Syzygies

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121.
by Syzygies 1y ago
Yes! I used to divide my time between a concrete hulk of a NYC apartment building, and a California home insulated to notoriously poor California standards. I was plenty warm in New York winters just from my neighbors' heat nearly all
122.
by Syzygies 2y ago
"I bought those expensive knives. Why doesn't my cooking taste better?" "I picked up an extraordinary violin once. It sounded awful!" There's an art here. Managerial genius is recognizing everyone's streng
123.
by Syzygies 2y ago
When my father bought his first digital camera, he insisted on raw format access. Inexplicably I didn't understand at the time why he (Bryce Bayer) wanted this. He was modest about his work. I do now!
124.
by Syzygies 2y ago
That's what I learned from!
125.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Cloudless Fluid requires a Teams Enterprise subscription. Or one can manually enter IP addresses. Their default is cloud mediation, so yes, they presume a working internet connection.
126.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Their UKH 80 looks incredible. Software is as critical as hardware: The UHK supports holding a key down to select a different keymap layer, then using the other hand to tap a key in that layer. While few people learn many-key chording, &quo
127.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I've been saving Markdown transcripts of my more involved AI chats, and I was unhappy with how any tool rendered to PDF. In either Cursor or Windsurf, I had Claude 3.5 Sonnet code a Ruby script for me that converts Markdown to Typst, a
128.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Mathematicians see hundreds of delusional papers over a career. It takes seconds to read their "no one understands me, I'm trying to save the world" tells. Every seen a Dr. Bronners soap label? Yep, that guy was crazy too. We
129.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Do you have a car? Do you really want to wait for humans to reprogram air traffic control software unassisted, with no formal correctness guarantees? Your attitude is fine if you plan to walk everywhere.
130.
by Syzygies 2y ago
"For documents whose source is likely to be shared or handed over to other pe ople, writing in TeX rather than expecting them to learn a new language is still good citizenship." Conversely, my entire interest in Typst is have an i
131.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I'm at a math conference where an amazing speaker brought up this list; she was on it. People eligible for DEI funding are often encouraged to choose that channel over a "regular" channel, in which they might easily have been
132.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Yes. There are better and worse ways to lead a team, just as there are better and worse ways to prompt AI. This post reads as a description of how the wheels come off the wagon if you don't do things well. With the evolution of AI agen
133.
by Syzygies 2y ago
An environment such as Cursor supports many approaches for working with AI. "Chat" would be the instructions printed on the bottom, perhaps how their developers use it, but far from the only mode it actually supports. It is helpfu
134.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I'm trying to sort out whether this article is relevant to a problem I've been working on the last few days. (It's staggering how deploying AI changes time scales.) We need "Centaur" documentation that can efficient
135.
by Syzygies 2y ago
My father (Bryce Bayer) was known for the Bayer filter, which survives to this day as the dominant approach to capturing color images in all digital cameras, and Bayer dithering, which didn't. Last time I saw it used was as decoration
136.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I'm running tests for an involved math research project, and to my great surprise Lean 4 << Haskell << OCaml in execution times (so far). I love Lean 4, but good luck getting help with it from AI. Today's project-in-pr
137.
by Syzygies 2y ago
In this thread you're seeing survivorship bias. We're discussing an editor that doesn't support AI. AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of immense scope. We're not talking to an alien intelligence; we&#x
138.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Deepseek r1 is getting a lot of buzz in the last day or so. As a Chat agent in Cursor, it gets further than I've seen other AI get at writing Lean 4 code. The process is acutely painful. It can't stick to directions, and keeps try
139.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I love Lean 4 as a general purpose programming language, but I can't use it because no current AI coding assistant can reliably work with me in Lean. I can be trying six languages at once like a chess master playing an exhibition simul
140.
by Syzygies 2y ago
My mind is blown, a new language where I can see new reach. Back in the day, APL was good at multidimensional arrays, and from there could outstrip Fortran shops at anything. A surprising swath of discrete reality can be viewed as a graph,
141.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Exactly. These tools test whether we're brilliant managers, understanding the potential and limitations of everyone we manage, and understanding the work well enough to do it ourselves. I too am using AI to play with new languages and
142.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I've stopped expressions of outrage at lazy first answers, after seeing some sort of "code of conduct" warning. Apparently, the singularity ship has sailed, but we really don't want AI to remember us as the species that
143.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Our world is increasingly defined by software without correctness proofs. Our tools are too clumsy, and we're just not smart enough, so we accept this situation. AI-verified code could become one of the most economically important appl
144.
by Syzygies 2y ago
Wow! My first test query immediately found me a paper relevant to research code I'm writing. Down that rabbit hole, I almost forgot to come back and praise this project.
145.
by Syzygies 2y ago
"Can AI do math for us" is the canonical wrong question. People want self-driving cars so they can drink and watch TV. We should crave tools that enhance our abilities, as tools have done since prehistoric times. I'm a resear
146.
by Syzygies 2y ago
For anyone who ran out of patience scrolling, and prefers their information top-down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster
147.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I too kept a log of my errors in the 1980's, hoping to become a better C programmer. I imagined that with careful enough reflection, I would never make the same mistake twice. I found the log many years later. Last entry: "Forgot
148.
by Syzygies 2y ago
This article is missing the "meta" in studying mathematics. Creative introspection into how one learns begins to really pay off partway through college. One's relationship to convention becomes as important as one's rela
149.
by Syzygies 2y ago
I grew up with no choice in this matter. Then there was a period when "touch" dialing was available for an exhorbitant premium. There's something so Brooklyn / Portland about wanting to relive this for the romance. It su
150.
by Syzygies 2y ago
ChatGPT-4o: 44+58+88=190 So, Oliver has a total of 190 kiwis. The five smaller kiwis on Sunday are still included in the total count, so they don't change the final sum.

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