TimorousBestie

Both.

Yep, can confirm. I was aggressively recruited for education as a math undergrad. There was no way that was going to happen, too many people view male teachers as inherently predatory.

To your point about high humidity exacerbating heat, I think it’s relevant to consider wet bulb globe temperatures (WBGT) instead of air temperature. It’s more objective than heat index or the ad hoc “feels like” metrics. Above 30-35C WBGT, humans start dying without intervention.

In the United States at least, days with high WBGT have increased and more places experience them. I hear the same is true also in Europe.

The document says more about the kind of advisor Moh was than the kind of mathematician Zhang is.

If you’re interested, I found https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09814v1 to beat Strassen for medium-sized and larger covariance matrices. YMMV of course. Takes a little adjustment for XX^H but it’s not so bad.

In addition, he was riffing on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a hub-and-spoke style prison design with a single guard at the hub observing the prisoners in each spoke.

1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.

I would like to see him try, yes.

Should they cook our food too?

Unironically, also GP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46559004

> The bad food is a plus. The most orderly civilizations generally have the blandest food. Almost all societies with good food are chaotic and disorderly.

So yes, the state should probably take over cooking to maintain order!

Seems pretty straightforward to implement a rule saying siblings go to the same district by default. I’m sure there are a bunch of edge cases, but the assignment process doesn’t have to be totally random.

I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school.

Setting aside the inevitable transportation issues this is an excellent policy that I would love to see implemented, but I think too many suburbs built their identity around “having the (property tax base necessary to create the) good school district.”

Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.

If we’re thinking about the same essay it’s a criticism of capitalist YIMBYs who are only interested in building McMansions and the like. It is both anti-NIMBY and anti-some-YIMBYs, which seems reasonable to me.

EDIT: Historically, some YIMBYs have not opposed—I guess we’ll call it instead—unaffordable housing. So-called “capitalist” or “libertarian” YIMBYs in particular. Robinson’s article describes this. Leftists are skeptical of “all housing construction makes housing more affordable” arguments, and there’s evidence presented in the article to that effect.

It didn’t change my opinion, which matches OP’s.

And if you flag/downvote AI content (or any other class of content) too consistently, you’ll find your flags and downvotes quickly become ineffective.

So the guidelines are in some sense a red herring.

It is an excellent comic. It’s a pity bowel disrupters aren’t real, they would certainly keep scrum from running over time.

As you remind us all once or twice a day. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive, of course.

This approach is the perfect "the richer get richer" inequality engine that would run things even faster than our current system (which works pretty well already).

That’s the idea. Lawyers accustomed to the patronage of wealthy clients need more of them to maintain their lifestyle.

I believe economic growth is important to improve the lives of citizens who struggle to obtain the means of subsistence, but beyond that I don’t really see the point. Growth becomes actively harmful when it exacerbates wealth inequality.

Using GDP per capita as the metric assumes that the proceeds of economic growth “trickle down” uniformly, and this is obviously not true.

Axler’s _Linear Algebra Done Right_ should get you at least part of the way there, content-wise, depending on what other math background you have.

As for reading math papers in general, it’s mostly a process of stepping through it incrementally and trying to verify the steps you don’t understand based on the surrounding context. Most of the concepts in this paper are accessible on Wikipedia or elsewhere, you can make small (e.g. 2 x 2) examples as you go and see what happens.

It’s not an easy skill to acquire from scratch, especially from outside the ivory tower.

I don’t get paid to do my job and then also the submitter’s job.

If you're getting code without tests to review in a PR, that should be an instant reject without even looking at the code.

Management didn’t like that the last time I was assigned a AI-gen PR and I like my job otherwise.

You are doing it wrong.

I didn’t write any of it. I occasionally get assigned PRs written (or not, in this case) by other devs.

Claude can generate tests and verify the code better than humans now.

It certainly didn’t do that in this case.

I don't trust humans to get things right anymore -- I have a PhD and Claude knows all the math and libraries better than me.

If it knows all the libraries so well, why did it add a bespoke implementation?

Claude and Codex are now generating all my code for me now, and I see them spitting out SVD code frequently -- often for very special cases.

I find this so annoying. I had to PR some Claude-generated gaussian elimination routine last month and making sure it got the pivoting logic correct was a waste of my time.

And yes progress is good progress.

Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.

Haber, on chemical warfare: “The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”

The lord of the rings on Amazon isn’t otherwise great.

That really underscores how bad the author’s “drama requires moral ambiguity” argument is. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power did everything it could to inject moral ambiguity into a very unambiguous text—Galadriel is now an obsessive that disregards the cost of her vengeance, Halbrand presents as a possible Aragorn ancestor, Adar is just trying to redeem the Uruk, etc.—but all of it falls flat, none of the reveals land (“I am good!”), and the end result is simply narm. The casting of Arondir and Disa hardly makes a difference in the light of all these writing flaws.

I have very little sympathy for “You couldn’t write X today” arguments. Here, X is The Wire.

There is a spiritual successor to The Wire: 2022’s miniseries We Own This City. Same complicated representation of Baltimore. Same complicated representation of American policing. Good critical reception, but less widely-known than a legendary show that ran for six years and sixty episodes.

The substantive difference between the two is that 2020’s-era HBO doesn’t make long-running serials like The Wire and The Sopranos anymore (Hacks is a notable exception).

That’s not a political change forced on them by unnamed leftists. That’s a change in business model.

Your description of the DSA is completely unrecognizable from my experience at local DSA meetings.

Nobody in my area cares much about Israel (outside of the handful of months between Biden dropping out and Harris losing, I can’t recall it coming up). Currently we’re organizing for food banks (SNAP cuts have really hurt our community) and trying to prepare for the chaos of Haitians and others losing TPS and possibly getting deported.

It’s not only Republicans getting contributions from Big Egg.

I thought it was very interesting, but maybe also incredibly naive politically ? it's like he's re-discovering alienation under capitalism.

To be fair, a number of professional politicians and political scientists don’t understand alienation under capitalism.

pure mathematicians lost themselves in the formalization of hypothesizing/modeling and thus lost touch with mapping it to reality.

You’re describing a very small fragment of total current mathematical labor. Very few people work solely on “formalization” and even e.g. model theory or type theory have real consequences.

LLMs sure, but AlphaZero had no visual cortex yet can smash Magnus Carlsen easily.

Chess does not require a visual cortex to play. People have been playing by mail with algebraic notation for centuries.