earthicus

This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.

I’ve thought quite a bit about getting a teacher, but have hesitated for a few [somewhat legitimate] reasons. Among them, I’m partially disabled and can’t practice consistently. However, having a teacher berate me about my posture would actually probably help that at least a little bit, now that you mention in :-) Thanks for taking the time to share your experience and encouragement with me! Best of luck on your lessons as well.

I recently started learning the piano as an adult, and from what i've gathered from reading and watching videos, the 'folk wisdom' about how to avoid rsi-type injuries is to minimize tension in your wrist by maximizing relaxation of your fingers and wrists (especially the thumbs, which tend to get locked into a permanent state of mild tension on the piano keyboard). So you want to do your best to develop more finger independence, so that you can press with one finger while keeping the neighboring fingers relaxed. It's really hard.

Describing it as "Octopus DJ with no fingers" got rid of the hands for me, but interestingly, also removed every anthropomorphized element of the octopus, so that it was literally just an octopus spinning turntables.

I don't think that characterization is fair at all. It's certainly true that you, me, and most humans can't solve these problems with any amount of time or energy. But the problems are specifically written to be at the limit of what the actual high school students who participate can solve in four hours. Letting the actual students taking the test have four days instead of four hours would make a massive difference in their ability to solve them.

Said differently, the students, difficulty of the problems, and time limit are specifically coordinated together, so the amount of joules of energy used to produce a solution is not arbitrary. In the grand scheme of how the tech will improve over time, it seems likely that doesn't matter and the computers will win by any metric soon enough, but Tao is completely correct to point out that you haven't accurately told us what the machines can do today, in July 2025, without telling us ahead of time exactly what rules you are modifying.

I looked at the Typst documentation and from what I could tell, it has 3 hard-coded "Modes" for 3 hard-coded kinds of syntax (normal, math, code). I couldn't find any way to add any custom syntax - is there a way to do this?

Tex/LaTeX are completely syntactically extensible. For example, a logician might want to use the software with any number of their notations, or a physicist drawing Feynmann diagrams, etc. I think at one point Lillypad used it for typesetting sheet music.

Edit: i found it! https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/#package...

"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."

This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.

The researchers discussed the study here (also linked towards the end of the article):

https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_...

I think the issue was that they are representing a real as a product of a rational and that more complicated type, so without a symbolic representation for 1, when representing and rational, they would have to multiply it by a RRA representation of 1 which brings in all the decision problem issues.

It was discovered that the procedure mechanism of Algol 60 was effectively equivalent to the lambda calulus. This insight was written out in a famous paper by Peter Landin, "Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation: part I"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363744.363749

Frank Wilczek has argued for something similar to this point of view. Here's a non-technical 'op-ed' where he discusses it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7pl5V0YU9taaXE0ZWJNRzlHNlU...

A mathematics degree will have some kind of 'transition to higher mathematics' course that you take your freshman or sophomore year. You meticulously work with sets, definitions/theorem/proofs in a simple setting, and especially adding 'structure' to sets with axioms.

In regards to the article, the course of this type that i took had frequent quizzes that required nothing but reproducing precise definitions or proofs we had learned. Of course the ideal would be for the student to be able to reproduce these from understanding. But in practice i was doing a lot of brute force memorization of definitions - i just hadn't internalized the language of mathematical logic well enough to reconstruct a concept's definition yet. however, it got my foot in the door and having those definitions in my head made the next courses easier, so if i retook that transition course a few years later on, i would not have needed to do so much memorization. i got better at learning those kinds of basic definitions.

So my answer to your question is yes to some extent - the memorization aspect of learning described in the article is useful for learning the first step to Math B as well. Also if you want to make another learning attempt, be sure and go back and start at that freshman/sophomore level transition course i was describing!

It's amazing how far we've come in a few centuries. From sketching a few visible features with the help of a telescope, to mapping out the microscopic variations in the moons gravitational field[1] with robot satellites!

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/multimedia/latest-i...

I agree with you that academic summary works are probably the best way for a non-researcher to learn what exists, what's known (and what isn't). Since i've never seen them discussed or referenced on this website, let me also point out the existence of academic encyclopedias, such as the Springer encyclopedia of algoriths[1] (each entry is essentially a slightly more pedagogical review article about a subfield or important problem in CS, along with loads of references to the literature for digging deeper), and the delightful encyclopedia of distances [2](800 pages long!). A couple others i've seen that may be of interest to this audience are the encyclopedia of systems and control[3], and the encyclopedia of unconventional computing[4]

Unfortunately some of these are absurdly expensive, so if you don't want to go the piracy route the cheapest way to access them is to get a membership to your local public university's library system, which in the US typically costs like $100 a year or something.

[1] https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4939-2...

[2] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-52844-0

[3] https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-44...

[4] https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4939-6...

"Python's predecessor, ABC, was inspired by SETL -- Lambert Meertens spent a year with the SETL group at NYU before coming up with the final ABC design!" --Guido van Rossum

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008...

Here [1] is a great (short, readable) paper from 2015 that explains Timsort and similar stack-merge sorting algorithms. It also gives a runtime analysis, and a simplified version of the algorithm that they call 'alpha-sort'.

[1] https://hal-upec-upem.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01212839/file...

My vulnerability is that I take immunosuppresants, which makes the vaccines significantly less effective (last I heard a few months ago, fully half of the breakthrough infections of the vaccinated were in the small population of immunosuppressed people).

Here's a nice 20min presentation by Nima Arkani-Hamed in favor of a new collider:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q

The American Mathematical Society has a long catalog of reviews of mathematics books, although they are often very short and not enlightening by themselves:

https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/math-in-the-media/reviews

There were quite a few utopian socialist (not necessarily anarchist) projects started in the United States in the 19th century, especially following the proto-socialist Charles Fourier. Wikipedia has a list based on a wide variety of different philosophies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_commu...

spread in places like the Bay Area may have started as early as January

This is known for certain in Seattle. The first case was in mid-January[1], then six weeks passed before the big outbreak started and genetic sequencing showed that the virus was directly descended from that original case six weeks earlier[2], indicating that there had been ongoing transmission throughout the community for the past six weeks.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/snohomish-c...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-may-have-s...

ps be sure to read that first link, published in january. It's absolutely maddening how cavelier everyone was being, even while China was literally shutting down a city the size of new york and sealing off the entire province...

I briefly studied mathematical biology, and remember there being some debate about whether tumor growth was more accurately modeled by logistic growth or Gompertz growth [1]. I'd be curious to know whether your fits get better or worse if you replace your logistic-based model with a Gompertz-based model.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_function

Very interesting article! Here is a more technical talk that describes 'fast scramblers' and some of the same kind of experimental proposals that the article is discussing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hmToNdDem8

What an incredible life Freeman Dyson had. The next time you have an hour free, I'd urge you to watch this autobiographical lecture he gave in 2011, "On living through four revolutions". In it, he describes his experience witnessing and participating in (1) the development of space travel, (2) nuclear energy, (3) molecular biology & the genome, and (4) computers. In addition to being absolutely fascinating and insightful, this talk does a fantastic job of showing off his wonderfully dry sense of humor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684

You might want to check out "Unix system programming with Standard ML" by Shipman. The first half of the book covers the basics of SML and the Posix & C interfaces, and also discusses building a simple TCP client and server. The second half of the book is a larger project building a web server:

http://www.mlton.org/References.attachments/Shipman02.pdf

I just finished reading the book 'Gifts of the Crow' by Marzluff & Angell, which is a popularization of current research into Corvid intelligence, consisting of anecdotes, experiments, and neuroscience.

Academics do, in fact, study recreation & play, language & song, and expressions of emotion like grief. They are considered indicators of some kind of intelligence worth studying. The book even devotes a chapter to each of those topics!

Here's a good explanation (it reduces to F=ma, of course!). This explanation starts by answering a different question, then points out that energy is analogous.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/67432/intuitive-...

Above the illustration in the text, the paper references work from 2001-2006 for motivating that geometry:

    [19]  J. Khachan and S. Collis, Phys. Plasmas8, 1299 (2001).
    [20]  J. Khachan, D. Moore, and S. Bosi, Phys. Plasmas10, 596 (2003).
    [21]  O.  Shrier,  J.  Khachan,  S.  Bosi,  M.  Fitzgerald,  and  N.Evans, Phys. Plasmas13, 012703 (2006)

https://sydney.edu.au/science/about/our-people/academic-staf...

And Bosi seems to have been at Sydney at the time as well:

https://www.une.edu.au/staff-profiles/science-and-technology...

This collaboration between the three physicists and Tao actually started its life in a /r/math comment thread! One of the reddit commenters pointed the physicist (I don't know which of the three was asking the question) to a mathoverflow answer of Tao's resolving a similar question. Here's the posts and it's followups:

https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/ci665j/linear_algebra...

I think that is precisely OP's point: on the long term, solar & friends are the only things that matter. If we get unlimited cheap power, we can only ever use it to generate an 'utterly miniscule' fraction of energy compared to what's available from solar because if you want to add a meaningful contribution to the energy content of the planet, you'll simply cook yourself, not from chemical global warming, but from thermodynamic waste heat.