antioedipus

You (or others) may like Struik’s A Concise History of Mathematics [1]. It’s also quite easy to read cover-to-cover. My other favorite, Stillwell’s Mathematics and Its History, is excellent as well.

In my opinion, Stillwell’s book is better to read as a way to motivate a particular topic, whereas Struik’s book really tries to illustrate the arc of mathematics through history—of course, Struik’s approach has its limits.

History can motivate otherwise inscrutable or dry mathematics in a way that would probably interest many students. Why isn’t the history of math a serious part of secondary school? I don’t think US students remember that much of whatever we do teach there anyway.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Concise_History_of_Ma... or https://archive.org/details/concisehistoryof0000dirk

First of all, many rolling release distros don’t follow upstream as fast as possible—there’s often some testing window.

People go on and on about backported security patches and stability, but I’ve had to handle so many buggy patches or issues that never got a backported fix that I now think this is basically a fantasy. The distro maintainers just don’t have the time (or experience with all the software they ship!) to backport patches for every single issue. I’d really rather get a fix by the actual software maintainer than a year-old mystery meat version that still has a bunch of known non security bugs fixed in upstream that the distro maintainers don’t care about.

Even worse, being able to stay on essentially outdated software puts a lot of organizations into a tough spot when their LTS version finally becomes unsupported. Practice makes perfect, and I think lots of small, regular updates result in a lot less pain than a mega-update every few years (really: I’ve had to manage one of these more than once, and it’s a total nightmare figuring out which of 1000 changes in the new LTS version caused a performance regression or something).

For something with “math” in the title, this article sure has a lot of basic statistical mistakes (like, things you learn not to do in an intro course).

* You can think of it as a factor graph with linear residuals and Gaussian noise functions in factors that connect a chain of variables, with all but the most recent variable marginalized. It’s a well known fact that linear, Gaussian factors result in a closed-form expression that gives the optimal maximum a posteriori estimate. The Kalman filter exploits this very special case. You can also write a LQR down with a factor graph (as the parent commented, the KF and LQR are duals).

Also, why run all of Microsoft’s spyware and deal with their forced updates just so you can get through to a slightly slower and less compatible version of Linux.

This website never fails to amuse me…

What is the intention of this comment? That Debord is “far right” or a reactionary? That people who read him are? That it’s interesting that a Marxist philosopher is read by reactionaries?

I am about the age of the people this article is talking about. This is laughably out of touch. Take a look at the right communities on TikTok or Instagram or Discord (they’re not small) with people aged around 13-20 and you’ll see that Marx to Mao to Deleuze to Fisher are alive and well in the minds of today’s young people. There are people my age who are reactionaries, but there are more who want out of the late-capitalist hellscape that’s been foisted on us.

I’m not even sure where to start with this because it’s such a vulgar misreading of Hegel… Hegel generally rejected the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” triad (which mostly comes from Fichte.) Dialectics, and his overall system of immanent critique, have considerably more subtlety and complexity than the determinism and teleology that you suggest. An even cursory reading of any of Hegel’s major works reveals how entirely misplaced most of your post is. I agree that a lot of Hegel’s political philosophy is marked by naivete, but this doesn’t mean his system can be rejected wholesale. That we should avoid this wholesale rejection in the face of apparent contradictions is actually one of Hegel’s basic points!

Google bullies you with Captchas if you have `privacy.resistFingerprinting` on.

It’s interesting you say that, because I find myself to be quite productive in GIMP.

I think the basic set of tools are pretty easy to use, and the one or two other windows you need open (like the tool-specific settings) are also pretty understandable. When I stumble upon something new I often find pretty good official docs on the topic.

This seems like it's a great example of survivorship bias: the Romans probably made lots of concrete that didn't survive the elements, but there was some that the Romans did get lucky with. It's also possible that we don't see a similar thing today because our manufacturing processes are so much more standardized (and critically, they are standardized around a process that is apparently less robust.)

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters.

Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features:

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935

As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.

This language is compiled, not interpreted. Because of this, runtime performance is not limited by Go’s performance characteristics.

This language can claim to be very close to C/C++ in terms of runtime performance characteristics because it compiles to C.

Are you thinking of Arthur Whitney?

His work was discussed on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19481505