fuck me. I have had ridiculous insomnia since 2020. I have had tinnitus on and off since 2015/16 Incidentally this is also when my insomnia first showed up.
HN user
tobmlt
I wrote an automated geometry design/generation tool for my PhD. A bit of nonlinear optimization and constraint programming with a natural (math) interface for writing constraints. Some other goodies.
I really like discrete differential geometry and what aspects of differential topology I’ve been able to get hold of so far. I enjoy writing computational code (cfd, time unsteady motions, design generation/optimization, mostly) and am enamored with the idea of symmetry preserving integrators, and the like.
I currently work on software for computational analysis and design.
On both my nokia and my blackberry it was far far better than on my iphone. That wasn't quite 199X but pretty close.
I wish the iphone had word prediction and autocorrect that was from the previous centruy
This reminds me of something I remember from college but cannot ever seem to find: "The Jevon's diagram" by which I mean a two country system, with country containing two groups: highly educated and not very educated. The two countries have very different proportions of each group, and the analysis is around free immigration vs no immigration, and shows the harm done to the larger number of less uneducated in one of the countries. Anyway, I'm not going to do a good job of describing this thing, from 20 years ago in class, here, but if anybody knows offhand what I mean and can point me at an article or source on this, I'd be very appreciative! It's bugging me from way back! (where are my notes! Silly tobmlt, not taking notes in latex back then)
Hey thanks. Reddit could be your friend here. Well, honestly, youtube as well.
Here's a good, to the point summary of a lot of things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgH_9Iy7_mQ (lot's of good advice from this guy I think, I the fact that he's selling you on his channel doesn't put you off)
0.) dress just a little bit nicer than average. Do this by simply dressing for the occasion and most likely it will just happen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/bfxiqb/how_to_d...
1.) Wear clothes that fit
https://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/comments/ehrtv/sh... https://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/comments/1hr3nk/h...
2.) Wear a watch:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/2mkg05/rwatches_bu... https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/1oawc3/meta_watche...
3.) understand when to wear what shoe
https://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/comments/p7usf/sh...
4.) Going out? Got a date? Wear a blazer:
https://suitsupply.com/en-us/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNe1dkaTfg0 (youtube, content starts at 2:06 or so. this guy wears more snickers than I'd be comfortable with, but it's fine for him, and yeah, anyway, some good ideas there)
Also critical, no how a suit should fit, tie your ties, etc. Reddit it all over this stuff so google reddit with your particular question and you should be on your way.
I hope that helps!
Great idea. Here is something that could be similar but more niche (sorry if too niche): join a meetup group for that does indoor rock climbing. If, say, meetup is a big thing where you are. Otherwise, check for, e.g. facebook groups that partner up climbers -- meet and learn! (likely need to take a class to learn the very basics first, assuming you know absolutely nobody and there is no meetup for it.)
More laid back: join a weekly bikes-with-lights social biking group. Weekly trivia, meetups at bars for tech people, new people to the area, karaoke, etc. Play to your strengths/likes. Run and hit the gym to boost social confidence (now I am back at crossfit ;). Learn how to dress up just slightly more than standard for any occasion (non exercise that is) if you don't already know.
It's easier to make friends outside of work if you build some structure or drive into your life beyond work. Become interesting by having interests. Whatever you choose to do, keep doing it and eventually you will meet like minded souls.
I wonder where OP is. Location might have a say in what's popular and help find a matching interest.
I've always imagined Feynman making a QED, QED joke sometime in the late 1940's for this very reason. Like he could end his Shelter Island Conference talk with the joke and then look up from the blackboard... to a bunch of confused and deeply furrowed brows, lol.
If you happen to desire to implement your own NURBS library, (and/or the bspline and bezier simplifications) take the nurbs book c reference implementation, and modernize, convert to you language of choice.
Latex specific ide \frac and auto fill. You can for sure get speedy with practice!
Those beautiful graphs now… I ended up using secondary programs to gen images (pdf or whatever) of graphs and such for latex to bring in the usual way. Not as good!
Great stuff! I am in awe of your beautifully done graphs.
For speed with, e.g. matrices like you say, but also more specialized course specific notation, could you build a set of quick functions for the topic of the day to aid note taking?
If set up your environment just so, you can repurpose really simple commands like the slash in “\this” to do some common but annoying thing like bold upright lettering or underbars or something. (I actually need to go look at latex to be sure what all you could make maximally parsimonious… it’s been a while and I mostly copy and paste my old commands around. Anyway, you probably already do this kind of thing.
Experiences vary. I was just at the point of qualifying exams when a full time job op came up in a tightly related field. They (profs and managers all) understood, my new co-workers mostly being phds themselves, and I hired on at 32 hrs a week for full time - health insurance etc, and dropped my dicey gov research funding. I loved every second of working mon-thurs, phd by,… every other spare second. But I could live on chewing gum, beers, and ideas at that age, I guess. I also took about 6 years all up. God it was fun when it was fun.
This should be a proxy measure for inflation. (If only it was quantifiable so easily…)
Instead of prices going up in this case, quality goes down.
Yes thanks. My bad for not putting up a link.
Give me a neural lace with which I can stop a knife missile, or contact which stops the figurative knife missile forever, and so am I.
This thread makes me wonder how many knife-missiles the USA has in stock.
(I am using the opportunity to reference the fact that the USA indeed has a “knife missile” and it is similar in principle if not in capability to the knife missile if the “Culture” series by Ian M. Banks.)
No clue. Octave is here for us… so at least we can run their code and ask any pertinent questions to expedite the port. ;)
(Yes I know it’s simulink for many, but I’ve met some pure computational folk who swear by matlab as their prototyping tool and python is a bug ridden rat nest of footguns to them.)
C’est la vie
This whole conversation has been very insightful.
From the noalias = no panacea
To the Fortran repl
Thank you. This was inspiring.
Maybe it’s time I learn me some llvm too. Cheers.
The barrier to entry to doing fast linear algebra from scratch is the lowest of any of c,c++,Fortran.
Python and matlab being to slow at “low barrier to entry level” for sure anyway.
I’m not going to comment on julia because I’m still drinking coffee. In theory… blah blah maybe it should fill this role.
Sit down, write stupid simple Fortran code to solve a large linear algebra problem (a discretized partial differential equation system) and things like matrix multiplication and numpy style mat(:) access are built in. (Numpy borrowed the syntax from fortran, actually)
For a scientist, this is way easier than wading into c++ and getting it right; or sticking with c, and avoiding the footguns.
Fortran gives you maximum serial speed with minimum effort… it is easy to write efficient serial code, while knowing almost nothing of programming. Memory management sure, but even there, there out of the box are no pointers to fumble and your allocations are going to be contiguous. Optimal Array Memory access comes down to knowing Fortran is column based.
Ah but then you need to go parallel, where the documentation more in c these days.
But you’re already comfy with Fortran now, so, scientist that you are, you dig and experiment until you get it running in openmp, mpi, and cuda, etc.
Modern Fortran has oop with one major design mistake:
They use % as the accessor instead of . (Yes I am joking around) ;)
Thanks for all the context!
Hey thanks for a very interesting and thought provoking reply. I lived in NOLA for 10 years and long may it live! Spot on with the destruction of the marshlands - something so desperately needing reversal.
I was just wondering if you could provide a citation for this:
>>Worst case sea level rise estimates easily gives New Orleans 300+ more yrs
I hope so. I fear not.
Talking to my friends in the city it feels like if ida had spooled up 1 day further out, it would have wiped the place off the map. I know it isn’t true, but man, the wetlands are so mostly water below town, the storm didn’t loose strength, the next time… etc. I hope ida was the second-order wake up call the city needed to survive a future cat 5 with 30+ foot storm surge.
From the title, I thought it was going to be an article about the present day. Sort of a “surprise! -it’s right now” kind of feel, and then talk about the second quantum revolution etc etc.
Thank you for the info depth response. I am credentialed and experienced at picking up things across domains so I might kick it around a bit - as far as it dove tails with computational quantum mechanics at least.
Could be interesting to look at the interface between quantum and classical chemistry… …And look at the interface between molecular dynamics and continuum FEM.
How about nutrient content by mass, or some such measure?
I skimmed the article, maybe I missed it.
Aside: How easy is it to break into computational biology as a, say, practitioner of computational mechanics?
If this one looks to be a bit of a deep dive, try the cup trick first!
Yes. You took the entropy right out of my mouth.
>> I suspect that we could have much richer conceptual tools for thinking about the physical world actually around us if only more resources went into looking at it
What I hear in this statement is more towards the domains of research engineering as opposed to theoretical physics. Sand piles are of course the bridge between the two ;)
“Winning” at this work is not worth “dying” at life. But that is just “words words words” and I cannot make it mean for you what it means for me. Self introspection is nonlinear and non-rational to a real extent. Love letter to hacker news: neither of those things is bad. Just different than engineering thinking. Do not seek to engineer your mind’s thinking, if you seek lasting happiness. Instead work to find your innermost workings (feelings fears ideals etc) and integrate them into your conscious day. Integrate fear? Why yes. Do not push it down…
Back to the task at hand. More linearly now: Why do you love this work you do? Ask the hardest questions and seek the hardest answers. Maybe you are on the right path for yourself. I don’t think you would have posted this if you really believed it.
I love my work too, and something about it is killing me. It is not the thing I love (the science, the math, the physics, the code) that is killing me, but the toxic nature of the environment in which I seem to have to practice it in order to make a living.
For me, there is a riddle to be solved. The things i love are not toxic, but they are mixed with things that are. My workaday life is heavy with toxicity. Can the good be separated from the toxic? Or do I have to go and become a river guide, bum, or base jumper? Perhaps I just need to meditate on these things. (I’ve turned my comment intentionally at myself, because I cannot be so hubristic as to know what specific advice to offer you) I will say, if you have to work in an environment of toxic stress, the first fear to root out is the fear of failure. Make peace with that fear in the strongest way. Your fear blocks your success. Find this way, if you can: Work as one who is at play. Otherwise quit and make another way to work on the things you love which is more healthy.
This is the sort of problem that some astute design calculations should be able to disentangle. ;)
Maybe they were using a topology optimizer driven by reinforcement learning to come up with the initial Pareto front.
That might have been what I am mis-recalling then, thanks! Our proff. still managed to turn it into something like a proverb of wisdom. (More engines not necessarily = more reliability)
You don’t think both reasons have been important? How about the eastern block during the Cold War?
I bet my rulers in the USA are happy that the EU makes it difficult for our people to move there. On the other hand I am certain our populace mostly thinks about keeping “the other out” sure.
Cannot both things hold on their own time and place, and depending on where the person holding the view sits?
Mexico’s ruling class is likely glad for our immigration law, as it keeps their populace pinned in. Economic issues always cut two ways, and the press will stoke emotion about only one of the two, for some reason.