As a teacher, no, memorization is an important step before understanding

Yep, same. Without fail the kids I run into who are bad at Maths and "hate Maths" have been poor at mental arithmetic. i.e. not keeping up with what is being taught because they're still struggling with the number-crunching. Once they get up to speed with mental arithmetic their marks improve and they don't hate Maths anymore.

I personally find them kind of annoying

So downvote them and/or scroll on by. As long as I keep getting more upvotes than downvotes I'll keep posting them, for those who do want to read them (the people who are upvoting). There's a lot of good content in them. Not sure what your objection to them is, other than no-one else has been posting anything else for weeks.

There is too much of them right now

There's exactly 1 per day. As pointed out by someone else, no-one else had posted anything else at all for weeks.

I believe we should stick to “one topic, one post”

Each one has literally dozens of stories in it. Feel free to start posting separate links for each one if that's what you want to see. I myself don't have the time for posting dozens of links each day. Contrary to what someone else seems to think, I am a person, not a bot, sharing relevant links I see each day. The upvotes I'm getting show it is appreciated, and here we are.

Except TI calculators also give the wrong answer when a bracketed term has a coefficient.

There's no multiplication in this question - multiplication refers literally to multiplication signs - only division and brackets, and addition within the brackets. So you have to use The Distributive Law to solve the brackets, then do the division, giving you 1.

2-(2-2)

But you broke the rule of left-associativity there. You can go right to left provided you keep each number with the sign to it's left (and you didn't do that when you separated the first 2 in brackets from it's minus sign).

I’ve never had anyone tell me operations with the same priority can be done either way, it’s always been left to right

It's left to right within each operator. You can do multiplication first and division next, or the other way around, as long as you do each operator left to right. Having said that, you also can do the whole group of equal precedence operators left to right - because you're still preserving left to right for each of the two operators - so you can do multiplication and division left to right at the same time, because they have equal precedence.

Having said that, it's an actual rule for division, but optional for the rest. The actual rule is you have to preserve left-associativity - i.e. a number is associated with the sign to the left of it - and going left to right is an easy way to do that.

Sharp as well.

Are you for real?

Yes, I'm a Maths teacher.

A fraction is a shorthand for division with stronger (and therefore less ambiguous) order of operations

I added emphasis to where you nearly had it.

½ is a single term. 1÷2 is 2 terms. Terms are separated by operators (division in this case) and joined by grouping symbols (fraction bars, brackets).

1÷½=2

1÷1÷2=½ (must be done left to right)

Thus 1÷2 and ½ aren't the same thing (they are equal in simple cases, but not the same thing), but ½ and (1÷2) are the same thing.

It’s not a law of maths in the way that 1+1=2 is a law

Yes it is, literally! The Distributive Law, and Terms. Also 1+1=2 isn't a Law, but a definition.

So 1/2x is universally interpreted as 1/(2x)

Correct, Terms - ab=(axb).

people doing academic research in maths, not primary school teachers

Don't ask either - this is actually taught in Year 7.

if they realise it’s over a question like this they’ll probably end up saying “it’s deliberately ambiguous in an attempt to start arguments”

The university people, who've forgotten the rules of Maths, certainly say that, but I doubt Primary School teachers would say that - they teach the first stage of order of operations, without coefficients, then high school teachers teach how to do brackets with coefficients (The Distributive Law).

Not sure what exactly this convention is called

It's 2 actual rules of Maths - Terms and The Distributive Law.

never ambiguous

Correct.

there is no right or wrong

Yes there is - obeying the rules is right, disobeying the rules is wrong.

the correct answer is 16, right?

No, the correct answer is 1.

Pays to know how to recover code from the reflog in these cases.

At first I read that as re-flog. Is that with a cat o' nine tails? 😂