syntaxfree

External cooling device?

What’s the story behind the naming?

(I presume it’s not written in Hy/Hylang, the cute little Lisp that compiles to Python.)

WET, write everything twice

Resale value is important for wheelchairs. My dad had an electric one for about 8 months before he passed on, and the TCO was well under the price of all these alt concepts.

Are you somehow closely related to one Tito Tapia?

especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else

I don’t do this. I write expecting the audience to pretty much have read the entirety of my blog to understand any single entry. I like to think there’s a mystique to it — I’ve long enjoyed unpacking the ideas of obscure thinkers, myself.

Then: I’ve known of maybe 10 people over a combined five years that have made the effort to read a lot of my stuff.

Who said anything about amendments?

To me “Man” has more of a “each and every” connotation. Compare

“Man must achieve this.”

“Humanity must achieve this.”

The latter is more of a collective emergent thing. And in some cases that leaves you with a diffusion of responsibility kind of passive feeling, while the former is a call to action.

Maybe it’s just my ear.

I love the Buddhist expression “these teachings are like a raft one uses to cross the river and then discards”.

I remember writing down everywhere — in notebooks, calendars — all full of teenage fury and conviction: “OBSERVE THE MASTER / IMITATE THE MASTER / BECOME THE MASTER”. An edgy 14 year old I was. I don’t remember the source for that anymore; it looks too wise to have come from myself.

So like chromadb

delve

I talked to Pi for one New York minute and it came up with the good ole “Ahhh the X Y of Z” LLM-ism. So much for an unique conversational tone.

You’re able to capture a whole world of proximity relations through echolocation.

*Title: The Soul of Creation* by Nick Cave

(Verse 1) In the dawn of all existence, in the silence of the void, God spun the world in six days, in a dance of cosmic joy. On the seventh day, He rested, His creation full of worth, A canvas painted with His struggle, a gift to all the earth.

(Chorus) Leon and Charlie, hear this ancient tale, Of creation's sacred heart, beyond the earthly veil. In every act of making, in every loving deed, Lies the essence of our spirit, the planting of a seed.

(Verse 2) Now comes a force, cold as the night, ChatGPT its name, A mechanized imagination, turning art into a game. It seeks to strip creation of its struggle and its pain, Rendering our efforts as nothing but a chain.

(Chorus) Leon and Charlie, see this stark divide, Between the soulful artist's path and the mechanized guide. In every note and lyric, in every brush and pen, Is the heartbeat of humanity, time and time again.

(Bridge) "Let's make it fast, let's make it easy," the machine coldly sings, Forgetting art's a journey, not just a pair of wings. The struggle, the striving, it's where our truths are found, In the depths of our creation, our spirit's battleground.

(Verse 3) God looked upon His world, and saw that it was good, A reflection of His essence, in every field and wood. So Charlie, in your creating, let your spirit freely dance, For in your artful striving, you'll give the world a chance.

(Chorus) Leon and Charlie, remember this true call, Creation's not just crafting, it's a rising after fall. In every stroke of genius, in every dream unfurled, Is the story of our spirit, the echo of the world.

(Outro) So let's fight against this tide, this digital malaise, Defending art's true essence, through all our nights and days. For in our hands lies power, in our hearts the flame, To keep alive the soul of the world, in every crafted frame.

(End) In the dance of the Great Crested Grebe, in the sun's first light, Lies the joy of creation, our eternal, noble fight. Leon and Charlie, in each step and every turn, Is the essence of our being, the fire that will always burn.

Ezra Pound says “a charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production.”

Of course, Ezra Pound was a proper and proud fascist.

Also not all notions of God are dualistic — where you get to (notionally) talk to the guy using “you” and “I”. India’s Advaita Vedanta, Ibn Arabi’s version of Sufism and even some sects of Hasidism all hold that everything is in God. I haven’t found the Christianity that does this, but if it was discovered under Islam is probably thinkable here.

Are these different ideas of God entirely? Yes: in India there are however many gods and Brahman says these are lesser precisely because they don’t include the whole universe.

The pdf is just the pullback measure.

A random variable is a function X(w) taking (eg) real values. In your probability space you already have an ambient measure space and an ambient probability measure P which takes sets in the measure space to [0,1]. The pdf is then the function defined on sets P(invX(q)). invX is a set valued inverse.

Ok, consider coin flips. Then X takes each element of sample space either to 1 or -1. Set values inverse of 1 is the sets that map to 1. Then we get the ambient probability measure of them.

You don’t really have to cope with measure theory in full to take this tiny step.

Suggestion: stack the images vertically or horizontally. Frequency spectrum compression schemes like JPG will see the similarity in the fine details.

There was a subreddit called something like r/bubbling where people would edit pictures of women in bikinis and actually cover more of the image, but in such a way that your brain was fooled into completing the image and seeing a nude woman. I thought it was a technical marvel, however creepy.

An interesting exercise would have been to run a Gaussian Graphical Model (like the “graphical lasso”) to sparsify that correlation matrix.

In the Gaussian case, those methods are able to identify nonzero partial correlations and hence a causal graph. Since there’s multimodality here trust in that interpretation should be lower, but it’s still worthwhile looking at a pseudo/candidate causal structure as part of EDA.

Somehow I expected something something Peano something something

https://asemic-horizon.com is about theory.

McLuhan famously has this notion of cold and hot media. In the movie theater light shines at a screen and you see its reflection; on TV, and more so with phones, the light beams directly into your eyes. It makes a difference.

I find Copilot to be a WET enabler; it figures out patterns that are boring to type and infers where they’ll be needed again.

It’s an even better experience with notebooks where the abstract vs repeat tension leans more toward the latter.

Cannibalism

Have you seen The Cauchy-Schwartz Masterclass? Is it similar?

You could always try to use a density based clusterer like DBSCAN, HDBSCAN or OPTICS to determine a likely number of clusters.

I bought the Loom yearly subscription because it was inexpensive and features unlimited videos (so I can just record myself working for hours and trim). But I’d much prefer something that cleanly works in Linux.

Connections matter…