Syzygies

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301.
by Syzygies 4y ago
1. Try a Leopold FC660C keyboard before getting too far down this rabbit hole, and confirmation bias gets in the way of seeing that Topre switches are nicer than any mechanical switch. 2. Then install a Hasu FC660C Controller, and start cus
302.
by Syzygies 4y ago
This is a divisive question, because of survivorship bias. Remember when the WWII Brits wanted to reinforce planes where they saw bullet holes coming back, till a statistician asked why no planes came back with holes in the other spots? Peo
303.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Ok, newbie here! In Haskell I can add a handful of lines to parallelize an "embarrassingly parallel" computation. For example, there are 66,960,965,307 atomic lattices on 6 atoms. A 20 core Mac Studio can figure this out by revers
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by Syzygies 4y ago
Wow, I did a double take, you sound like me. When I said something similar praising Haskell's effortless parallelism, someone made a reply that lead to my learning Clojure.
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by Syzygies 4y ago
A document that puts these differences in context is Rich Hickey's "A History of Clojure" https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd... The design decisions in this paper strongly reson
306.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I'm sure you're right. Rust is a popular language in Haskell user surveys, as it's not such a stretch coming from Haskell. The majority of the lines I've ever written were in C. When I look at Rust, all I see is `{};`
307.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Rust is a fly-pollinated flower. Without garbage collection, it needs flies. Rust is in part designed to look familiar to C programmers. Rob Pike once famously described C syntax as able to survive a channel that mangled whitespace. That&#x
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by Syzygies 4y ago
One never knows till one is in the moment. I watched a wave grab a child. As it happened we both came back out, but it was neither or both, that's how we're wired. As a professor one of my students had a seizure then stopped breat
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by Syzygies 4y ago
I manually manage by year/folder, synchronizing thousands of items via DropBox. Each folder has all the associated links and metadata I can muster. By "manual" I mean various scripts, on MacOS. "bib" for example is
310.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Destroying one career is not the same as destroying a field. Mathematicians like to believe the likely apocryphal tale that Nobel didn't endow a prize for math because the likely first winner was sleeping with his wife. Nevertheless, t
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by Syzygies 4y ago
So, what's interesting about differential equations for someone who doesn't find analysis or physics particularly compelling? Say, a computer scientist with a greater love for discrete math? Linear differential equations are a gre
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by Syzygies 4y ago
I still don't know a better language for parallelism. Some alternatives can make up for being sluggish by employing parallelism. Haskell is already reasonably efficient (for my problems) and parallelism is trivial to add.
313.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I love Ruby so much as a scripting language, I ask myself why I don't just use it as an "acceptable lisp" [1] for my research, rather than Haskell. Haskell is more easily parallelized than any other language I've experie
314.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Wow, I learned that I could have a wet vac drain. My yard is absurd clay. I've used my wet/dry vac, along with an electric pressure washer, to dig holes and remove tree roots (easier to cut what you can see). A drain would increas
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by Syzygies 4y ago
> but only for participants who correctly identified their experimental condition. So the creatures who can take flight in a light breeze are the ones who can sense the breeze. That sounds about right.
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by Syzygies 4y ago
Most of the objections to blackboards or whiteboards can be mitigated by carrying one's own tools. For blackboards, I bring my own Hagoromo chalk [1,2] which has a wonderful touch and is radically less dusty, and several Korean microfi
317.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier? At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread prefere
318.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I'd love to see your ninja files, to see how you handled such things. Rather than complicating my build.ninja files, I handle build variants in my script. Easy enough to output a new variant, probably faster to use, and certainly easie
319.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I'm surely also in that range. It took us years to write this project, but 57 C files is a small project. Others find themselves in the range where the build decision-making itself can take seconds, with tools other than ninja. Ninja i
320.
by Syzygies 4y ago
https://gist.github.com/Syzygies/fe8cf2096fcb91dd11b5c8cf763... The source will be shareable once we get it running again. Other than historical curiosity, people are most likely to use it for assistance in converting
321.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Recovering an ancient project sent me back down the "which build tool should I be using?" rabbit hole. Getting a script to grave dig 57 inconsistently styled K&R C files (!) really stresses the build cycle, more than writing n
322.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Several comments independently propose incrementation as coming before addition, multiplication. One can only make sense of progressions like this by finding relationships between the levels. There are at least two ways to see a connection
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by Syzygies 4y ago
Mark was my college roommate! Ted Nelson was an earlier Swarthmore graduate whose visions for information anticipated the internet, and remain somewhat contrary to how the internet evolved. Mark took all this to heart. I had a brief influen
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by Syzygies 4y ago
Wow! What fun. You have to make this a phone/tablet app...
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by Syzygies 4y ago
Rob Pike famously explained that C needed its space-insensitive braces and semicolons in case code was transmitted through a channel that mangled whitespace. Those days predate most people reading this, yet many new language syntaxes opt fo
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by Syzygies 4y ago
Yes! That was the book.
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by Syzygies 4y ago
In 1980 as a math grad student, I took out my bank's first student loan for a computer, $3000 ($9000 now) for an Apple II. My annual stipend was not much more. My branch of math at that time was a foot race with no rule against bicycle
328.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Scheme is a language I love. Chez Scheme is even fast. I don't use it because the support for parallel programming looks like 1990. In contrast, one can add a handful of lines to a Haskell program and keep 16 cores busy on a Mac Studio
329.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Yep. In 1995 the main lesson of the web seemed to be "you can be an author." (Good luck finding bus schedules...) So I cobbled together a Pavoni espresso website in raw HTML, most of my efforts going into the drawings, and for a t
330.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I watched Persi give a talk where he demonstrated this trick, as part of a lecture on ways to use finite field theory to find de Bruijn sequences. I hadn't seen Persi in a while; we'd written the "seven shuffles" paper t

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