abstractbill

Math is full of such steps, moreso than most other endeavors, probably because the main limit is the abstract reasoning itself.

That, as well as how long we've been doing it (thousands of years!) and so how much of the more accessible parts we've explored very thoroughly.

I've been admining our family minecraft servers for about 5 years, and just handed off that job to my 12 year old daughter who now knows more than enough of the linux command-line to do it. I thoroughly recommend it, it's been great!

There are many ways to get it done. What worked best for us was choosing java over bedrock, renting a cheap linux vps, and writing some very simple shell scripts for starting, stopping, changing worlds, etc. Happy to talk you through anything you get stuck on!

These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.

A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it was impossible to do a really good job of it back then. This sounds like it might finally make it doable!

It's nice to see peoples' success stories with diagnoses. I've been suffering from something for more than 20 years now. I was healthy until 2005. Then it seemed like I got sick with some kind of virus and just... never got better. I have unpredictable good stretches and bad stretches. During my bad stretches I can't get out of bed. I've mostly given up on the idea of a diagnosis myself, after seeing dozens of doctors over the years, with the most positive interactions being Stanford researchers telling me I'm a really "interesting" case.

My 15 year old is devouring them right now. She pauses dozens of times every day to tell me the best jokes. I love it.

"... though when it tried to animate it the bicycle bounced off into the top and the bicycle got warped."

Should be the pelican bounced off.

I read them as a teenager, and now my teenaged daughter has started reading them. They are every bit as good as I remember them being.

A complaint asking what this has to do with hackers or hacking.

A question I enjoy asking myself when I'm wondering about this stuff is "if there are alien mathematicians in a distant galaxy somewhere, do they know about this?"

For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.

This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.

Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else.

Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging back.

It’s your brain working as intended.

As intended by whom?

Sure, but I think there's plenty of room for people to say "I found this pattern that looks really interesting!" without analyzing it further themselves.

It's just "turtle": https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

I started my kids on turtle graphics. There's a good implementation that comes with python that's very easy to get up-and-running, to the point where it quite reminds me of BASIC on the kinds of microcomputers I got started on as a kid.

Honestly my first reaction to seeing these photos was to wonder if they were AI-generated (I'm not suggesting they are, I just have that response quite often now).

It's been a long time since I've been a regular reader of any newspaper, but when I was (admittedly at least 20 years ago!) I don't remember it being that way at all. Can you suggest a good example of a recent Guardian article that's ragebait?

Yes, and all of these dates would be considered "young" by most mathematicians!

Congrats on your progress!

Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation.

My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.

Typo: "When we with vectors" should be "When we work with vectors" I think.

A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.

In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."

What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.

(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).

Yes! That a really fun problem too -- it feels like it should be tractable but it's insanely hard. If you do start some kind of competition around it, let me know, I'd be interested.

The link at the bottom doesn’t work.

Can you clarify which link is broken and how? What browser and OS?

In my experience, LLMs are terrible at clues.

That hasn't been my experience. Without good prompting they give you clues that are too bland and literal, but it is quite possible to get them to give you clues with interesting and creative wordplay. I wish it was easier to get clues like that more consistently, but it's certainly doable. I still believe within a year it'll be easy.

Thanks!

That's a wonderfully hard problem, I'd love to see it get solved.

Great observation, yeah, I've had very similar experiences with prompting, exactly as you said -- one direction giving very bland literal clues, and the opposite direction giving clues that are a stretch even when you know the answer!

Thanks. Yes, specificity of solutions seems like a good metric to optimize for.

In some of my crosswords I get clues that are specific in clever ways (e.g. one of these has "Extreme, not camping" which I thought was really strange until I found the answer "intense" and was very impressed by that level of wordplay from an LLM!)

Oh that's really interesting thanks! That would actually be an easy constraint to add too.

Thanks for the kind words, I will try to get something written up about it.

I didn't notice HN had replaced the link (https://crosswordracing.com) by the current (at the time) redirect. If you want to go to the current front-page game, you should visit https://crosswordracing.com

Edit: If anyone has any interest in how I'm generating the crosswords feel free to reach out. It was a fascinating problem to solve, and I'm not aware of any better automatically-generated crosswords than these right now.