madhadron

Counterexamples are clarifying. For everyone condition in a proof, it's really handy to have a maximally simple, memorable counterexample that makes it fail because it violates that condition. Mathematicians tend to walk around with a bestiary of counterexamples in their heads. It also makes it really easy to recover a theorem because you try to sketch out the statement, and the spiky, memorable counterexamples jump out of your memory and you add conditions to constrain the domain away from them.

The ACM should probably have run this by a statistician before publishing it. As another commenter pointed out it opens with bad experimental design, then goes on about random allocation in a way that makes it clear that the author doesn't understand the subject well.

You don't need sequences of independent samples for assignment. You need sequences that are independent of the sequence of subjects being assigned. If you have a very small number of possible sequences then you can't get independence by the pigeon hole principle, but both 2^(64*N) (from N random 64 bit numbers) or 2^64 - 1 (for N samples from a PRNG) are so large that it doesn't matter.

The argument about a sample of seeds not producing a flat histogram is also weird. Of course it doesn't. That's irrelevant to whether uniformly sampling a sequence of N 64 bit numbers from the space the PRNG provides produces independent sequences from the subjects.

You're describing a very small number of companies that all copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general across the industry except where managers from those small number of companies came in and shoved them in before they were fired.

tens of thousands of lines of code

Perhaps this is part of it? Tens of thousands of lines of code seems like a very small repo to me.

This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs to explain quite a bit about Roman society under Augustus for you to understand what is going on in detail in Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia. The Tao te Ching suffers from being written in a style that was very much for people in the know in a certain milieu, limited texts, and a huge amount of cultural baggage on top. The most interesting recent scholarly translation I know of is by Victor Mair, of a different, recently discovered text, and his contention is that the book is a 'mirror for princes' and not a mystical text at all.

they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means

I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English. My personal favorite is a translation that opens with 'Bro!'.

Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not. No objective reader of this would come to the conclusion that it's ambiguous or misleading.

That's hilarious! You might want to add a bit more transition for the joke before the other points above, though.

I'm puzzled by your statement. The activities you're describing have lots of exfiltration routes.

Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on training data got traction, it would be neither, so it doesn't matter if they provide this or not. They probably won't exist as a solvent entity in a couple years anyway, so even the question of whether the indemnification means anything will go away.

I’m not sure what you mean by a change of basis making a nonlinear system linear. A linear system is one where solutions add as elements of a vector space. That’s true no matter what basis you express it in.

All these transforms are switching to an eigenbasis of some differential operator (that usually corresponds to a differential equation of interest). Spherical harmonics, Bessel and Henkel functions, which are the radial versions of sines/cosines and complex exponential, respectively, and on and on.

The next big jumps were to collections of functions not parameterized by subsets of R^n. Wavelets use a tree shapes parameter space.

There’s a whole, interesting area of overcomplete basis sets that I have been meaning to look into where you give up your basis functions being orthogonal and all those nice properties in exchange for having multiple options for adapting better to different signal characteristics.

I don’t think these transforms are going to be relevant to understanding neural nets, though. They are, by their nature, doing something with nonlinear structures in high dimensions which are not smoothly extended across their domain, which is the opposite problem all our current approaches to functional analysis deal with.

"Time Enough for Love" is the only Heinlein I've felt any inclination to reread in the past few decades that held up at all (and it's still a good read).

Lamport's website has his collected works. The paper to start with is "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system." Read it closely all the way to the end. Everyone seems to miss the last couple sections for some reason.

Look up the admission of the Dakotas. There was a minimum number of people a state had to have to be admitted, but that was ignored in order to pack the Senate.

I mean it is psychologically irrelevant to almost all scientists in the US and not something they consider in their career choices at all.

The actual constituted nations of Europe as they exist today? Aside from the UK, not long. Most of them are states that came into existence in the 20th century. Germany was the 1980's. The rest are generally 19th century.

Because they're not negligible. It's worth calculating it out. Length contraction produces a very slight increase in charge density of the nuclei, but there are a lot of charges and electromagnetism is very strong.

USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky.

And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.

No, there's a senate to get the small states in the late 18th century to ratify the constitution. There's still a senate because various groups added states without enough population to pass the bar of statehood in order to get extra votes without having to actually have democratic support.

Lawsuits take a very long time, but a court injunction can control which way that time is spent.

(I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.)

There speaks someone who has never spent time writing poetry, and probably isn't very good at editing.

The BCG vaccine is not protective against tuberculosis in adults. It helps prevent miliary tuberculosis in children.

I did my graduate work on tuberculosis. Those of us who weren't vaccinated because of our country of origin refused to be because the vaccine wouldn't help us and it changes testing for TB from a quick skin test to a lung x-ray.

It's not barbaric or corrupt or anti-vaccine in this case. It's details of this particular vaccine.

Here speaks someone with no scientific training or knowledge of the NIH, public health, or how any of it operates.

As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and naval officers? Awesome. I loved school. Most other places? Meh. Rural western Virginia? Terrible. Bullied until I finally snapped and left someone half conscious on the playground (and the football coaches watched as I handed out that beating). I was homeschooled from 8th grade until I left for college at the suggestion of the teachers in the school because they were running out of classes at the high school for me when I was in 7th grade.

I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.

There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.

My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.

Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.

It's a tradeoff. You can have excluded middle in your logic or infinitestimals in your extended reals. For mathematicians dealing with all the wild stuff coming out of studying infinities in the calculus, getting rid of excluded middle was a non-starter, so the system based on limits was created. If non-constructible proofs via contradiction aren't useful to you, as in physics, then you can certainly use infinitesimals.

how do you guys keep up to date with tech?

I don't. There really isn't much that's new that shows up. Spend your time exploring stuff people have already done, then learn whatever version of it this employer is using as needed at work. For example, at one job I needed to learn Ruby for a project. But here's an object-based, single dispatch, dynamically typed, interpreted language with some warts. You figure out what they call the inevitable things that are there in such a language and what the warts are, read some code to get a sense for the idiom, and then get on with life. If it's your first such language it feels challenging. If it's your third or fourth, it's just filling in the blanks. SQL Server has lots of warts and differences from PostgreSQL, but the stuff you expect is all there under some name. Any distributed database has to solve the same problems as any other one.

So don't worry about the new things. Worry about the old things with staying power, and the underlying designs and principles and patterns of thought that get reused again and again.

Biosphere II is worth a visit. They're still running it as a non-isolated research station. The original had several very specific problems (trees need wind to form strong roots, fresh concrete absorbs a lot of oxygen, their crops besides sweet potatos had serious soil nutrient problems, which meant they spent almost all their time desperately subsistence farming). Based on what they did we could run a Biosphere III today pretty well, which means I would call the Biosphere II experiment successful.

I think the difference between this and Jacques Cousteau's ConShelf in the 1960's and the saturation diving habitats used today is the depth and duration? Cousteau's group spent weeks at 10m and the saturation diving habitats are meant for living in for a few days at a time until your shift is over.

They do not explain anywhere why you would want to live at 200m, where it's dark and boring and you sound squeaky all the time. Living at 10m I totally get, especially in somewhere like the Red Sea.

I wonder what enabled the Inca to imagine all of these things...

Probably the same way as the Chinese, Romans, Persians, Hittites, Assyrians, Olmec, Mexica, and all the other large scale political polities of the world.

How do you even spread those ideas across such a wide area without literacy?

Most of the world has been illiterate for most of history. Even after the invention of writing, most practical knowledge was orally transmitted. Writing was for warehouse records so you could prove that the peasants really did owe you that ox.

It's been the standard reference for decades for a reason. I learned from it, too. There's really nothing else quite like it available.

Nobody wants to drive what feels like a Prius

I'm quite happy with my Prius. I think it's a skill issue. Roof racks and a tow hitch on a normal sized car handle the vast majority of cases where people imagine they need a truck or SUV. But I remember a young couple showing up to buy a mattress from my roommate, and being flummoxed when the mattress wouldn't fit inside their Subaru Forester with built-in roof rails. I had to show them how to tie it on the roof. They never did return my rope... If you can only imagine putting things inside the vehicle or in the bed of a pickup truck, then having a truck or a big SUV must seem essential. What makes it even weirder is that the Prius has more interior space than a lot of SUVs.