I've "settled" precisely because I have exactly what I want. It's not the "costs" so much as it is the absence of value. You could argue that I wouldn't pay $100 for a turd because the cost is too high, but the real point is I don't want the turd. You'd have to pay me to take the turd. Like you'd have to pay me to take the higher status job, except they can't pay me enough, and if they did, it would be because I'd be able to save enough to quit shortly thereafter. So really there's just no sustainable world where I keep the higher status position. Because I really, truly, don't want it. It can only distract from what's important to me, and fill my head with things that are not.
Being homeless is an unhappy affair because it's some combination of cold, rainy, snowy, hot, sunny, and stinky, not because it's low status. And because you have nowhere to store e.g. food or clothes, so your situation is precarious. And nowhere to cook, so difficult to eat healthy meals. I highly doubt most homeless people have social status as a top concern.
I'm not sure what I could say that's "shameful" because I'm generally a pretty happy person. In techie circles, I suppose one thing is that my kids are all girls, and I'm going to encourage them to be stay-at-home moms instead of chasing careerism, try to put them into social circles where promiscuity is heavily frowned upon and the primary reason to go to uni is to find a husband (an "Mrs degree"), etc. Very much against the zeitgeist in my work world (and on this site), but I think it's the best way for them to find happiness. So we moved to the South to stay away from West Coast values.
> If the best you have is garbage, then you just say that you don't have anything useful. It's like exercise science: there's almost nothing useful there. Don't pretend there is.
If you think my statements are garbage think about your own statements. You call me out for presenting valid scientific papers by denigrating the whole field of behavioral science which you then refute by pulling out random anecdotes which aren’t even backed by anything.
> If you accept that premise, then you can't frame it in terms of science
I don’t accept that premise. All science has the possibility of being wrong. It is often wrong. But it is the best we have and it has resulted in remarkable things such as going to the moon.
Anecdotes are weaker than science. If behavioral science is trash to you then the your anecdotes are raw shit.
> Again, I've "settled" precisely because I have exactly what I want. It's not the "costs" so much as it is the absence of value.
The foundation of economic theory is based on unlimited human wants and desires. We baked this assumption into theory because it’s so ingrained in human behavior that it’s the foundation of the financial world.
How about I give you an extra ten million dollars with no strings attached? If you say you don’t need it then I see it as more likely you’re just virtue signaling and lying. Bro be real.
> Being homeless is an unhappy affair because it's some combination of cold, rainy, snowy, hot, sunny, and stinky, not because it's low status. And because you have nowhere to store e.g. food or clothes, so your situation is precarious. And nowhere to cook, so difficult to eat healthy meals. I highly doubt most homeless people have social status as a top concern.
Oh let me change that to being homeless in sunny CA with free shelter and food. Most homeless people in SF have completely free access to food anyway. Or how about if your kids worked as a poor waitresses for the rest of their lives but were happy? Obviously that’s what I mean right? No point in getting pedantic about specifics when I’m talking about status.
> I suppose one thing is that my kids are all girls, and I'm going to encourage them to be stay-at-home moms instead of chasing careerism,
That’s a pretty tame one. Not really going to lower your status. You got any sexual kinks? Perverted stuff you like to do in bed that you’d never admit? Do you have any slight interest in men that you’d never admit? Anybody in your family you hate and you think should die?
That’s the level of things I’m looking for. If you truly didn’t care about status you’d be able to admit it.
But if your your perfect ideally on every level I find that harder to believe unfortunately.
We can end the argument here. You won’t be able to prove your stance (event though I’m not even asking you for scientific data) and the science I presented is the highest level of evidence anyone on earth can offer in an argument anyway. It’s not going anywhere so I’m happy to end the argument here but if you want to continue I’m still down.
As a side note, status is even more important to women than men. Your own daughters will date based off of status and they will by nature generally hold status of themselves in higher regard than you. Men are less concerned with status (though still concerned) and are not in actuality concerned with status when selecting a mate as opposed to women where status is part of the main criteria. If you want to empathize with your daughters and women in general than understanding status is part of reality. But of course like you, ironically, being concerned about status, is signal for low status so often people are in denial or they lie about it.
I was calling the science garbage (i.e. denigrating the whole field), not what you wrote. And yeah if the methodology and data are garbage, there's no point in using it. It's like saying chatgpt 2.0 is the best we have, so we should use that. No, we should just say we don't have anything useful. And no, psychology did not get us to the moon. Actual science does not have the problems behavioral and social "sciences" have.
Physics is founded on spherical cows. Doesn't mean it's true. But sure I'll take extra money. I already said I'm working to accumulate more of that. So I can quit. But I wouldn't take $10M if it e.g. meant I had to be CEO of a F500 or something for 10 years. You literally could not pay me to have to do that job for a decade. And if you paid me $5M/year or something, I'd quit after 3 months and be happy.
I wouldn't want them to be homeless in San Francisco either because it's dirty and unsafe, and again I don't think it's a road to happiness. If they really enjoyed waitressing, whatever, but the thing is I think if you're truly happy with life, you'll probably want to form a family and share that happiness. And then something like waitressing is likely a distraction from that, just like software is for me.
I'm pretty sure "actually I don't want my girls to go into STEM and want them to be homemakers" is way more status damaging in the software world (when my first was born a colleague literally asked if I was going to teach her to be a programmer. Uhh, sure) than sexual proclivities of all things lol. But alas, I can't even say I'm into butt stuff.
I don't think I'd characterize being gay as an "imperfection" or something to be ashamed of?
But wanting someone (especially family?) to die is uh pretty hardcore. So no I can't say I've got anything like that for you. I honestly just never need to interact with people I don't like. It's pretty easy to choose your own social circle once you're an adult.
I'm not at all claiming I'm perfect (e.g. I could probably lose ~10 lbs of fat. I could always stand to have more muscle), and I realize it's in vogue to have mental health issues, but there's a reason being normal is... normal. I have to imagine most people don't really have anything to be ashamed of, and most adults grow out of whatever insecurities they may have once had.
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> That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Isn't that just a kafkatrap?
Consider the following exchange where a sane man finds himself in a psychiatric ward:
John: I'm telling you, I'm sane. I don't have any delusions of grandeur and I don't think that I'm Jesus.
Evaluator: I see, your subconscious delusion and erroneous insistence upon sanity are more pervasive than I thought. Your repeated attempts to assert that you're not Jesus is clearly a defense mechanism. I'm afraid I cannot recommend your release.
Something went wrong here.
Or to rephrase: suppose that a person existed who was not status driven. Would you be able to detect such a person if they existed?
Change your example too John saying he doesn’t have experience the emotion of fear. He has never experienced such an emotion in his life.
The thing many people do not understand is how ingrained status seeking is in not just human biology… but biology altogether. Even the lobster has serotonin and is status seeking. It is also in built into our society. Practically every facet of every culture across time has status seeking imprinted into it. Among academia and people who study the biology and behavior it’s unequivocal that people are status seeking.
Basically to help you understand where I’m coming from it’s like this guy is claiming he’s never felt jealous before. “I’ve never cared that someone has more than me or covetted what another man has. It’s just illogical! I’m baffled that other humans act so illogically”.
It’s like that. It’s fake and it’s posing a bit. A lot of HNers like to position themselves as super intelligent people who are incapable of being status seeking or jealous or even feeling scared because it’s “illogical”
The fact that you made a game on a device that "wasn't for games" is even cooler.
The essence of hack.
You can write a game in almost every language. Check these ones written even on really low specs VM's:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/mu808
This could be adapted https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports
More info at https://luxferre.top
One time I wrote a game in English.
Irony is lost on this guy ... :D Edited to add: I comment on the guy you commented on, not you. Just in case. I did not want to reply to them to not give offense.
With Inform7 targeting the ZMachine VM you can literally say that =).
Inform6 it's a 'small' OOP language where with the English library the syntax it's dumber than VB6, Lua or anything else. Basically the objects and logic describe themselves as a dumbed down config file. You create a meta-object for rooms and light, and then copy and paste to create rooms, containers and tools based on atributes (again as if it were a simple config file).
Inform6 example:
https://jxself.org/git/?p=cloak-of-darkness.git;a=blob_plain...
Inform6 compiler:
https://jxself.org/git/inform.git
(cc -o inform src/* )
Inform6 lib
https://jxself.org/git/informlib.git
To compile Cloak...
Lib should be the English library, you can get it with or copy informlib to lib/To play the game:
Or LectRote under Mac... or WinFrotz under Windows, it will work the same.With Inform7 you just write clauses in English, the interpreter will write IF6 code for you and then call the inform6 compiler to create a Z5-8 game ready to run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7
As you can see, no AI needed, no LLM's, no huge GB sized software, just a Pentium MMX could be enough for i7, a 8-16 bit machine for Puny Inform games (kinda like Inform6 'lite'), a 16 bit machine for z3-z5 games and maybe a 'high end' 16 bit computer for Z8 games. A 386 PC would be enough to run 'complex' text adventures. And consistent enough unlike LLM's where the objects' enviroment is lost everytime.
I have an almost identical story. I wrote a few games: snake and a choose your own adventure fantasy thing. And likely others that I can't remember, but yeah, I had a teacher tell me basically the same thing. I was pretty sad because those really took a lot of time.
Now that's a tattoo right there. Never forget.
I relay to you a nugget from my ancestor: "Man, this teacher sounds like a real shithead!"
In high school our computer class was in BASIC. They taught us to swap two variables A & B like this:
But I knew the BASIC we used had the SWAP command. On an exam, I used SWAP A,B instead of the above. I got the lowest passing score, a 70%, and the teacher wrote, "Do it our way please". No thanks Mrs. Mott, I'll take the 70.Those folks can FRO. The teacher my wife would have had for a Pascal class in high school refused to let her apply, saying it was not for girls. Her father said, you can take it at community college.
What a shit teacher: "No, don't be creative and learn. Do only as you're told."
I do not learn from textbooks at all. I learn from playing. I played with all my toys "wrong" when I was a kid, or so I was always told. I always turned to the last chapter of a math book to see what I'm going to learn or to see if I could figure it out from what I already knew (what I would now call "first principles"). I took appliances apart and tried to put them back together. If I failed to do so my dad would help me put them back together, as long as I didn't tell my mom he was encouraging that behavior :) I watched my older sister play piano and learned the songs she was playing by ear, then asked her to teach me to read music.
This behavior often came out as rebellious or prodigy behavior in grade school but I don't think it's any of that. I think it was just a matter of giving a curious kid space to play and learn and grow. kids like me often don't thrive in rigid environments not because we don't like rules or think they shouldn't apply to us but because our brains just don't work completely linearly.
I'd wager that most kids actually learn better like this but it's not super efficient to cater to 30 different curious kids wanting to learn 30 different things.
You sir are the hardest person on HN
How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing
I served 60 months of the 70 month sentence. I had a computer restriction, so I couldn't be around a computer.
Since I wasn't able to use computers or the Internet for that time, I did/read/learned a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise learned. Learned how to make hooch (prison wine), how the law works and how to maneuver the court system (useful for both civil and criminal cases), got more fluent in French by speaking with some native French speakers from Benin, learned how to work out & lift weights (which I still do), and learned the value of freedom.
Thanks for the reply, I see you are quite the legend and am all caught up now.
Are you still coding these days? Does AI instill any new sense of awe and wonder or a new found passion for coding/computers? Hope you are in a better place now. Cheers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht
> First person banned from the Internet
Legend.
Indeed.
70 months, or 5.83 years
Perhaps this is a foolish question: how did your friend actually use the tracker? Did he input the prices from the newspapers or TV news?
I'm not sure how much he actually used it after I wrote it for him, to be honest! But we did have access to daily newspapers, and some of us got weekly stock charts called "Daily Charts" by Investor's Business Daily (all paper, of course). Some of us were into trading stocks (this was during the Internet boom 1995-2000). Another weird skill I learned that is still useful to this day.
I feel like there’s a blog post in here somewhere…!
I should do an AMA at some point. There was a pseudo-AMA on reddit a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1z0yx7/first_person...
Would you be open for an online coffee sometime? Your life sounds wild.
i created a program to make it appear like i wiped my formulas before before a calc 2 final in high school so that when the teacher witnessed us wipe the phones it seemed legit.
In HS, teachers hadn't even caught on to that possibility yet.
I programmed quite a cheat sheet worth of formulae etc into my calc. Right before the test, I dropped it onto the floor. The battery cover popped off and the AA batteries popped out.
These were TI-81s (IIRC) so no battery backup -- it was a full memory wipe every time you changed batteries. Sooooooooooooo... goodbye cheat sheet!
However, I aced that test anyway, legitimately. Creating the cheat sheet actually helped me to learn the material. There's a lesson or two in there somewhere...
They had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.
They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.
The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.
Got the 89 first year it came out, loaded a periodic table on it and used it on my high school chemistry exam. Teachers had no clue back then
I had a similar story -- just absolutely acing math with my TI-89 until one teacher finally learned that this TI-83-looking calculator could do symbolic stuff ... just an absolute nightmare after that
Spent some time on ticalc.org too, making some not-great stuff to get me thru those years
https://www.ticalc.org/cgi-bin/acct-view.cgi?userid=34493
The -85 was released in 1992, iirc it's TI's second graphing calculator. The -83 is a later model.
I was told that one of the designers graduated high-school in '81 and college in '85, so the HS calculator was an 81 and the college calculator was an 85.
The order was:
TI-81 (1990)
TI-85 (1992)
TI-82 (1993)
TI-80 (1995)
TI-92 (1995)
TI-83 (1996)
TI-86 (1996)
TI-73 (1998)
TI-83 Plus (1999)
TI-89 (1998)
TI-92 Plus (1998)
TI-83 Plus Silver Edition (2001)
TI-84 Plus (2004)
TI-84 Plus Silver Edition (2004)
Anyone here have an idea why the models jumped around like that? Like why'd the 82 come out after the 85, or the 83 after the 92?
They had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school.
All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules.
Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.
Huh. I have only good memories of this calculator. Would buy for my kids in a heartbeat. The fact that it barely changed is a feature to me. I know exactly what they’d be getting.
The scam doesn’t just work in the US. In The Netherlands most secondary school students had, and I think still have, to buy these. I imagine in other countries too.
There is an interesting side effect from having always used TI calculators. They use a dot as the decimal separator, not a comma like we do here. There is usually some option to switch, but the hardware button obviously stays the same, so I’ve always been taught to just make that switch in my head, and it has become the natural thing for me to do. I see 1,000.50 on a screen I write down 1.000,50. When I use software that uses a comma as the decimal separator, I get annoyed and it takes some mental effort to enter the right values.
> scam
… that continues no matter what. I gave my kid my 89 from the late 90s—I was happy to avoid the TI student tax. Then a year or two back, the college board banned the 89 from certain tests/classes and so I had to cough up for an 84. Even if you take care of your stuff, treat it well to pass on to your kids, the Man finds a way to extract their cut.
Plenty of students succeed just fine without owning a graphing calculator (they can spend a few minutes learning the handful of test-relevant features and borrow one for the exam). Thankfully as of this year there is also a Desmos option.
I think you can flash a TI83 Plus ROM to a TI73 by using an exploit? One exploit was that flashing an OS writes all the ROM, then checks the signature afterwards, then erases it if it fails. Pull batteries at the correct time and...
One other factor that others haven't yet covered is that the different lines had different capabilities, e.g. the T-89 had Computer Algebra System symbolic manipulation meaning it could pretty much solve many types of math problems on its own, so it wasn't generally allowed in school. And then the Ti-85/86 was a step down, but had matrix support that the lower models lacked, so it was necessary for some specific types of classes.
My favorite was always the TI-85/86 line. I loved those F1-F5 buttons right beneath the screen, which made the interface overall better to navigate. The first programming I ever did was on one of those (either the 85 or 82, can't exactly remember at this point which I owned first). And, the only thing of note I ever had stolen from me was a TI-82, taken out of my unattended backpack by another student during gym class :( (And I had even carved my name into the back of it with a knife, so it would've been identifiable.)
This. The thread's confusion comes from looking at these as computers: more capabilities are always an improvement.
In common use, they're intended as mathematical learning aids, a function for which very specific sets of functionality (and no more) are required.
F.ex. basic matrix ops but no auto-solvers
Similar to how you wouldn't give a kid learning how to construct an argumentative essay access to a full LLM if the goal is learning how to perform the task.
From a product POV, sure. From an end user’s perspective, I strongly dislike that. There’s no room for growth there. Buy the model that does matrices when you’re taking linear algebra, and you learn that model through and through. Then take an engineering class where you need a solved, and now you have to use a different device that works subtly differently in enough ways that you have to learn all about it.
I just want one device that does everything so my new learning can build on my old.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere here, I love the TI-85 I used through college. I’m no partisan. However, I think that for anything outside a school context, that means skipping any device marketed as “ok to use on tests” and buying an HP. I scarcely need the cool stuff of the HP50g or DM42n I picked up along the way, but if I ever do, I know it’s already in there and waiting for me to discover it.
The smarter way for TI to market and grade segment would have been following IBM's supercomputing footsteps and firmware-locking feature sets.
So one could attest that a calculator was currently running the "Grade 6-US" feature set standard.
But I imagine in the 1990s doing so at consumer device scale was dicier. I.e. where would upgrades be applied?
They were different lines. The numbers aren't mean to be chronological; similar to how AMD released some 5000 series AM4 Ryzen chips long after they'd moved on to AM5 and 7000/9000 series.
TI83 (1996) was a successor to the TI82 (1993) which was a refresh/update of the TI81 (1990).
TI85 (1992) was the second model they made, originally intended as a higher end version of the TI81.
Similar reasoning for the rest of their line up. Different models had different features, and then those models would get incremental updates/refreshes over the years.
I wasn't part of the team or anything, so if anyone has any insight to why exactly they called it that in the first place, I'd be interested to know, but generally speaking the answer is: When they released the first one in 1990, they didn't name it under the presumption that this family of devices would be a staple educational/academic electronics device for the next 3 decades with dozen(s?) of different iterations/generations over the years.
A lot of it had to do with capability. The TI 92 was considerably more capable than the 83. The 89 had better software than the 92 but with a smaller form factor. The 92+ was the 92 with the 89 software.
The encyclopedia of TI calculators is http://www.datamath.org
Joerg Warner has been collecting them exhaustively, and peering inside for date codes and such.
If anybody here can illuminate where these names came from, I'd love to know!
That's such a fantastic story.
Since we’re sharing stories…
In high school my stats teacher told us we had to get a proper calculator. She didn’t set any upper limit so i went down the calculators rabbit hole… and got an used ti-86 from 1999 off ebay for 35 euros (this was in 2007 or so).
I programmed software to solve exercises in ti-basic and spent every lesson doing essentially software testing: basically whenever a classmate was called to the blackboard to solve an exercise I’d input the exercise data and verified I got the right results.
I got 9.5 out of 10 to the immediate next test. The teacher took off half a point because i miscopied a number (0.3 rather than 0.03, i still remember that after almost 20 years). It would have otherwise been a perfect test.
Fun times.
I still have that calculator, i turn it on every now and then.
I remember naming that calculator “Annarita”, like a girl I used to like and that (of course, lol) barely knew I existed at all.
My TI-85 story involves the fact that it only had 2D plotting (though I think newer models such as the TI-89 had 3D).
I had a 3D calculus class so I wrote a program in it to plot a 3D isometric mesh of a surface using the 2D rendering library. It was slow but got the job done. I used it to help pass a test or two.
I also experimented with drawing random surfaces and objects like a tire. They looked pretty cool for a calculator screen.
The math lab at the college had a cable which you could use to take data off or put it on so you could in theory have exchanged programs with others but this was before the internet so I didn't.
I still have mine and enjoy the sliding the cover off - a trip down memory lane.
Later I rewrote the program in QBasic on a PC for fun and it was lightning fast!
Love this
this made me giggle lol
About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this story. Then last year I found a Ti84 in my parents attic...
My dad got a free palm pilot m125 or something and I used a ti/HP calculator emulator on it since my parents thought buying a $99+ calculator was too expensive. fun writing apps in basic for that thing and the games for it were the best mobile ones. I did envy people with Mario and drug wars on their calculators though.
I played the heck out of some space trading game based on drug wars I think. You “flew” around between planets buying and selling cargo.
I would love to play something like that again on my phone.
Space trader?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trader_(Palm_OS)
I played it recently on iOS via the palm web emulator
https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/
Must have been closer to 20 years, 84(+) didn't come out until 2004.
Gonna be pedantic/crotchety about this because I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+). Guess who's the engineer now, and who's the NEET? Your kids pay attention to what (who) you value, folks.
Genuinely not sure. Are you the brother that spited your family with a successful career or the one whose life was was doomed by a graphing calculator.
I'm not sure how the favorite (families have them) doing what the family wanted (becoming the one who is successful) is spiting anything.
And it sure would be funny if the calculator was a one-off instead of just one instance in a pattern of dysfunctional parenting that taught:
Son 1: The family will always have your back, no matter the outcome as; you'll be rewarded, so long as you try.
Son 2: No matter what you accomplish, you will be valued less.
Real laugh-riot there. Hope that clears things up.
> I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+)
I had a TI-85 (maybe 86), unlike the entire rest of my school who had 83s.
There was a difference: when programming in TI-Basic, variable names on a TI-83 are limited to a single character. On the 85, you can make them longer.
But that was pretty much the only difference, and it will never come up if you're using the calculator for school-related reasons.
(For calculus, I had an 89. The differences are much more significant there.)
The TI-85 also didn't have a lot of the built-in statistical functions that the TI-83 had.
I also was the one person with a TI-85 in a school of 83s. But by the time I took the statistics class I knew enough BASIC to write my own programs to replicate the functionality that was missing.
I was a self taught TI-Basic programmer and ran into the 26 variable limit on a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote. I ended up breaking it into 3 programs so I had enough variables. Programs could invoke other programs so I could navigate between states.
I don't remember there being much of a difference between the 83 and 84. Did you care about the amount of memory or the clock speed of the processor? Or was it more of a status thing.
weird grudge to keep for twenty years, man
Weird thing to do to your preteen in your 40s.
Sounds like he needed all the help he could get.
ooh good catch! it was a TI-83, got confused right there (it was before 2004)
My guess : the engineer got the older model
Reason : making due with more scarcity increased independence and critical thinking.
I don't know if that was your point...
had to search that, NEET is India's National Eligibility cum Entrance Test.
No, I was too scared to ask.
NEET means "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The stereotype is an unemployed young adult living with their parents and playing video games all day.
Gonna guess you are the NEET
why are you attacking your brother lol
Every time I see a post about the TI calculators, I think about how much I dislike their interface, and it's all because I started out on a Casio.
I had a Casio that was multi color, because I thought it was cooler. Display was nice, functionality sucked.
I had a Casio as well because, IIRC, it was the only thing the shop had. Eventually I had to also get a TI because it allowed using imaginary numbers in a matrix operation. Not that that was used in more than one course after all. But I grew to like it and even had an emulator for a long time on my first smart phone.
But yeah, Casio was definitely more friendly and polished in UI, but dumber. You could only use "wizard" type things and pseudo gui clickies while the ti was crude and text-heavy but let you enter just about anything anywhere and seemed more symbol and language oriented. Which one was nicer in use? I guess it would depend on how much of that language you could memorize. Or browse a cheat sheet for.
I had a Casio because it was $10 cheaper than the TI. Man I was jealous of the "rich" kids.
Was this the first time you had realized that they did, in fact, love you the entire time?
I have a happy story about Casio and college. I started college with a very limited TI-55 calculator: 51 steps and no conditional branching. The rich kids got HP-41 calculators, the average ones got programmable Casios. I got a Casio PB-700, programmable in BASIC.
Best gift ever. I could finish all numeric methods tests in a fraction of the time it took for others to use or program the ordinary calculators. It was a huge qualitative leap.
Hahaha! This is great.
Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
On 9 July 1537, Martin Luther wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Capito about a lost golden ring: "Pro annulo aureo gratias tibi agit mea Catharina, quam vix unquam magis indignatam vidi, quam ubi sensit, cum vel furto sublatum, vel sua negligentia (quod nec mihi verisimile est, licet usque ingerenti) amissum, quod persuaseram ei, hoc donum esse felix omen et augurium ei missum, tanquam nunc certum esset, vestram Ecclesiam cum nostra suaviter concordare; id mire dolet mulieri."[1]
When Luther's house in Wittenberg was excavated about 20 years ago, a golden ring[2] was found that must have been deposited there before 1540. It is therefore quite likely that this is the ring mentioned by Luther in 1537.
[1] See WA, BR 8: no 3162 -- https://archive.org/details/werkebriefwechse08luthuoft/page/...
[2] Here is an image of the ring: https://www.zum.de/Faecher/G/BW/Landeskunde/rhein/geschichte...
Are we expected to know latin, or is this supposed to be a little homework assignment for us? Ridiculous.
Rather obviously these days one can copy/paste the Latin into google translate in mere seconds for relief ...
Google? Eeewwww!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpgTqRxaC0c
You're expected to use technology to break through the language barrier
FOMO burnout is real.
Yup, classic Martin Luther!
If my grandmother were to find out that housekeepers occasionally do actually take things, it would set us back decades.
Google Translate:
My Catherine thanks you for the golden ring, whom I have hardly ever seen more indignant than when she realized that it had been stolen or lost through her own negligence (which is not likely for me, although I still insist on it), which I had persuaded her that this gift was a happy omen and augury sent to her, as if it were now certain that your Church would agree pleasantly with ours; this grieves the woman wonderfully.
My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.
This is why you always mount outlets with the grounding pin facing up!
Or have sensible outlet design where prongs are always recessed.
Wow, I never knew they could be installed that way; the US standard doesn't say. Now every time I see a new outlet I'm going to check.
This is why you have modern circuit breakers.
How does that help?
The ground pin, when "up", is higher than the hot, so in certain situations it can prevent something from shorting the hot and neutral. Code (?) or convention requires it if you have a metal faceplate, and hospitals require it. People generally like them mounted ground down because then they look like little faces. :-)
edit: Not code, just convention.
Wouldn't it short hot and ground then, and still turn the necklace into a short-lived fuse?
The more practical reason to mount ground down is that wall warts with ground pins or polarized prongs nearly universally arrange them so that they're hanging down when inserted into a ground-down plug. If the plug's flipped, the wall wart's upside down and its weight is trying to lever it out of the wall.
Yes, in that case it would short hot and ground, which is effectively the same and hot and neutral, since at the main panel hot and ground are bounded together. But if it were, say, a metal credit card or something rigid, it might just fall on the ground, or could hit the ground and neutral.
It doesn't.
... it was an ungrounded plug... Plus it was a chain, so it'd drape across all 3.
TBH, in the house I mount them ground down, but under cabinets or in the garage/shop or etc I mount it ground up.
I think ground up commonly indicates that an outlet is controlled by a switch on the wall. It's not code, but I think it's a convention
Agreed, I have seen that.
[dead]
From here: https://www.cemetech.net/news/2026/4/1062/_/ti-84-evo-calcul...
> 3x Processing Power - Matching one of the speculated options, the calculator appears to use an ARM Cortex CPU, finally retiring the z80 and ez80 family of CPUs that were used in three decades of TI-83 and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. It's running at 156MHz, compared to the 48MHz of the older calculators. It appears likely that in an unexpected break from over 30 years of TI's operating system codebase, the OS has been re-implemented with new features natively on the ARM CPU rather than using an ez80 emulator to run an updated form of the TI-84 Plus CE operating system.
It looks like TI is finally moving away from the Z80. This must have been a pretty big engineering effort on TI's part. Like the article says, up to this point all of TI's low-end graphing calculators have been Z80 based and use the same system software that has a lineage dating back to the early 1990s. They were previously so wedded to the Z80 that when they introduced Python programming to their calculators, they did so by adding an ARM microcontroller that runs MicroPython, while the main eZ80 CPU acts as a serial terminal.
Much nostalgia. The TI-83 Z80 was how I learned assembly as a teenager, so I could write better calculator games than was possible with TI Basic. Many others here had a similar experience, I’m sure. It’s been a couple decades, but I’m sure I’d still remember most of it if you put me down in front of a bunch of Z80 asm code.
One thing that I remember vividly was you had no MUL or DIV, so you have to implement them yourself with shifts, adds, subtraction, etc. This was an extremely useful learning experience
Same story here (basic was too slow for a phoenix/movable-ship-shooter game).
Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM? I looked at some old ASM I wrote long ago, and it's hard to follow the logic of the program, since most lines are messing around with the registers. But basics like 'ld hl,xyz' and 'jp/jnz' still make sense.
> Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM?
I find when you learn things at 15 they tend to stick around. (Stuff I learned last week, not so much!) Even just looking at your example, I remembered that HL is a 16 bit register and you can split it into two 8 bit registers H and L if you want. I think most of it would come back; I wrote quite a lot of it, both for the TI-83 and later for a Z80 that I bought and put on a breadboard and wired up to some RAM and EEPROM, about as bare metal as it gets.
> most lines are messing around with the registers
Isn’t that just the nature of assembly? :)
I learned much of what I know about computer and low-level systems engineering from Minecraft. Watched lots of videos making CPUs and built many components myself including a full ALU with a look-ahead adder and hardware multiplication.
Fun memory trip. Learned assembly on those old Z80s in middle school. I had to go re-dig up SafeGuard, a program I made by reverse engineering TI's TestGuard, to stop admins from wiping your calculator memory and all your games! https://mikeknoop.com/upload/safeguard/
>cemetech
>Kerm Martian
There's some names I haven't heard in a while :)
It's kind of weirdly comforting to see Kerm is still passionate about calculators after all these years, isn't it?
Does this mean uncle worm won’t run on it out of the box? A tragedy
One-shotted with Claude Code. Chef kiss.
Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only. For the educational market, this "security" is a selling point. It guarantees that a student isn't running unauthorized code or "cheating" apps. It also likely allows OTA auditing of the classroom's state.
> Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only.
This is substantially inaccurate.
1) Not all ARM Cortex series CPUs have TrustZone. It is absent on many Cortex-M microcontrollers, for example.
2) TrustZone is an operating mode of the CPU, not an "admin processor". Depending on the part, it is often made accessible to developers. (Whether that includes third-party software developers is, of course, up to the device manufacturer.)
For more information, see:
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100690/0200/ARM-Trus...
There’s a discussion to be had on the absolutism of technology for decisions or security, and the slow erosion of a certain intangible “discretionary” element in day-to-day life.
Any secure boot design can achieve that, you don't need TrustZone to do that
What prevents a motivated cheater from swapping out the processor entirely?
The effort.
And the cost, and the parents.
We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable!
But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.
Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.
Same.
I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist.
I eventually figured out python too!
I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.
Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.
It wasn't the first time I programmed but it was first time I encountered problem solving with code.
I'm not one those (very admirable) people who build just to build, who make their own version of frogger or something. I need a problem to solve.
But making a program that would take the parameters of a physics problem and spit out all the other quantities or that formatted output the way my stats teacher wanted it was a huge timesaver and that motivated me.
same. My first real exposure to coding was hacking Drug Wars on my brothers old ti-89 in math class.
This new one has python, imagine
In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.
I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.
We made multi-player games over the link cables in the early 1990s. We certainly learned a ton from building those. It's not clear how much the calculators added to the math and chemistry classes where we were supposed to use them.
It’s not that the calculator was more than what students need, it’s that even for what it was the TI83/84 was way overpriced. It could have been like $20 at the scale they were produced.
Same! Ticalc.org was my original GitHub haha
You could get that same educational value from programming things on a smartphone.
Current smartphones are highly optimized for content consumption a.k.a doom scrolling. Nothing serious exists for programming. On top of that, a touch keyboard and hard to reach special characters make programming on a modern smartphone a big chore. I miss the old days of smartphones that had a hardware keyboard with tactile feedback. I used to code up and maintain a PHP based dynamic website circa 2007 with a Sony Ericsson K770i and upload through a J2ME based FTP client that also had the text editor in it. If I remember it correctly it was called MobyExplorer
It's much harder to type on a TI calculator than a smartphone.
Not sure I agree. You can "blind type" on a physical keyboard, and even if it has less sophistication in the way of inputting large amounts of text (lack of auto complete, lack of fuzzy typing/auto correct), a calculator is purpose built with tons of shortcuts and contextual menus that you access from muscle memory without second guessing yourself. Right now, if I've got a mildly complicated mathematical expression to type, I'd rather do it on a last-century calculator rather than e.g. on Android's GeoGebra.
It's been a long time since I've done it, but I could type pretty quickly on a TI-83 - even with the silly ABC keyboard layout and all.
I did, in Java 2ME for my Nokia. That was a completely different experience and much harder to get going. I did make a color 2D game though in about a week.
The TI-200 was much more accessible and fun, creating small little programs during or after class. Only once you wanted to go assembly did it become a chore again.
To summarize: not the same.
What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?
> What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?
Termux
Haven't tried these, but have seen them recommended:Acode
Termux + neovim
Termux + code-server (vscode-like, accessed through phone browser at localhost)
I don't have a favorite. I do not feel like anyone that I am aware of has made proper investment to make a quality development app for mobile due to the low market demand. While development is better than on a calculator I think they are below my expectations.
I like Codea for iOS, though the free version has a soft-limit at 500 lines. If a project gets bigger than 500 lines you can still run code but it'll nag you to upgrade.
I sort of agree.
You're paying $100 for completely antiquated hardware where its core feature is "it doesn't do much".
Pretty much any professional environment that you will need calculations will have access to a computer that can do these calculations significantly faster and better.
I thought my HP was pretty cool in high school, but pretty much the moment I graduated I stopped using it because I figured out how to use Excel and/or a programming language to do number crunchy stuff. Even for CAS stuff, I would just use Wolfram Alpha or SageMath (depending on how ambitious I'm feeling with setting stuff up).
I can't remember the last time I used a calculator outside of showing someone else how to use it.
Well I'd add to that - the real core feature is that the teacher and usually the textbook show you exactly how to use it, that's why it gets listed specifically as a course requirement.
That unfortunately is also why they can charge so much and people buy them anyway, because at best you'll be on your own to learn how to use anything else (and at worst you won't be allowed to use it at all for tests and such).
There are many professional examples outside of teaching (construction, lab based science, field work, engineering, healthcare, retail) where a calculator, not necessary a programmable one, is useful because the environment restricts the use of computers due to safety, security or practicalities.
My buddy was a general contractor. They have books of pre-printed calculators for common beam lengths. For instance, say you have a room 30 feet wide and you're putting a roof on it with a 30 degree pitch. The book will tell you exactly how long to cut the roof timbers so that they reach from the edge of the wall to the crest of the roof.
Said friend was at a site and someone had misplaced the book. He pulled out a calculator and did some basic trig to give them the lengths and told them to get back to work. He said they were looking at him like he'd just conjured a demon or something. "You can... just calculate that?" "How did you think they made the book?" "But how'd you learn to do that?" "In that math class you dropped in high school."
The interface is great for what it does though. I still use ti-83 interface with the calculator app on my phone.
Yeah I guess I should correct and say that I do use an HP 50G emulator on my iPhone cuz I like RPN.
But even still, the iPhone can do many things and is many times more capable, and you can buy a used iPhone 12 that works fine for about the same price as one of these calculators.
HP 48G(X) is the OG and what I took SAT-I and AP Calculus BC exams with. The iOS/iPadOS emu app is called i48.
Android app is called droid48
Nice.
Also, one of the major (unique?) UX innovations of the physical HP48 (c. 1990) was that it could beam apps and data to other calculators over serial IR or RS-232 with a computer. (A DIY computer interface cable could be fashioned from Sony CD-ROM analog audio cable.) Furthermore, the IR LED on the HP48G(X) was so bright, it could be software-controlled as a very long range TV universal remote, and there was a learning universal remote app that could learn codes from physical remotes by reading from the IR receiver. It would take fast and ubiquitous wireless networking (WiFi, BT, and cellular) c. 2003 before the app store concept would arrive generally for smartphones and other devices.
I learned programming on that calculator. I learned programming because of that calculator. I owe so much to that calculator.
Same.
I distinctly remember my teachers having a debate around whether or not the functions I had programmed into my calculator were "cheating". On one hand, it was a tool and notes that I had access to my peers did not. On the other hand, I had created those tools myself, and if school was supposed to train me for the real world, wouldn't I be able to use the tools I created in the real world?
I faced a similar issue with my teachers in high school - iirc I was able to argue that by programming the formulas, I was demonstrating an understanding of them. Being able to show that understanding in our testing was the concern from my teachers’ point of view.
Ha in my school's math department the cheating thesis won and my silly single variable CAS system (which in retrospect did nothing you couldn't do with the graph functions!) got calculator programs banned. Luckily enough my specific math teacher that year didn't care enough to enforce it and it was soon forgotten
Wow, there were actually principles behind the rules and they bothered to reason about them. That's way different than my experience with school teachers.
Same. I hid custom calculators behind game levels so my teacher couldn't find them.
There are many of us, I make a living today because my dad brought home a Ti-83 Plus and I kept messing with the "PGRM" menu
I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.
My ti-89 titanium got me through two engineering degrees. Loved that thing.
It's wild how much curricula within high schools must differ, because my school went out of its way to teach and encourage/require its use on nearly every quiz and exam. We joked sometimes class felt more like calculator class than math class. This was Texas, too, which I hardly consider a pioneer in education. Maybe TI pride?
Now that I think about it, this could have been a strategy my high school drilled into us as a way to increase SAT scores, since TI-84s were allowed to be used there.
Texas (TI) invented the handheld calculator after all.
Agreed, it's insane to me that in an era of Google Colab (et al) schools still require students to shell out >$100 for one of these. I'm sure there is some backroom arrangement with schools of some kind.
A lack of functionality is the point. You don't want a full CAS or Internet search results available, or many students will just take the easy route and not learn anything.
Neither teachers nor school districts have the time or resources to audit every new tool someone wants to use, or to help students figure out how to use their preferred tool to do something - find something that works and just use that
It's a weird halfway house.
I had a cheap Casio fx calculator. It got me all the way through my exams in school and university. I had Mathematica at home.
While I can see that being very good on a TI-84 would help you complete exams faster and get better marks, is that a skill that we want students to learn? Being good on a fancy calculator is essentially useless in real life. In real life people use computers not fancy calculators.
IMO it's better to either allow only basic calculators, or to allow real mathematics software.
The ability to quickly graph functions and see them visually is an enormous aid to learning. Similarly, for various topics like statistics the ability to operate on a dataset is beneficial. Doing all of the raw arithmetic that goes into Chi Squared or whatever isn't particularly important for statistical analysis, and being able to get to the important bits faster is very beneficial.
Where to draw the line depends on the course. In general tools that "give the answer" for something where thinking provides insight are bad in education - for instance, a CAS which will simply compute derivatives isn't beneficial when taking Calculus. Things that eliminate grunt work not useful to that intuition - like computing the same formula 40 times to draw a graph by hand - are beneficial.
There’s no back room arrangement, beyond perhaps some amount of marketing from TI to math teachers. But nobody is getting a kickback to recommend the TI-84. Also, since so many people had to buy these things then stuck it in a drawer after a couple years, there’s a healthy supply of used ones on eBay and marketplace.
I got an HP50g from Craigslist in high school that
- was cheaper than a TI
- had a primitive CAS system
- teachers had no idea how to put it into test mode
It carried me through AP calc BC, I would’ve gotten <4 off of my own knowledge alone
I had the same one. I thought it was pretty cool.
One perk I found is that if I kept it in RPN mode, people stopped asking to borrow my calculator, which was a valid excuse to learn how to use RPN, which is basically all I use now (and indirectly made me really love the Forth language).
Mine was a Casio fx-something. Teachers didn't like it but it didn't let me cheat and it was just the right amount of functionality to help me with math. Carried me through Pre-Cal, Trig, Calculus and Differential Equations.
That was my first graphing calculator in high school, because it was way cheaper than the equivalent TI. Like seriously 1/4 the price for "beginning of the school year" sales.
That thing was fine, and if I hadn't dropped it and broken it, I probably would have kept using it for the rest of high school. I eventually replaced it with an HP.
30 years ago, we had the option of the TI-82 Or (83?) and the 85. A bunch of the kids with the 85 were playing Tetris and some were writing little programs. I got the cheaper 82/83, and I don't actually remember using it for anything, even once, even though I did the IB track (stats, trig, algebra, calculus, etc).
I was in the not-TI-85 club for a while. I think I had the TI-84? You could still write programs but your variable names could only be one letter. When I upgraded to a TI-85 and got Tetris a friend who had the not-TI-85 asked if his could play Tetris. I checked out the Tetris code and saw there were less than 26 variables, so I figured it could be done. I spent several English class periods porting the TI-85 Tetris code to the not-TI-85 and I got it to work. All the not-TI-85 owners loved me, lol!
How is that possible?
I wouldn’t have been able to function without it in school (20 years ago). But we also didn’t have iPhones.
Back in the mid-90's we had a TI version of sneakernet where you would copy programs from one student on to your TI-85 via a link cable; this is how I got Tetris back in the day. I assume OP did the same.
IIRC there was a way to connect the TI-85 to your serial port and use some Windows or DOS software to copy files onto it. (Everyone's PC still had at least one serial port on it back then).
Was it that only the 85 could connect to a com port, but then you could connect the 85 to the 82/83? I seem to remember pleading with the one kid with an 85 (who didn't even care about games).
The 82 also had a com port
I don't remember if you could connect an 82 to an 85, but I do remember you could connect it to a PC as well over serial
I chopped my TI-83 link cable in half and wired it to the parallel port, like this: http://www1.inf.tu-dresden.de/~aw4/ti85.html
and this: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117001444/http://www.geocit...
(Edit: I am assuming you were asking how it's possible I didn't use it, not how it's possible that people were copying programs onto their calculators.)
I don't know. It's been too long. We must have done graphing on paper.
I don't remember a lot of coursework in math that required me to produce a decimal value. For example, we wanted √2 instead of 1.414.
In physics, I think we used regular calculators.
I used to be bewildered at my parents not remembering certain things from high school. But, now I'm living it :).
I used mine constantly in highschool (10 years ago).
Same. But I agree with the parent, I always got the vibe it was a giant racket between public schools and TI. Writing code for it was probably cool back in the 80s-90s but it's so dated now.
I used mine in highschool (20 years ago) and still use one today.
Same except mine was over 30 years ago (an OG TI-85). Still on my desk, still use it almost every day for something or other.
I don't know how the TI-85 compares to the other models without looking it up, but there's a forever soft spot in my heart for mine. It got me through a comp sci degree and still works flawlessly today.
I use mine constantly in high school (now).
>We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I suppose it depends if you took advanced math classes or not.
My high school required one for a math curriculum that was specifically designed with the idea that students would not need advanced math classes. It kids up for failure if they were hoping to move toward higher level math in college, as the fundamentals were never adequately taught. But at least they sold thousands of calculators to kids who would never use them again.
They actually started us on them in 7th or 8th grade.
$100 for something you'll use all through middle and high school and into college isn't a bad deal.
I would have preferred a proper math education. I would have paid more for that.
I actually need a TI-82 in 7/8th grade, a TI-83 in high school, then college wanted a TI-89. I was having to upgrade every few years.
Not only did we use it several times every week for 4 years, I spent 4 years writing tons of programs on it. Best $100 ever spent, thanks mom & dad.
This is probably right, but just to note that it's very much a generational thing. When I got a TI-83 (and then eventually an 89!) it was easily the most advanced handheld computing hardware I had ever been exposed to. The iPhone made sense to me, and I knew it would be huge, the day it came out because of these amazing calculators.
I know technology has moved on and all, but much nostalgic respect to these amazing calculators.
TI-86 is the one in my case. We had to buy it in high school, and I used it so much in high school and in university after (I still have it in a box), that it's the only calculator I've since used. I absolutely have to have a TI emulator on my phone, and have paid for multiple ones along the years.
I use my emulated TI-86 every other day, and prefer it to any other UI I've seen on calculators on phones.
When I have a laptop available, I of course use excel or wolfram alpha for anything demanding, but when on the go, I like my emulated TI-86.
Definitely. At the very least, given the slow change in which ones are accepted, a cheap rental setup seems like the baseline that should exist... but everyone had to buy their own for my schools.
I was in (Catholic) HS 30 years ago and we used our TI-82s extensively in AP Calc.
Probably have not touched mine since college.
concur .. better to have a 40-buck fx82 for daily math and use Desmos for graphing, than fork out 250 to 300 for a super-duper calc they wont use.
I got a ton of value out of mine... but I graduated in 2011, when smartphones were only just taking off and relatively few people had them yet.
But my wife is also a high school teacher and one of the most consistent problems I hear about from her is smartphones being a distraction. If she lets a kid use their smartphone as a calculator, odds are they'll soon be scrolling content feeds, playing games, or chatting with others. If her school required students to have a graphing calculator with limited functionality, it would probably be a benefit to her classroom.
Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS https://www.usaofficemachines.com/csofx300ms-fx-300ms-scient...
There's even knockoffs of it for $1: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809744184708.html
I picked one up when the 99 cent store was shutting down. It works fine.
Look what you can get for $20: https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX...
TI is like the Intuit of the education world. I want to love them but this is ridiculous - a N4120 celeron laptop is the same price as this new calculator - it might be a garbage laptop but it's doing a heck of a lot more for your $160 than this calculator is.
Well, the TI-83/84 are called a graphing calculators for a reason: you can plot equations and datasets with them and look at them right there[1]. Looking at graphs is huge for learning, or at least it was for me, and school isn't just about plugging things in and getting an answer (or shouldn't be, at least).
Doesn't mean it's not overpriced, but that's one reason and you can get a used TI-83/84 for like $30 or less. They pretty much never break.
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1. Okay, the Casio can QR-code-link you to a graph, but if I have internet/smartphone there are better graphing tools anyway, like Desmos.
casio can do graphs on device for under $40
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Casio-FX-9750Glll-Graphing-Calcul...
The reason you can get used ti's for $30 is because that's how much they're actually worth.
You can get a catiga if you really want for like $17: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809054964211.html
... or you can go with TI for $160 ...
I mean a laptop running windows can use the old power toy calculator or something like speed crunch to do graphing and I'm sure Linux has countless others, with Chromebooks probably having more for free online as well, I can only assume.
A graphing calculator is a fraction of the cost, has no security updates, is standardized, isn't connected to the internet, ... There is value in a thing that does one thing well.
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If you count basic calculus as high school level, TI89's can do symbolic integration. They're usually banned on tests for that exact reason tho.
The TI-89's have the same shell as the TI-83. I took the shell off the 83 and put it on the 89 as well as replacing some of the buttons.
I used this on tests that banned the TI-89.
Can it do anything non-trivial? The algorithms for symbolic integration are extensive.
My Casio could do numeric differentiation and integration. I used this to double check my answers in my exams.
In fact, it still can as I still own and use it to this day.
It's quite good for what it is. Of course it will lose to Mathematica but I used mine heavily throughout physics to derive things symbolically.
My favorite cheap Casio is fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition, $17
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...
Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.
If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...
The older ones that still have basic:
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...
BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)
https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki
I agree with you on the Casio fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition. I picked one up two years ago for $11.41. It naturally writes out equations, has a backspace and is generally excellent. I still love my HP RPN calculators, but the fx-115ES works nicely for anyone who isn't using RPN or sympy.
Also a +1 for this calculator, it's really the best scientific calculator you can buy and a steal at the price it sells at.
International Baccalaureate math has some stats questions that require a calculator that can do stats questions. Not really possible by hand in exam conditions!
My Casio FX-260 Solar IIs [1][2] (I recently bought 3 more of them) cost me $5 CAD a piece on clearance at Walmart. No battery, a modern solar panel that works great even in dimly lit rooms, and a modern SOC with all the standard scientific calculations, scientific notation, engineering notation, significant figures, and all the basic stats calculations too (sum, mean, pop stddev, sample stddev, permutations, combinations, factorials).
It’s my favourite calculator and the one I always reach for, despite having a bunch of more complicated 2-line calculators etc. It’s just so easy to use and very fast to do anything I’d want with a calculator. If I need graphing I’ll reach for Desmos. If I need algebra I’ll use Sage. I haven’t used Sage since my undergrad, however.
[1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
[2] https://www.casio.com/ca-en/scientific-calculators/product.F...
The basic $12 Casio scientific has stats like mean, standard deviation, regression... Stats is a huge field, we're talking highschool level. I think it probably covers it
Oh that’s neat! Probably should’ve checked your link. Not sure what the advantage of the Ti-84 would be for highschool math, but the UX on NumWorks calculators is completely a game changer, especially with stats and graphing questions.
Maybe everything is possible on the Casio, but it’s so much clearer on the NumWorks (especially for eg. Physics questions, where you might want to retrieve values you calculated earlier with full precision, etc). Genuinely felt like a cheat code when I was in highschool. I showed mine to my teacher and they swapped the whole’s schools standard calculators from the Ti-84 CE to the NumWorks, which is cheaper too.
I mean sure. Unlimited precision calculation I don't think is the proper domain of the cheap desk calculator.
I mean what do these do? I think like 10 digits worth?
If you're actually doing something requiring over 10 digits of accuracy and you can reliably hit that you probably have a $10 million lab...
So honestly what are we talking about here...If it's pure mathematics this is a bad tool for that as well.
oh of course. But I meant being able to select a result or equation from 10 minutes ago in the calculator history without re-typing it!
These cheap calculators certainly have history. I think it's even persistent.
Chips with megabytes of non-volatile storage can be had for under a dollar at scale these days.
https://us.rs-online.com/product/microchip-technology-inc-/s... ... 4MB (32Mb) $0.74.
The TI-84 EVO brags about having 3MB on their $160.00 device. Cool TI, don't strain yourself...
IB questions require at least a mid-range calculator to obtain e.g. the ccdf of chisq, t, and other distributions.
In the exam, you'd also be at a disadvantage without advanced graphing.
HL or SL? (It's been a while for me, but I know I needed PDF/CDF functions... and I don't know about the optional modules/Further.)
I took Math AA HL in M25
Oh, I didn't know they split it into two tracks! I was there when you had Math Studies/SL/HL/Further.
The contrived ones where they make you graph stuff, but that’s about it.
There is no graphing problem that you'll be asked to solve before university that can't be plotted to a 'good enough for high school' level by hand in seconds.
Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.)
If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.
Life is not all about solving problems, high school life even less so.
Personally, I found great enjoyment in coming up with more and more involved plots in the Polar and Parametric modes, where yes I would predict what a graph would look like and then go over to see it. And then go back and iterate. Etc. Until I was painting pictures with functions and had a far greater understanding of the domain than I’d wager anyone who thinks graphing calculations are for finding roots of polynomials could imagine.
You can enjoy that as much as you want without the curriculum mandating or all-but-mandating that every student buy a $160 toy.
This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator. Besides, it is expected that a student can use a graphing calculator to be able to numerically solve for a root of arbitrary polynomial equation.
> This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator
It is not nonsense. I'll draft an example.
Any second degree polynomial is a parabola that is either pointing up (positive a term), or down (negative a term). That term is an indication of how curved it is.
-b/2a is the X coordinate of the parabola's inflection point.
Plug that value into the equation and it'll give you the Y coordinate.
You now know the inflection point of the parabola, you know which way it points, and how steep it is, and exactly where the polynomial's roots should live (and whether or not it has any real ones!). If you remember what the squares of 0.5, 1, and 2 are, you can now connect the dots on a 'pretty good' plot.
This took yuo longer to read than it takes to do.
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Similar transformations can be applied to sine waves, root functions, exponentials, logarithms, and reciprocals.
If you can't do this, or don't understand how to do this, you have not learned and understood the material. If all you've learnt is how to plug the formula into a magic $160 box to look at the pretty picture, and how to ask it to solve for roots, you and your teachers have wasted your time. The point of all this isn't looking at plots, the point is understanding how you can manipulate these equations, and what these manipulations do to them. This should all be drilled to the point of being intuitive.
Anything so complicated that basic algebraic manipulations won't get you the rough shape in seconds of work... Is more complicated than a high schooler is taught to solve.
> Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS
There isn't one.
The TI-83 is just a $160 tax on every high school student. There is precisely zero use in a graphing calculator before university.
If you ever need a plot of literally any function you'd be plotting in high school, you should be able to do a very quick, very rough approximation by hand. If you can't, you haven't learned the material.
Graduated high school in 1984, I don't think graphing calculators existed then but if they did nobody had them. Standard "scientific" calculators were what I used for all my high school and university math.
Most of those are counterfeit knockoffs and the buttons are unreliable. It's safer to buy an older, pre-VPAM variant of the 300 or 991 models.
You can turn off VPAM though, why would you not want it?
I'm personally a fan of the ti-30xs. Still cheap and a good number of features for looking at data
Generating a QR code to see the graph online is kind of cool, but also kinda dumb too.
I mean, these days kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?
Ironically builtin smartphone calculators are really bad, and one of the best ones you can download might be Graph 89 (a TI-89 emulator).
Rant/Aside: Smartphones (or at least Android) are just generally really bad at being... smart, especially out of the box. No dictionary? No thesaurus? To say nothing of built-in encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). Calculator worse than the $1 scientific ones? It's astounding how obvious it is that they're meant to dumb people down and just sell you crap when you look at the complete absence of basic functionality anyone from 50+ years ago might expect them to have.
>kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?
Many tests will not allow you to use a smartphone. My son couldn't even use the school issued chromebook on his PSAT, he had to get a loaner Windows laptop or use an approved hard calculator.
I'm with you. Some open source app is all they need.
However to answer your question: phone rules in classrooms vary enormously and the dedicated calculator is faster to interface when you're drilling problems in a homework setting
I finished highschool in the (gasp) 20th century so the modern classroom is certainly something I've had to learn
Summary of the comments in here:
* I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules
* I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming
My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat.
My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front.
The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs.
Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!
Our study hall in Junior High would wipe your calculator as you signed in to ensure you weren't playing games, god forbid. I would claim not to have my calculator, and often not do my math homework in study hall just to avoid getting my calculator wiped.
My experience is not much different then what you listed, except I discussed programming with my math teacher. She said as long as I was the one who programmed it, and that I didn’t share the program with anyone else, the I could use it.
Looking back on that experience, I’m very grateful to her, but she also probably didn’t realize I was programming it to also show the individual ‘steps’ to get the solution instead of just the solution.
I wonder how many of us had the exact same experience (down to those damn three little dots!)
Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.
CAS capabilities are prohibited in the SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calcu...
Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college.
I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
I vaguely remember they were banned by a proxy that stopped working after the Ti-89 came out: no QWERTY keyboards
Originally that blocked the Ti-92, but then the Ti-89 and Nspire line had numeric keypads + CAS
Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.
CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
They let you write python programs as long as it’s from memory though. I wonder what the code golf looks like for a rudimentary python CAS. If you could evaluate the equation without needing to parse it, I bet you could get a lot of mileage out of a black box gradient decent routine. The analog circuit solver I wrote for my nSpire (without CAS) was ~11kB. https://github.com/deckar01/pylacc
Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom".
When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator.
Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
That rules out classes of problem which we want to teach, or falls back to using lookup tables which is more arduous and limits the number of problems which can be put on an exam.
Teaching students to use lookup tables at all is a largely pointless exercise. Teaching students to graph or use statistical functions on an advanced calculator transfers very well to other environments.
> That rules out classes of problem which we want to teach
Does it? Could you give a contrived example of a high school problem that would be ruled out by a lack of a graphing calculator?
> Teaching students to graph
They should be able to plot any of the functions they'll be working with by hand, very quickly.
> statistical functions
If they are using statistics, they should be able to provide the relevant combinatorial coefficients as the answer (xCy, etc), without actually doing the computation.
Not to mention that scientific calculators all support basic stats functions.
You've already rejected elsewhere in the comments the style of problem these calculators are used for as either "more complicated than a high schooler is taught" or a "your teachers have wasted your time".
Which is fine, you have an idiosyncratic view of modern mathematical pedagogy (at least as it exists in the US). When you're a high school math teacher you can argue with your state dept. of ed. about it.
These calculators are also used at the undergrad level, fwiw, so the "high school level" (whatever limit you're putting on that, many high schools will accelerate students into undergrad stats and as far as Calc II), is not a factor in their use overall.
Calculators can do a lot of things; a lot of physics is greatly improved by access to a good calculator.
My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students.
Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
The reason is exam requirements - some professional certifications don’t allow CAS calculators and have other restrictions.
I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
It doesn't help students learn if the tool does everything for them. This isn't a tool for professionals.
Heck, you could do a decent amount with the CAS back in the TI-89.
Decent? I'm not sure the new CAS models do anything that the TI-89 didn't.
Which is why it was notoriously banned from exams.
TI-89 is the GOAT!
Honest question: Why do we need physical graphing calculators anymore? Can't this just be a phone app?
That screen resolution for one is horrible for 2026.
Mostly for students in settings that may disallow either smartphones or calculators with specific advanced features (schools, SAT exams etc)
Also I don’t know about you but these days I welcome stuff that allows me to stay away from the damn phone.
i moved my ti-89 to be a phone app, but it was much much slower to type on the soft keyboard than it is to press the actual buttons.
It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
You don't. Most academic uses are now replaced by desmos, which is also used on the SAT. It's free, it's fast, and it does most of what you need.
I am pretty sure I could use a TI-89 Titanium in the dark even now
I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out.
All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps.
I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to beat a large screen and full keyboard.
"Approved for Exams" make more sense when you take into account the history of the Ti family of calculators.
Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."
It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.
for context
tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes
however:
- this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online)
- you have less muscle memory and often take longer
- harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction
- trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem
- some specific functions just don't exist
essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both.
this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question
ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though
Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
There are a lot of interesting problems that can be done with a calculator, though
The calculus courses I took in high school disagree
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I am from an xUSSR country. And started school shortly after the dissolution. Not only calculators were forbidden in exams, they were forbidden in classes. So calculators in school seems so strange to me.
TIL Desmos. Thanks for the interesting info, seems super cool!
In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0].
One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.)
I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints.
0: https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-co...
I just put up with TiLP which I somehow figured out how to build on macOS. I think I still have cruft from that attempt on my machine years later somewhere
> Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction
15 year old me in math class programming my loaned TI-82: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
Jokes on you, you learned to program.
Didn't let schooling interfere with their education.
I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators.
For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps.
I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all.
Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program).
This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".
What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
Or are we all just using software on our computers now.
That would be sad.
(I've had a Casio fx-991EX on my desk for a few years, that replaced a broken Casio fx-991ES. Though designed for academia, its operation is burned into my brain at this point.)
I collect HP calculators: I have an HP 12C, an HP 15C Collector's Edition (there are a few of them left still for sale), an HP 32Sii, and an HP 48SX. I sometimes use them, but whenever I'm in front of a computer (which is almost all the time), I find myself using the Unix dc command.
Handheld calculators are nice, but outside of exam settings, I could use a smartphone or a computer, though calculators are nice when I want to work distraction-free through something that requires performing calculations. I believe this is why HP largely exited the calculator market: HP's target market was professionals, and cheap computers and smartphones killed the calculator market for them, similar to how electronic calculators killed the slide rule. Texas Instruments, however, is still in the calculator business, largely due to their successful courting of American middle and high schools, as well as ETS and other testing agencies, beginning in the 1990s. I don't know the situation in Japan regarding calculator usage, but I see Casio scientific and graphing calculators proudly displayed at electronics stores such as Yodobashi Camera and Bic Camera.
I collect as well:
I use the HP-16C pretty regularly when I'm working on network protocol programming. I have good apps that do it, but there's something about having the calculator right in front of my keyboard rest and turning to it that I like more. In a pinch or outside the house I'll use JPRN instead.https://github.com/zathras/jrpn
I use emu48 on my phone emulating the HP-50g, which was almost exactly the same size as the phone so my muscle memory somewhat carries over (minus the tactile feedback of a real keyboard). I still have the physical calculator on my desk at home, with no batteries in it so it's only usable within reach of its USB cable.
Anything that goes beyond what that calculator's UI can reasonably handle is going to end up in a Jupyter notebook or something like that.
Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses.
[0] https://thomasokken.com/free42/ I should send them a donation.
[1] https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf followed by https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf
> What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
I still have my TI-85, but I essentially haven't used it since I left college. For 99% of what I need, I use either Python, or what's built into Firefox (e.g. unit conversion), or DDG. For that last 1% (e.g. full CAS functionality), I tend to grab whatever web-based non-AI tool is handy.
Web based AI tools are remarkably helpful these days since they no longer try to do math themselves and instead write python to do it.
The most common way for me to do basic arithmetic is by opening up a Python shell and using it as a calculator. This is what I typically do when I go through my finances every few months and calculate prices for things.
I use a TI nspire CX CAS.
honestly, I think it makes no sense to spend more than 30$ on a calculator if it can't do symbolic math.
The way you input things like division, integrals, matrix, etc. on newer calculators like the nspire is far superior than the older calculators (eg. ti-84, ti-89, etc.). They look like how you write them on a blackboard instead of relying on purely parentheses or "," and ";" to separate parameters. It's like going from Excel to Mathcad
If I’m reaching for calculator, I’m reaching for my phone.
At that point I’m either using the stock iOS calculator or iHP48, HP48 clone.
It mostly depends on which page of apps I’m on and which is closest.
I like the unit conversion on the iOS calculator, easier to use for trivial calcs than the HP.
Biggest gripe on iOS is a single memory. On the HP I’m mostly hooked on the infinite stack, and that’s why I use it over the HP-42 clone app I have as well.
I used to keep my old TI-82 (or was it -84?) from high school and a simpler sturdy solar-powered calculator near my desk, but I realized I always just used either my computer (IRB in the terminal usually) or Apple's calculator app on my phone and never ever touched my physical calculators. So they've now been put in storage.
Ti89 emulator on my android. Muscle memory from high school and college use is strong.
I still use my TI-89 from high school, but I'm interested to find if there are any open hardware/firmware calculator projects with basic engineering tools and a CAS.
emacs calc. It's RPN by default, inspired by HP RPN calculators. Also allows algebraic input.
Or often just a python repl
> emacs
> python repl
Hmm...
Honestly, most of the time whatever the newest variant of the TI-30 is ends up being plenty (and what I have at my desk).
> Simplified keypad
> The keypad layout removes clutter and makes commands and shortcuts easier to see, so you can work faster with fewer steps.
I don't see it. I compared a screenshot of one of these to a older T-84, and it looks like they have same number of buttons, and the buttons are just as cluttered (except the EVO has secondary labels on the keycaps instead of the case).
That's a good thing, since one of the best things about calculators is they typically have a ton of buttons for quick access to a lot of functions.
On my favorite designs ever? The first TI-Nspire "battleship" keyboard. Mini alpha-symbol keys in the corners of actual keys. It looked so annoying, but my muscle memory got very good at it.
https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202...
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.
I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.
Personally, I don't think I have much benefit in a new generation TI-84. I still own a TI-85, a model that was discontinued before I was born, and it is still an objectively superior tool for doing small calculations than any other alternative.
For instance, we compare the phone calculator. My phone fills a lot of really important roles besides being a calculator, ones that necessitate a password. So first I have to unlock my phone. Then I have to leave whatever app I had open before. Then I need to find the damn calculator app.
That's 5-6 seconds of friction, depending on how responsive my phone feels like being and how many times I fatfinger my password because the concept of "muscle memory" on a touch screen is practically an oxymoron. Not to mention, you cant just walk away from the desk for a moment with the calculator app left open on your phone, ready to come back at a moments notice, like you can with a dedicated calculator. Phones are just too important for that.
There's arguable pros and cons to using your PC over a calculator, but I think that discussion is a lot more nuanced. Either way, a PC is definitely less portable than your phone or a calculator.
Maybe I'll be convinced to upgrade at whatever point they add usb-c and a rechargeable battery to their lowest trim model. Not before that though.
> Not just an upgrade — an EVOlution
Oh no.
You’re absolutely right!
…LLM-isms are like nails on chalkboard I swear. Instant turn off the moment I read them.
Even if they’re maybe not lol, doesn’t matter my visceral reaction is negative.
That's just what standard marketing copy sounds like.
...which perhaps says a lot about the corpora that the models are trained on.
This made me double check if it wasn't someone's vibe code scam website.
156 MHz!!!!
Surprisingly high or surprisingly low?
I don't know either what they meant, but for comparison NumWorks calculators are clocked at 216 MHz (100 MHz for the older models, and 550 MHz for some of the latest ones, but not everywhere), so it doesn't look that much out of the ordinary, maybe a little underpowered from my experience with the first NumWorks but eh idk it's a calculator and unlike the first NumWorks they don't try to do CAS.
IMHO surprisingly low. Still not clear to me why they don't just port these things to ARM or similar?
I'm not an expert in this department but I wonder if battery life is a factor here. My Ti-84+ has not fully died once since I was in middle school (as a college graduate now). It can survive an entire year out of use and would still have a usable charge when I would pick it back up for a new math class.
Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.
Faster than a base-config SGI O2, with a MIPS R10000 at 150 MHz! /s
Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.
Electronics engineer here. I use my HP Prime G2 daily in the lab for basic things as well as quickly calculating complicated stuff, since you can pretty much program it to do whatever you want.
You might say why not use Python or Matlab?! It‘s true that you don‘t need a small handheld device to do engineering calculations where there is a ton of other much stronger and free options out there. But the thing is, a calculator is a pure dedication to one thing. You turn it on, you do your calculation, get the answer and move on. It gets out of your way. Plus it is a better feeling to type stuff using the dedicated buttons in a calculator than using a keyboard.
These have been standard equipment (that you buy, or the school loans out) in middle-class US high school math since the 90's (and gone basically unchanged since then). The math books even have content tailored to particular models so that you'll have to buy them instead of alternatives from other vendors.
IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.
Those are permitted in schools and even exams in the US, for example. That’s also why they’re often so limited, to make the exam cartels happy.
You may have gone to a poor high school and college. I saw plenty of calculator use in high school and college a long time ago.
Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles.
At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).
Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind.
But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.
In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do.
I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.
There's the NumWorks which is very similar for a more reasonable price, that also run Python
Numworks is so much better. According to kids that have access to Ti and HP graphing calculators.
The hardware and software design similarities between this Evo and Numworks is a strong endorsement.
And you can tell that TI pretty clearly copied the NumWorks calculator.
Why do you need an online calculator subscription? I can kind of get why you want a physical calculator, especially for a school environment, but why would you want a calculator online when you can just use... the rest of the web?
The comments on this are fascinating. Although, I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN."
2 dinners out for a family of four would cover the cost of this calculator. If my kid's school required this for math, I wouldn't bat an eye at purchasing one.
I needed a Ti-83 for school in 1996-1998. If you couldn't afford one, the school would loan you one for the semester. Band instruments were the same way.
> I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN."
Well, it is ;) The Swiss Micros clones are pretty awesome:
https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x
I have 2 Swiss Micros and a pile of sapphire-chip designed-in-Corvallis USA-made HPs. The DM41x is pure joy in the hand. But I still texted the pink TI-84 EVO to my 16-year-old daughter because she doesn't like my stodgy TI-84 CE Plus (which I love).
Same story here. I still have the HP15C I learned assembly language on ;) None worse for the wear. They'll all come handy after the acopalypse.
I'd take a dm42n over any Ti anyday.
Those who have used various classic HP calculators in the past may be interested in this:
https://www.swissmicros.com/products
These are clones of various older calculators.
I bought a DM42n last year. I didn't need it. I don't use it so often that I can justify its purchase. Still, wow, I do so enjoy working with it. It's one of those tools that just feels good to use.
There is a certain joy in working with RPN and in using a piece of technology that was designed as a tool, not as a toy or an educational appliance.
With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.
That's so true. It's custom-built to do exactly one thing, as efficiently and ergonomically as possible. I love any tool like that.
I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school).
That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base.
Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI.
There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day
The Python inclusion is fascinating to me. I, like many other kids in the US, did a lot of calculator programming with the TI-84 back in school. It definitely taught me the basics in a way that made my CS classes much easier. I'm jealous of the kids who now get to make that journey with Python instead of TI-Basic.
It's a beautiful device so much that hacker inside me wants to poke into what CPU they have and design a similar one in Verilog myself then put it on FPGA with similar display and it's driver then a 3D printed case and keys too.
I learned to program on a TI-83 and later bought a TI-84+ with the cable that allowed me to transfer my apps and games between my device and other students devices. I have fond memories of hand typing into a TI-83 BASIC for hours using code I found online at the local library - games like Drug Wars and other similar choose this or that console based games. I would later get a USB cable that allowed me to download apps and games onto my device. Good times. Decades later and I'm still programming.
156MHz and 3,5MB user memory... Why do I feel like that is a joke these days.. I think some ESP32s are faster and have more memory, but not sure if they are fully comparable...
I briefly laughed out loud at another comment saying their lightbulb has more computing power than that, because that's completely plausible for a wifi bulb today.
TI calculators peaked with TI-89/92/v200. Functionality, low latency UX, long battery life. These are still readily available in the second hand market, at very reasonable pricing (thanks to them selling well back then).
Unfortunately, ever since, they seem to have decided to imitate smartphones and focus on making restricted devices for exam taking, rather than tools to empower the user.
Shout out to https://ticalc.org/ - the design is pretty much unchanged.
Interesting that this doesn't seem to include a computer algebra system like the Nspire CAS. Wonder if it's a testing environment compliance thing?
Absolutely is
I do have fond memories of my TI-82 (we couldn't afford the fancier 84 or 89). I wonder, though, after all these years did Texas Instruments corner the market and obtain an monopoly on allowed calculators for proctored tests or ... because it sure is a shame there's not competition here driving the cost of these things down and the features way up.
Conclusion from reading HN comments: very few used the calculator to actually calculate anything
Wouldn't be hacking to use things for their intended purpose.
And those goddamn displays still have the pixel density of a Tamagotchi.
It's a shame that maths in American schools is equated with calculation. All you need to be a mathematician is a calculator!
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You can claw my HP48 out of my cold, dead, hands.
I'm an HP-12C guy since working on a trading desk and have 2 of the OG bronze colored ones and 2 of the HP-12C Platinum that are faster and silvery. But since I've been re-learning math with Math Academy I'm drawn to pick this puppy up. Should I be looking at an HP equivalent, though, since I'm an RPN convert?
I'll take my father's HP 49g to my grave. but if TI wanted to flirt with me, all it would take is a setting to enable Reverse Polish Notation. (I did check the features, and no mention).
This has me pining for a future professional class CAS 3d graphing calculator.
I'm thinking something that could be a major upgrade in spirit to the long-in-the-tooth (released a decade ago) Casio FX-CG500.
Could use the soon to be released ARM C-1 Nano and Pro cores in an SoC with stacked 2GB LPDDR4, USB-C charging to a large battery, high-res transflective LCD...
Mockup "AxiomPad Pro X1": https://enia.cc/out/axiompad-cas-mock.png
$160 at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI84-TI-Calculator/...
Not as bad as I would've expected. Also, apparently it includes a very simple Python environment? https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/eguides/eguide...
For a $10 BoM and maybe a year of R&D I would say that $160 is bad.
Their engineers are still trying to figure out how to make backlit keys. Just give them another two decades, I'm sure they'll crack it.
The $0.03 LED, $0.04 diffuser panel and the extra 3 cents for manufacturing keys with transparency will eat into their 93% profit margin. Can't have that. The children will just have to use a desk light.
A TI-83 was about $100 in the year 2000, and it doesn't look like it's that much cheaper today. I would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging their very captive market.
But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001.
TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones.
FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.
This has a 156Mhz processor.
My lightbulb has more calculating power than that.
Shrug. The SAT and ACT don't let you use an iPhone on their exams. $160 is what the market will bear. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and perhaps there's a market for a much cheaper competitor to beat TI here.
Is it a free market? Can students choose any calculator they want as long as it’s certified for their tests or is it mandated by the school?
You can use any calculator that meets the restrictions for things like the SAT.
However.
The entire year, your textbooks, your teacher, your in-class practice, was walking you through the specific commands you need to select to actually do the things, like graphing and solving.
If little Timmy is unable to read the manual about how to do math he doesn't yet know with whatever his specific calculator is, he is at a severe disadvantage, and the teacher basically cannot help him.
A friend in high school bucked the trend and used a casio in our TI based education, and did just fine for himself, but he was apparently a smart kid.
That problem could be solved by creating a 1:1 clone regarding buttons and user interface. But I guess TI has a good legal team to tackle that.
> $160 is what the market will bear.
You previously acknowledged it's a "very captive market" that you "would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging" :) "$160 is what the very captive market will bear until the state-sanctioned gouging backfires" is a less compelling argument.
"Shrug" is kind of gross. Seems like you're being reflexively cynical.
Edit: to be clear the problem here is really local school boards being antidemocratic and unaccountable, not TI being greedy.
Seems like you're being reflexively cynical
There are plenty of things in the world for me to spend my limited supply of outrage on. Calculator pricing doesn't make it into the top 100.
It is an abysmal value. Your corner drugstore sells an AP/SAT approved calculator for $9 to $29.
I will buy one anyway because calculators remain a modest luxury that I want to indulge.
With a CPU 3x faster than a z80, you gotta wonder how many seconds per python instruction.
Simply the best: https://www.hp.com/us-en/calculators.html
I didn't have a calculator until my senior year of highschool. But since we weren't alliwed to use them in tests, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
As an engineering student at CMU, I had an HP 15c like everyone else. A few years back when I found out they are coveted, I sold mine on ebay. I have an emulator on my phone.
I assume that calculators will continue to evolve and that my grandchildren will have a Propædeutic Enchiridion.
I used to doodle and make pixel art on my TI 84+ in high school. I'd spend entire classes just clicking left, right, up, down, and enter to move and toggle individual pixels with a simple program I'd written. https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html
the best calculator is of course a RPN calculator, preferably a HP 48GX, but HP Prime also suffices. Swissmicros DM42N is a good second :-)
To bad it is still made for pupils and not engineers. I tried using it for computer science and math and it lost to a Casio
I use Qalculate! quite a lot (but for rather simple things). However, I miss the "physical" aspect of having real buttons. How woud this Ti-84 Evo compare ?
https://qalculate.github.io/
I love that the first thing I see in the website (at least on mobile) is "Approved for exams", as if there was some other reason one would be forced to buy those pieces of garbage.
My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it.
Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.
I find it interesting that TI still seems to use custom ASIC chips for their calculators.
Any MCU out of their portfolio should be fully capable of driving the display, reading the keyboard. And the math should be lightweight for even the smallest processors nowadays.
Biggest ripoff in academics.
There should be a cheap open source calculators for schools and exams. It’s ridiculous that TI is still charging this.
The biggest ripoffs were the textbooks. Especially the textbooks written by the teachers, themselves, who forced you to buy them.
The UI reminds me quite a bit like https://www.numworks.com/calculator/apps/
Looking at the price of this and other calculators, I wonder if there's a market for "dumb calculators" analogous to dumb terminals: a device with the calculator form factor, keyboard, and display, but where the actual computation happens on a paired computer/phone or a cloud endpoint over WiFi/Bluetooth.
The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.
What's the "online calculator license" ?
"Online calculator included (four-year subscription) •($80 value)"
Apparently just a TI-84 Evo emulator(?) that you can run in a browser for $20/year:
https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...
My guess is that they are trying to encourage people not to use the various clones and unofficial emulators available for their calculators.
It runs python!?
I still have my ti89, and my brother's 83. My kids will learn to write text based dealer simulation in ti-basic, then 68k assembly, like real men^.
^ they're boys so that cliche works
But no mention of the most important feature… I just need to know that it can still play Drug Wars.
Bring back the HP-10c. RPN with "scientific calculator" label. Pure and simple, and approved for testing that forbids any programmable devices.
EDIT: oops, conflated with HP-35, from a decade earlier. 10c was programmable. HP-35 was not.
Distraction free tools like this calculator, is increasingly important to help keeping focus.
How is the battery life? Rechargeable sure is nice, but the older models lasted forever on 4 AAAs (at least my TI-83). That's one aspect that would justify the low processing power for today's standards for portable computing devices.
I still have my TI-83 plus. It's been with me for 25 years now! I've always kept it on my desk, despite the fact that I engraved 'KoЯn' on cover when I was 13 or 14.
As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny
I always thought they should make a thin, metal, foldable 83 variant that just bends in the middle and looks like a cigarette case.
You will have to pry my TI-89 from my cold dead hands. I wish they still made it
"Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction"
They clearly haven't met a classroom of high school kids. Then again... I didn't have access to the internet in my pocket when I was in high school so....
They're most definitely trying to ride on the recent anti-technology in school push.
Loved it in university and still use it on my phone:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.eanema.graph89/
I have no idea how on earth a scientific calculator costs almost as much as a cheap android phone. Do they use oled and snapdragon soc these days? Back in my school days a 20$ Casio seems more than enough.
If only they would build a Ti-84 RPN, I would snap it up in a heartbeat
Apparently, you can use it in RPN mode!
But can it play BlockDude?
I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.
Hand reaches over and I lovingly pat the HP-67 sitting on my desk.
There is something impressive about a product line that can remain culturally relevant for this long, even if part of that durability comes from a very protected niche.
Is there any information on exactly what kind of processor is inside this thing? Since running python I'm thinking it's actually a low end mobile processor.
Classic hacker mindset - the rule said no programmable calculators, so you made it say it wasn't one. Security through labeling.
I wonder why they don't have a "Buy now" button on their website.
Great memories writing games in TI-BASIC on sheets of loose-leaf paper to later transcribe manually into my TI-84+.
Nice to see the hardware move forward. I still wish calculators were more open, or at least less locked into school-age pricing.
Wasting time making games on my TI84 in the back of middle school geometry taught me how to program.
I want a desk calculator keyboard that works with my phone. New TIs are just really cheap phones now.
Python programming with 156 MHz and 3.5 MiB of RAM? Can a Python REPL even start up with that profile?
3.5 MB is pretty generous, actually! Some older TI-84 models had MicroPython running on a secondary ATSAMD21 processor with 32 KB of RAM - that was effectively unusable.
Do these graphing calculators still use Derive (tm)? pity, there is no pc version anymore
It has Python? That's pretty cool.
It doesn’t have a qwerty keyboard. That would be such a pain to type on.
For some reason qwerty keyboard calculators are banned in tests.
I think those were aimed at different market segments. And that would be engineers, professionals and working academics that is not students.
Generally limitations in education on what was allowed led to more limited feature sets. Where as full feature set that could be upsold with qwerty keyboard was aimed for different users.
75” 4k OLED screens would have been unobtainable when I first used a TI.
10yrs ago they would have been 4 to 5 figures.
Now they are what? A couple hundred?
How in the world is a TI graphing calculator still $160? These 30yr old calculator chips apparently hold their value like gold…
It’s got a 3x faster processor brah
Good point, my understanding of a cubic function in 02 was totally stunted by the processor speed…
Wow, no comment yet for https://xkcd.com/768/
Does it still use Zilog eZ80 (Z80-family, 24-bit) as the main CPU?
HP48GX rules, HP Prime is a solid second. SwissMicros DM42N is a solid third.
I don't have a prime, but agreed on 48gx + dm42n without a doubt. I'd add the 50g as another contender, doesn't depend so much on external memory cards (which have the tendency to fail) and is fairly aligned with the 48/49 line.
How are these still so slow?
Q: Who else had their first exposure to programming on a Ti-83/4 calculator?
The only thing I used mine for in high school was playing Phoenix and Drug Wars.
It runs Python!
National exams will be wild for the kids capable of programming or vibe coding.
With a 156MHz processor and 3.5 megabytes of user-available memory the kids will even learn how to optimize their code!
I had a TI-89 in high school. I was that kid.
I don't get it. Who is buying these calculators nowadays? It's expensive and any plot it can generate is 1 prompt away from the AI that students are already using. Also why is there a calculator license? what even is that?
That is the coolest graphing calculator I've ever seen.
Ti-30x is all you need.
Does it run Doom?
Who is using this on the SAT when there is Desmos?
If only kids of today loved this more than their phones.
Very very warm nostalgic fuzzy feelings here
The race to run custom code on these is on :D
price, 165$ which is ridiculous for a device that costs them less than 20$ to build.
I see we've finally progressed beyond https://xkcd.com/768/, in specs if not in functionality or price point.
But when will it run GPT? (:
This is a very useful gadget and without any AI
Can we still program assembly on this one? There must be a way to hack it open.
nostalgia
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is any of this really necessary now that we have LLMs ?
ever been to school?
Yes, things that are not LLMs continue to be useful and interesting even though LLMs exist.
I hate what AI hype is doing to peoples' brains here.