Syzygies

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361.
by Syzygies 5y ago
What's the risk from replacing YubiKeys with software that relies on the internal security chips in modern computers? My most cited paper was used by the original BitCoin paper, so I can attempt to listen to a security argument. I have
362.
by Syzygies 5y ago
The Simons Foundation spends money; the money has already been made. Quanta Magazine wants readers, but not for ad revenue. Their metric for success is relative to their intended audience, which is interested in science.
363.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Nice. I have daydreamed about something like this for years, and this is not it. I'd imagine a series of left/right comparisons, like a visit to an eye doctor, where the machine learning is rewarded for its ability to predict my p
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I teach linear algebra in a pure math department. We like to think that freeing people to be able to daydream about linear algebra is our goal, that there's more to it than what function calls to make in MatLab. Still, you could throw
365.
by Syzygies 5y ago
If you're checking that 17 isn't a typo, do a screen grab and doodle on the graph. For each vertex, write down how many ways you can get there in two steps from v1. There are the same number of ways to get back, so you sum the squ
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I am usually using my Sony smart TV as a computer monitor, connecting a Mac mini to an HDMI port. A smart TV wouldn't straight-out spy on an external use like this, would it?
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by Syzygies 5y ago
Arithmetic coding is a drop-in replacement for Huffman coding that saves binary roundoff. It's less known because it was patented, and the (short) code to implement requires optimizing a tricky 1.0000 versus 0.9999 issue (in binary). T
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I've used something like this for Lisp-family languages privately for decades. [1] I like having a bar | open a parenthesis that closes automatically when the line or group ends. [2] There are many Lisp/Scheme constructions that j
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by Syzygies 5y ago
At 17:05 he shows two possibilities left, ABBAS and ABYSS. In the actual implementation of Wordle, ABYSS is the only remaining possibility. (I recommend his videos to my students, who love them!) I don't know anyone who has actually re
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by Syzygies 5y ago
This also works for American Express. They won't pro-rate the annual fee after thirty days, but you can drop from Platinum or Gold to a Green card and get back the difference.
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by Syzygies 5y ago
A "nit" is also an alternate term for a "nat", the natural logarithm counterpart to a Shannon information "bit". This headline really threw me, trying to guess at what level of organization there was an informa
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by Syzygies 5y ago
My college stereo amp was a Heathkit. It had one IC, for the phono preamp. My brother built the same amp, and found the leftover IC socket when he finished. Heathkit support was great: "If you didn't toast the IC soldering it in,
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I'm a mathematician who joined Masterclass to improve my cooking. I look forward to checking out the class by Terence Tao, as a diversion. I held off joining for the longest time because I didn't want twenty hours of each person t
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I'll play with the Wolf filter, thanks. Math typesetting is too messy for current OCR tools. It would be nice to reverse-engineer the LaTeX source for a math paper, but not likely soon. OCR for the language would help in mind-mapping a
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by Syzygies 5y ago
As University libraries have moved online, one reads many poorly scanned journal articles. I often wonder about taking the time to clean them up. What replaces temporal information here is the same characters appearing over and over. So of
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by Syzygies 5y ago
A fork using primes: Primel https://converged.yt/primel/ The best first guess using Shannon entropy is a dead heat between 12953 and 12539. Not surprisingly to the number theorists out there... If you study the JavaScr
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by Syzygies 5y ago
It's a units issue. I'm measuring in yes/no questions, which is the native scale for Shannon entropy. You're measuring in Wordle questions. There's more information in a Wordle answer than in a yes/no answer.
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I'm a mathematician. Back in the day, cannabis was a source of impairment. Now, a minimum effective dose of Indica from a vape pen helps me sleep. Except when it doesn't. We value disruption in tech industries but our normative la
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by Syzygies 5y ago
Interesting. There can't be a proof of general optimality for Shannon entropy, because the words are irregularly distributed. However, (unlike your lists) they're not distributed by an adversary trying to foil Wordle/Jotto st
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by Syzygies 5y ago
> wasting part of an hour as I did searching for a clever way to score guess words. I'd love to see scoring a Wordle guess added to one of those programming problem sites, as code golf in any language would be amusing. I was once a
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by Syzygies 5y ago
They made a mistake. There are 2,315 relatively familiar words that can be the secret word, and 12,972 words in all that are accepted as guesses. Using the full list as potential guess words, TARES is optimal for a random secret word from t
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by Syzygies 5y ago
5.291 soare 5.294 roate 5.299 raise 5.311 raile 5.311 reast 5.321 slate 5.342 crate 5.342 salet 5.345 irate 5.346 trace 5.356 arise 5.360 orate 5.370 stare 5.382 carte 5.390 rai
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by Syzygies 5y ago
Back in the day, a shopkeeper in Japan might realize that they'd forgotten to pull out their abacus, that they'd been playing this musical instrument in their head to do calculations all morning. One guides a slide rule to roughly
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I've seen this but haven't bit. I've been many laps through the keyboard obsession. I learned Dvorak on a Matias Half Keyboard, skeptical of their brain mirror theory, then tried it out of curiousity on a full keyboard one da
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by Syzygies 5y ago
Reset your clock to tomorrow's date, and play again. That's how I confirmed that the solutions are in order, in the JavaScript.
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by Syzygies 5y ago
Read the JavaScript? It contains both lists. Training on the wrong dictionary, tomorrow you might find yourself in a slump.
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by Syzygies 5y ago
In the 1960's my dad programmed Jotto (a simpler five letter secret word game) on Kodak's computers. Entropy became the first interesting mathematical concept that I learned. Log base 2 of the remaining words is a measure of how m
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by Syzygies 5y ago
Is an obsession with "originals" as quaint as our desire to walk on Mars, rather than sending robots? My first reaction (after amazement) was to imagine a machine coloring in the cracks. The future will always see any effort in th
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by Syzygies 5y ago
In that century, the term "prescheme" had a certain cachet in mathematics. It wouldn't surprise me if the name choice for this scheme dialect was in part a nod to the math term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#
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by Syzygies 5y ago
I once logged every mistake I made programming, hoping to avoid repetition. I found the list years later. "20. Forgot to eat. Got sick."

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