bradrn

Hah, I had the same thought on seeing the title!

Personally I’ve found this article a much more approachable overview to the question in the title: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2019/09/the_riemann_hyp...

It’s presumably named after Henry Bigelow (like several other things in oceanography), so my guess would be /bɪɡəˈlə͡ʊwi.a͡ɪ/.

Reminds me of Haskell’s monad-bayes: https://monad-bayes.netlify.app/

lots of unexplained grandiose thinking like “ k and q made the vector the unit of thought.”

That much makes sense in context: K is an array language, like APL, J, etc. From what little experience I have with J, ‘vector as a unit of thought’ seems like a reasonable description.

Extremely likely to be AI

I had the same thought though.

This point in the comments made me think twice:

People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]

Yep, that’s what I meant; thanks for clarifying the point.

(Though that said, a sibling post linked this interesting talk on limitations in OpenType itself: https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf)

In Naskh, each letter has only four forms (for the most part — there are a few ligatures etc. but I think ‘only four forms’ remains basically true). The choice between forms is determined almost entirely by position within a word (initial/medial/final/isolated). All the letters are aligned along the baseline and connect to each other in basically the same way.

By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.

(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)

Just reread the post — it’s much more pleasant to read now! Thank you!

(For what it’s worth, I think your own writing style is quite nice, now that I can see it.)

I like wl-kbptr myself: https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr

Yes, that would help considerably.

(Also, I suggest clearly acknowledging where AI was/wasn’t used. I like CuriosityC’s suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411968)

It’s slightly confusingly phrased, but the full sentence is:

The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra […] where the main mode of pitch control is by moving the tuning slide.

Which is correct.

Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant:

“Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.”

Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”

Typotheque’s Dash has a very similar variable axis, though they call it ‘Speed’: https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/dash-casual. (For some reason you need to click on the ‘Variable’ box in order to see the full variable range.)

Odd, I’ve had the opposite experience… back home in Australia the boxes came with metal edges, but here in the UK (Scotland) they all seem to be plain cardboard. If the metal ones are sold somewhere I’d be very interested to know where I could find them!

It looks like that never occurs for Helvetica (A316600) due to the absence of kerning. However, with Arial (A316599) the description notes:

a(29368) = 111111 is a first notable anomaly, because its bounding box width of 2675 lies between those of a(29367) = 49115, with bounding box width 2655, and a(29369) = 70002, with bounding box width 2681.

I am immediately reminded of my favourite quote from the Jewish book Pirkei Avot (‘Ethics of the Fathers’):

It is not your duty to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.

[https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.16?ven=english|Mishnah...]

Or, for that matter, what if you happened to be in a spot which had been occupied by a person at the time at which it resets?

I found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413

Also known as ‘boolean blindness‘: e.g. https://cs-syd.eu/posts/2016-07-24-overcoming-boolean-blindn...

Part of me feels like direct numeric array indexing is one of the last holdouts of a low-level operation screaming for some standardized higher-level abstraction.

This paragraph reminds me a bit of Dex: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.05372

Persian mersi is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers...

[2] https://zompist.com/chance.htm

The linked paper has some pictures: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193087

In Haskell this technique has been called ‘reinversion of control’: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2011/10/quick-and-dirty-reinversion-o...

What background do you come to J from? Another programming language?

Yes, I’m very fond of trying out different languages. My main language for personal projects is Haskell.

How do you like it?

I haven’t used J for a while, actually, but I recall finding it a bit confusing, especially when rank manipuations are involved. It has a larger vocabulary than most array languages, which I felt made it hard to learn. It was great fun though!

It’s not my language, to be clear! In fact I’ve never even tried it… my array programming experience so far has mostly been with J.

Also Uiua:

https://www.uiua.org/tour#audio

https://www.uiua.org/tutorial/audio

Emacs has this too, with ‘undo-tree-mode’.

(Incidentally, the documentation is wonderful: ‘The only downside to this more advanced yet simpler undo system is that it was inspired by Vim. But, after all, most successful religions steal the best ideas from their competitors!’)

Neither can I. Luckily tweaking the colours can make it somewhat readable. (Sometimes…)

A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them.

This is a very strong theme throughout Ursula Le Guin’s books and short stories; perhaps you might find those interesting.