annzabelle

To second this, most (non-applied) mathematicians work first with paper and pencil or on a chalkboard, and the act of writing out the symbols is a part of thinking about them. Typing doesn't wire into the brain in the same way. Think of how you learned algebra in school. You wrote out much of what you were thinking, often in ways that would be hard to flexibly format on a computer, and the act of writing your thoughts solidified them in your memory.

Mathematicians pretty much universally view typesetting as a distinct step from the thinking part of math, and something you do at the end once you have figured everything out.

Definitely agreed. I have a bachelor's in math and took an abstract algebra course as part of it. I also took a couple computer science courses in college and work as a data engineer. My only real exposure to networking is from an AWS cert I did years ago.

I can tease apart the Rees Algebra article one bit of half remembered terminology at a time and come out of it feeling like I just barely understand what the topic even is.

I can read the TCP article and feel like I have a thorough overview of the topic and could explain it at a high level to someone else.

Great links.

Yeah, it's not really a global "I have nothing to hide from any government whatsoever" but more of a "I don't have chat logs about overstaying or smuggling," which is what they're likely to implicitly assume if they've hit the point of searching your phone and you've got some special phone they can't search.

In my home country I would take a principled stance and hire a lawyer, but in the particular case of border crossings to a country you're not a citizen of, seeming like you have something to hide can easily lead to them denying you entry.

They have screen readers.

Maybe I should've specified: I have seen many anecdotes of RCS being substantially more unreliable on GrapheneOS than it is on stock Android.

My understanding was that you have to install google messages to get RCS to work and on google's end it gets finicky about device ids. I read a couple blogs where people found RCS to be really unstable on GrapheneOS even with a couple workarounds.

If I'm going to have to install a bunch of google products onto my phone anyways, I don't buy the benefits as much.

I also had a recent experience being shaken down by a border guard entering Australia, and if he'd asked to go through my phone, explaining that I'm running a weird privacy focused OS he's never seen before seems like it would be a great way to increase my chances of spending a night in airport jail and being put on the next flight to North America. I don't really have anything to hide and appearing like I have things to hide could seriously inconvenience my life. Barring a tourist from entering a country has a very low bar of evidence.

Edit: Also the backup restoration is a bit more of a mess for me right now for the same reason I need the dual sim feature. I've got an American esim that's difficult to reactivate without being in America.

I've been looking into GrapheneOS as a longtime Pixel user who is thinking of becoming a bit more security conscious. But, looking around at its current state RE: RCS and camera apps, I think it makes the most sense to stick with stock Android.

I also have a really niche feature I rely on daily (letting me "wifi call" from one sim over the data line of the other sim), and it's really hard to tell if GrapheneOS supports it.

If I can grab my old pixel that's stored in a box at my parents' house on another continent I might give it a try, but GrapheneOS really doesn't seem ready to be a daily driver.

I will say (if you have that first 5-10 years of experience or so), there is real value in becoming an expert in some enterprise technology that was extremely popular 20+ years ago. The COBOL consultants getting $500 an hour right before Y2K might be an exaggeration, but you can build a career on getting businesses out of legacy systems messes.

My father is an expert on the IRS-specific IBM 360 Assembly code base and their tangled webs of attempts to get off of it, and it made for a very comfortable (and well compensated) role for the last 20 years of his career.

I would definitely not suggest COBOL or MUMPS to a 20 year old, but as a niche for a 30 year old for a stable gig? Some of these legacy systems are never going away.

I recommend if you're looking into inpatient treatment and you're not an acute danger to yourself or others, look into partial hospitalization programs and intensive outpatient programs instead. I know Kaiser covers some at least in Virginia.

In my experience with family members, inpatient hospital stays at many hospitals in the US are one of the least therapeutic environments possible, and once you've gone through an ER or psych ER (which most of them make you do), you have no control over which hospital you end up at. In the end your stay is unlikely to be any more than 7 days.

PHP programs on the other hand tend to fill the role that work had previously taken in someone's life for a few to several weeks. They're typically 9-3, held in office parks, and are mostly quality group therapy with a daily or weekly psych visit.

I will note that in a lot of places in the US, the role of medium term acute psychiatric care is taken by partial hospitalization programs, where patients go to a facility (usually a few conference rooms in an office building) during the workday for intensive therapy and medication management, but go home with family in the evenings. These programs are a lot cheaper than inpatient programs, and the standard workflow in my experience (with "good" insurance) at this point is 3-10 days inpatient, followed by 2-10 weeks in a PHP, and possibly some part time program after that. A lot of people skip the inpatient part if there's no acute danger.

I'm surprised the author makes no mention of those sorts of programs in the article. It makes it sound like the options were a luxury 8 week inpatient or nothing, when there's really a lot of stuff in between.

It's actually because of DARPANET/ARPANET and other early computer research that was military or intelligence funded. It led to a concentration of networking in the region that led to MAE-East and it's all spiraled from there. The transatlantic cables were an aftereffect of everything else.

I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.

Reddit has always had the dynamic of people misrepresenting their knowledge and just repeating what other people said on that subreddit. I find myself doing that when I spend too long on there - posting very authoritatively on something I'm honestly clueless about.

One big pet peeve of mine on reddit is on any kind of immigration-related subreddit it is absolutely filled with people talking about how it's impossible to migrate and you'll never get a visa. Yet, meanwhile, people do migrate successfully and legally all the time.

Growing up near Ashburn makes every anti data center argument feel like crazy land. From my perspective when I lived there, they were somewhat ugly large boxes that paid county tax and raised land value. I never noticed any kind of noise from them, though they were largely on industrially zoned land right by the airport. Also gave us single digit ping. Electricity rates are below the national average.

Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.

I grew up right by Ashburn, Virginia, which has the largest concentration of hyperscale data centers in the world. I rarely heard of organized opposition to them until they became a politically charged issue and associated with white collar layoffs.

I never once noticed significant noise from any of them - they are nearly all on the opposite side of a wide road from the nearest housing, and the road is louder than the data center. There is enough electric supply in the region that they almost never run the gas turbine generators.

As a way of growing the industrial tax base of an area, they are one of the least dirty ways to use industrially zoned land, though they don't produce as many long term jobs. There is a big data center construction and design industry in that region, and it did pull Amazon to open HQ2 nearby, but those are both first mover effects.

I have, in two wildly different companies, on opposite sides of the globe, witnessed leadership go all in on using LLMs to write external documents that would have significant legal and financial consequences for any inaccurate statements or numbers included. There's always a "we'll have our experts read and fact check everything before we send it out," but I have a strongly held view that people whose expertise is not in editing/fact checking tend to be far worse and sloppier at it than they are at writing things correctly the first time.

I mostly view AI as raising me up one more level of abstraction in coding. It still requires babysitting and verification if you want anything vaguely maintainable that's not pulling in a ton of irrelevant libraries, but now I am able to give a clear spec for a ~50-100 line task and it'll get it 90% right, and it's a small enough chunk I can validate it well.

Claude though is still slow enough that I think it works out to maybe a 50% improvement at my time to do a task, but sacrificing deep knowledge and learning. I worry that I'll never develop the same skills and intuition that senior engineers developed a decade ago because I'm outsourcing a lot of the planning and thinking.

Late on this, but small town. Turboprop I think. Jets have security but prop planes don't here. It was still large enough to have a waiting area and flight attendants.

Big difference between specially locked checked briefcase and open carried rifle through the airport.

I think part of it is that even at the busiest airport on the South Island (Christchurch) this would be a doable ask for us. My boss just has no concept of what life is like in a large country, let alone a large city. He's thinking of LaGuardia Airport as just Christchurch Airport but larger.

I had the chance recently to do several of New Zealand's Great Walks (3-4 day scenic wilderness treks with more expensive huts than the rest of the hut system), and I highly recommend doing something similar if you can swing it. Walking 15-30 km a day (9-18 miles) for several days while carrying supplies on your back really gives you new context for what you can do and what life was like without cars.

I find Claude is shockingly slow. If it were genuinely instantaneous, it would be worth it, but I often find myself twiddling my thumbs while waiting for it to cook.

I met someone who told me they flew domestically with a licensed hunting rifle in NZ about 10 years ago and they were told to open carry the rifle onto the plane where the flight attendant locked it up.

Unrelated but Finnair's requirements for flying with doctoral swords are wonderful.

We have a lot of long term connections in the industry in NZ. I'm simplifying a little, but the process for a district council to hire us to do the same thing the next district council over paid us to do last year is relatively straightforward.

The sinkhole thing is a really long story, and a lot of it is that my boss is an old, eccentric, PhD who has zeroed in on this.

LaGuardia has sinkholes because it's built on a crazy substructure of rotting wooden pilings and metal framework.

We don't expect them to pay us, my boss (remember, 70 year old Kiwi) thinks you can just call airports up and get on the runway. To be entirely fair, if a sinkhole opened up at Invercargill airport, we could be on the runway tomorrow, and probably next week at Christchurch. He just doesn't realize that NYC is not the South Island.

Tangentially related, but I work for a New Zealand company that does civil engineering work, including some in the US. There's a lot of localization that we have to do around roads being much wider and different materials being used, but the main idiosyncrasy is that in New Zealand we can just call people up on the phone or via email and arrange contracts, but for large jurisdictions in the US there is a competitive bidding process that we (as a foreign company) can't just circumvent.

My boss wanted to investigate some sinkholes on the runway at LaGuardia to calibrate a device, and was confused that I (the token American) couldn't just call up the Port Authority of New York and get our truck of equipment onto a runway the same week. I tried to explain to a coworker that American airports and the Port Authority in particular are very sensitive about what they allow airside, and he said "oh, so we don't get hit by a plane." I had to explain the last 25 years of American history to him.

I've heard rumors, maybe that far back, of women getting mail ads for baby clothes a couple weeks before having a positive pregnancy test.

I do find that the best apps are the paid ones, they don't need to be relying on selling user data to make a profit.

Sadly, a lot of the great boutique lifestyle business paid apps are apple only, and I can't stand the typing experience on iphones.

I use Macrofactor (macro tracking app for lifters with good privacy/UI) as a weight/period tracker, and occasional macro tracker. I don't think anybody is going to go to the effort to hack their databases to find the 100 women tracking our periods on it.

The one downside is that they do days since last period as days since the end of your last period, not days since the start, unlike literally every woman and gynecologist ever.

LLMs, for better or worse, bring some of that capability to users who aren't fluent in scripting. It allows language centric control, but a couple more layers of abstraction up from direct coding, especially with the rise of agents.

Though, I do find that breaking down instructions into concrete specific steps and validating the LLM output is its own skill that is not too dissimilar to the mindset needed for coding.

The description of interacting with a computer through language seems oddly prescient of LLMs.

Definitely agree on exercise. I'm a temperamentally neurotic person and had ADHD diagnosed as a child. I no longer take ADHD medication, but I run 3-4 days a week and it makes my baseline tension and neuroticism much lower, and improves focus.