boothby

17 ms·

301.
by boothby 2y ago
It's even more general than that: effort is antithetical to cool. Being seen making effort is as embarrassing as failure itself, perhaps moreso -- there's a peculiar glory in spectacular failure. Parents these days are taught (w
302.
by boothby 2y ago
The 3D grid result is well known, perhaps it would be fair to call it trivial (you can even throw away all but 2 layers of one of your dimensions). As you say, the Menger Sponge is a subset of the 3D grid, so the students had to find a con
303.
by boothby 2y ago
The missing assumptions are that the number of genes is large, independently distributed (i.e. no correlations among different genes), and identically distributed. And the whopper: that nurture has no impact. You can weaken some of those a
304.
by boothby 2y ago
It's interesting what people take from this passage. I was primed by alangau's statement that Dostoevsky predicted the death of absolute good, and the mass slaughter of millions, when I read > There is not—there cannot be—a si
305.
by boothby 2y ago
There is nothing heterodox about calling our qubits qubits, nor are our qubit counts deceptive. The limitation is on the algorithms that can be performed on our systems; something that we're extremely clear about in our publications.
306.
by boothby 2y ago
Much more has been written on the topic in the intervening years, including by Aaronson. I'd challenge cwillu's statement that "nothing" has changed, but I'm a D-Wave employee* so I don't tend to wade in. M
307.
by boothby 2y ago
I stand by the part where I said we all "knew" it at the time; his picture was included in a mural and everything! But, thanks, TIL! Your reference doesn't support the negative claim, but I found a really cool deep dive her
308.
by boothby 2y ago
It's funny, in high school, we attended assemblies in the Quincy Jones Auditorium. Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee attended the same high school, which we all knew, but Quincy Jones just didn't have the same name recognition. Despite
309.
by boothby 2y ago
I'm a lover of esoteric languages, and Piet[1] captured my imagination more than any other. So, I wrote a compiler[2] for the language, eventually writing a backend that re-targets Piet itself. And since I love code golf, I wrote most
310.
by boothby 2y ago
To be entirely pedantic: if the job is developing a correct mental model for setf, lisp may be exactly the right tool for the job.
311.
by boothby 2y ago
I'm a mathematician working in a common lisp shop, and sometimes, I really do feel that I'm living the dream. We're presently hiring, with more of a focus on software engineering than doodling on pure math, of course, but we
312.
by boothby 2y ago
I'm no physics expert but I do make programmable crystals for a living. One of my favorite applications of adiabatic quantum computers is the simulation of physical materials such as [1] wherein we see emergent phenomena like fraction
313.
by boothby 2y ago
I generally try not to comment on work-related stuff in public but I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that sampling rate. Surely they can do better, and that's just a limitation of the free API?
314.
by boothby 2y ago
Consider it an arched eyebrow, not offense. > Physicists are renowned for their hair, but why stop there. That's a lark for layfolk. If I wanted to participate in beauty pageants, I'd have done that. But I chose discrete math
315.
by boothby 2y ago
What a curious comment: remarking on my appearance in direct response to my report that people judge me on my appearance. No matter that you meant it as a compliment (I must assume, despite your cryptic and neutral phrasing). This may sur
316.
by boothby 2y ago
> I may take up a minor in math, but I don’t want that to be my job job. Oof, I died a little. Mathematics, and mathematicians, are so misunderstood. There's no one way to be a mathematician! Some of us just see the world throu
317.
by boothby 2y ago
In high school, I got a D in first semester calculus, and declared myself "done" with math. Up until that point, I had used a calculator as a crutch, but calculus required symbolic manipulation that could not be faked. My dad&#x
318.
by boothby 2y ago
> What does an algorithm look like? Writing Piet by hand is a fun way to explore this. Sergei Lewis[1] and I[2] have each written tools to generate Piet code. Sergei's assembler makes much nicer looking code than my Piet backend
319.
by boothby 2y ago
I did one of those for a codegolf challenge once, it was fun! DMM links to it on the examples page; I'm somewhat amazed that it's still up on pastebin. https://pastebin.com/zxc9V3UX
320.
by boothby 2y ago
Sadly, that depends on a discrepency between npiet and the current Piet spec: > The interpreter now begins sliding from its current white codel, in the new direction of the DP, until it either enters a coloured block or encounters anothe
321.
by boothby 3y ago
folds sheets in the dark
322.
by boothby 3y ago
All of them? I gave up on that goal partway through the pandemic; I spent about a year's worth of occasional games without seeing Tengu and eventually accepted that I wasn't interested enough to get that 6-challenge badge. Strate
323.
by boothby 3y ago
I actually brought this hot take up in my conversation with Hillel -- something along the lines of "void * * is the canonical native graph representation in C."
324.
by boothby 3y ago
As somebody who's actually done the work, I don't think you've really spent time with the question. The problem is that graphs, in general, aren't special. They're a structural dumping ground. Data structures are
325.
by boothby 3y ago
I take solace in such findings. I learned that my quest was ill-conceived, and I abandoned it; I should be glad that I'm no longer searching for what cannot be found.
326.
by boothby 3y ago
Don't fall for the abstraction! Mathematically speaking, if you have graphs G1 and G2; you can make another graph H with nodes {G1, G2} and edges {(G1, G2)} and nothing goes wrong. You can definitely view your whole operating system
327.
by boothby 3y ago
I disagree: trees are connected graphs with n nodes and n-1 edges. They're graphs with a special structure that is highly exploitable for performance gains, but they're graphs.
328.
by boothby 3y ago
It isn't just an 80/20 problem. Imagine that you replace every linked list, binary tree, trie, etc., with a generic directed graph datatype. The resulting performance would be abysmal . The resulting notation would be horrid,
329.
Quantum annealers and the future of prime factorization(techxplore.com)
3 points by boothby 3y ago|1 comments
330.
by boothby 3y ago
Yeah! Programmers are quite familiar with this universe. In many programming languages, you can't represent 2^64 with a built-in integral datatype. While it's certainly possible to implement data structures and algorithms to su

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