Syzygies

7 ms·

61.
by Syzygies 10mo ago
> However, I have questions: "Turns out the quantity they needed exists, but couldn't be described in their notation" What is this about? Sounds interesting. There are hierarchies of numbers (quantities) in mathematics, ju
62.
by Syzygies 10mo ago
In grad school around 1980 I took a cab home from a midnight showing of the reggae film "The Harder They Come". The cab driver asked me out of the blue, "Is it true you can't tell the difference between +i and -i?"
63.
by Syzygies 10mo ago
Yes. I was surprised there was no mention of "false sharing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_sharing Rather than incrementing each counter by one, dither the counters to reduce cache conflicts? So what i
64.
by Syzygies 10mo ago
Using AI to write good code faster is hard work. I once toured a dairy farm that had been a pioneer test site for Lasix. Like all good hippies, everyone I knew shunned additives. This farmer claimed that Lasix wasn't a cheat because it
65.
by Syzygies 10mo ago
1977. And I didn't know what a hash table was, though I can't explain now why they didn't think of using a hash table. I was effectively using a dumb hash function. Their 1978 second edition works in exactly the memory needed
66.
by Syzygies 10mo ago
When I was a senior at Swarthmore College, Herb Wilf came over from U Penn to teach a course in combinatorial algorithms. I was encouraged to attend. He claimed that choosing a subset of k integers at random from {1..n} should have a log in
67.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
I always book directly with hotels, airlines, and auto rental agencies. One gains privileges by cutting out the middleman. For example, one can generally check out early. We had followed a hotel reservation from locals in Nagoya, and found
68.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
exactly
69.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
My gut, reading the HN title, was "half the time". I had to read the article, to see how many words piled up before he said that. Of course, considering finite fields of prime power order, one might leap to the conclusion "a
70.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
"Other than returning the four parts for a refund (which we did) and documenting this behavior here, our only other recourse was to guarantee that these four specific parts were never sold as new again:" Alas, one can completely r
71.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
The classic is two guys on a moped in Marseilles. The passenger cuts a pedestrian purse strap (or iPhone strap) and they vanish. One could embed an invisible security cable, but then...
72.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
To decide on a language for a math research project, I implemented a toy problem in many languages: What is the distribution of cycle counts for signed permutations on n letters? Use all cores in parallel. C++ 100 19.57s
73.
by Syzygies 11mo ago
I know both authors, so I wrote them to ask. This is a rogue image that appears in various PDFs posted online, but not on Springer's official PDF or any print copy we've seen.
74.
by Syzygies 1y ago
I choose from a range of lockers that are years I was single. Who did I date that year? I also set the combination to all zeroes, to scramble my combination after locking. Easier getting in and out with fixed muscle memory, and easy to conf
75.
by Syzygies 1y ago
A December 1956 cover feature article in Radio-Electronics magazine describes "Relay Moe" which plays tic tac toe with adjustable levels of skill. It used 90 relays. < https://www.vintagecomputer.net/cisc367&#x2F
76.
by Syzygies 1y ago
There is no single accepted definition of "fireball" like the Kármán line where outer space begins, and even that is just a convention. The "artificial sun" created at Hiroshima, the early-stage plasma fireball at 1 ms,
77.
by Syzygies 1y ago
Wants to, but still experimental: https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/
78.
by Syzygies 1y ago
I met Charles Snead Houston, who lead the first two American attempts on K2 and became a doctor. (He fell the furthest in "The Belay", the most famous belay in mountaineering history.) He asked me to explain my work on card shuffl
79.
by Syzygies 1y ago
I coauthored the paper "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair" which solved the GSR model for riffle shuffling in closed form, leading to the recommendation to shuffle a 52 card deck seven times. Your picture is a great geomet
80.
by Syzygies 1y ago
Alas there was no way to pause my $200 Max subscription while I'm in China for two weeks...
81.
by Syzygies 1y ago
This interests me but they don't address practical Claude Code Opus 4.1 use at scale. I have a $200/month Anthropic Max subscription that I use for help in exploring and coding my math research. As of now no AI model can compete w
82.
by Syzygies 1y ago
To clarify, I see AI as an association engine of immense scope. Others are responding with variations on this model in mind. It has long been a problem in math research to distinguish between "no one has had this idea" and "o
83.
by Syzygies 1y ago
Claude assists me in my math research. The scenario that concerns me is that Claude learns unpublished research ideas from me as we chat and code. Claude then suggests these same ideas to someone else, who legitimately believes this is now
84.
by Syzygies 1y ago
The Kodak Research Labs (like Bell Labs) let their researchers play. In the 1960's my father (who later devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) coded this algorithm for "Jotto" the 5 letter word version of Mastermind. C
85.
by Syzygies 1y ago
One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just
86.
by Syzygies 1y ago
I make little use of .NET; my hand-coded atomic queue is faster than .NET work stealing for parallelism, for example. I like the slightly cleaner syntax and twice as fast for my applications. I'm escaping the black hole of Haskell. If
87.
by Syzygies 1y ago
Tarides has an OCaml focus. Elsewhere on their site, with an interesting omission: "Examples of functional programming languages include OCaml, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala, and Common Lisp." F# and OCaml are close cousins, and
88.
by Syzygies 1y ago
After inciting the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2017, and later effectively destroying our US democracy, Facebook is having billion dollar offers to AI stars refused. News flash! It's not so your neighbor's child can cheat in s
89.
by Syzygies 1y ago
I'm hoping to code Bezier animation in OCaml/F# in four dimensional space time, with a moving vantage point. Offload rendering each time slice frame to worker threads. I'm surprised Bezier-rs is all about curves. Sure, fonts,
90.
by Syzygies 1y ago
And David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, was the technical consultant. As Ron Howard explained this to me, he sees reality as more interesting and detailed than any fiction. No one would grasp the details were correct, but he felt they woul

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