evanb

I’m RSS-subscribed to a few sections relevant to my research.

The gilded age’s wealthy were also the winners of winner-take-all technologies such as the railroad and oil.

Given the energy scales involved, it's more likely that the issue lies with the approximations DFT makes to quantum mechanics, rather than the approximations quantum mechanics makes to quantum field theory.

I'm a professor of physics; my research area is computational quantum field theory. I was beginning a new approach for a certain kind of model. I know the model has not been simulated before (a collaborator has just constructed it for the first time using in-field knowledge developed in the last year).

I've been steadily more impressed, but the real startling moment was earlier this week, I could show that in a particular operation I had a bug (some identity wasn't satisfied) but I couldn't understand why. In one try Claude Code grokked my code, explained the problem to me (there were some dimension-dependent minus signs that needed to be computed), and fixed it.

The description is at https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/

By the Standard Model of Physics Software you can edit Quarkdown in Atom to get Quarkup and change your Neutron Mail to Proton Mail, but it only works if you type with your left hand and create an Electron app and an anti-Neutrinos AI blogpost.

In case the author is reading this, if you're going to introduce the complex-valued harmonics you should be careful to put the complex conjugate in the inner product

    <f, g> = ∫ f(ω)^* g(ω) dω

    p . q = Σ_i p^*_i q_i

Hmm. As a physicist my intuition is that information-preserving transformations are unitary (unitary transformations are 1-to-1). If a compression algorithm is going to yield a bit string (the zip file, for example) shorter than the original it can't be 1-to-1. So it must yield the zip file and some other stuff to make up for the space saved by the compression.

You could package all your data into a zip using this language but you would also have a worthless stretch of memory seemingly filled with noise / things you’re not interested in.

I don't remember much about music theory but I know enough about symmetry to know that there's a mistake in the diagram at 9 o'clock.

Bug report: I tried 6.999999̅ and got false. So there's some nonstandard model of the reals being leveraged here.

Of course that's true, but (in the context of the GP) code's bespoke artisanal nature is not the one most people value.

I have always anthropomorphized my computer as me to some extent. "I sent an email." "I browsed the web." Did I? Or did my computer do those things at my behest?

As a term-rewriting system the rule x-x=0 presumably won’t be in Simplify, it’ll be inside - (or Plus, actually). Instead I’d expect there to be strategies. Pick a strategy using a heuristic, push evaluation as far as it’ll go, pick a strategy, etc. But a lot of the work will be normal evaluation, not Simplify-specific.

Mathematica has Infix [0], which expresses the adjacency with a ~ (because Mathematica reserves pure blankspace for multiplication). But it works fine to do eg. `"hello"~StringJoin~" world"`; I was always surprised we could only have the predefined operators in many other languages and we couldn't define our own.

This seems like a great attempt. I would be worried about how much parsing and backtracking might be required to infer the infix precedence in a totally general system (like garden-path sentences[1]) or actually ambiguous parse trees (which is cured by adopting some rule like right precedence and parens, but what rule you pick makes some 'natural language' constructions work over others).

[0] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Infix.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Mathematica has symbolic and infinite-precision addition, so you can't automatically take advantage of obvious compiled code.

The initial focus is to implement a subset of the Wolfram Language so that it can be used for CLI scripting and notebooks.

If you have Mathematica installed you can write CLI scripts and notebooks.

They did consider it, got a contract that affirmed that the military would be bound by the same pre-existing terms of service as every other user, and want to resist the military's pressure to renegotiate.

Surely that might be naive but the entire issue is that they want to stick to the original contract, which is of course the purpose of a contract in the first place.

IANAL but it seems 3rd-amendment-adjacent.

I'll try to find it; thanks!

I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").

Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.

“Pining for the fjords?”

Winter rain, now tell me why

Summers fade and roses die

The answer came, the wind and rain

[...]

Circle songs and sands of time

And seasons will end in tumbled rhyme

And little change, the wind and rain

Fare thee well, Bob.

or

3) there's a misunderstanding about ordinary least-squares.

You think it was primarily poor people who were driving their cars into Midtown?

These are nice! I had never seen the 1/5 spiral before!

I animated these and related 'proofs' some time ago

    1/3 = 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-15-quarters/Triangl...

    1/7 = 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/512 + ...

    1/8 = 1/9 + 1/81 + 1/729 + ...

Careful what you wish for. Negating the predicate of "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" might open us up to the consequence.

I think it's a reference to https://xkcd.com/353/

Indeed, but if I had called it the Nazi salute I'd have been begging the question---or something like it.