boothby

18 ms·

331.
by boothby 3y ago
No, axioms are hypotheses. In general, a mathematical proof has the form "If [conditions] are met, then [result] is guaranteed." This requires no faith whatsoever that [conditions] will ever be met. But those numbers that requ
332.
by boothby 3y ago
Careful, now. Ultrafinitists exist within the mathematical community and sometimes we overstate our opinions for funsies. Doron is much more reasonable in person than one may conclude from this website. To me, ultrafinitism is an intellec
333.
by boothby 3y ago
Generating them programmatically would be fun. Regex matching is NP-complete already thanks to backreferences. But even without backreferences, rectangular regex crosswords can encode SAT problems. So, solving these hexagonal crosswords
334.
by boothby 3y ago
To be sporting, I left a little bug resulting from my weird compulsion to golf snippets like this.
335.
by boothby 3y ago
You can improve that by around 13% if you soften the inequality (your > should be >=, I believe) table = {} s = 'ddddd' for i in range(100): if i%5 == 0: print(s) state = table.setdefault(
336.
by boothby 3y ago
Examining the code, my first thought was to throw it a de Bruijn sequence[1]: a cyclic sequence of length 2^n that contains every string of length n as a subsequence. It should (and does) learn a length-32 de Bruijn sequence after only a c
337.
by boothby 3y ago
Any chance you've got pictures? It sounds like a few of us here are happier without the padding, and I've been passively looking out for a sit/stand solution for my in-office days.
338.
by boothby 3y ago
At the start of the pandemic, I was using my girlfriend's piano bench, but she wants it to be at her piano. Now, I sit on an Ikea bekväm step stool. For decades now I've dealt with lower back pain, but that's almost entirel
339.
by boothby 3y ago
Piet is a 2-dimensional language whose instruction pointer roams the space. There are 8 "directions" that execution can travel in, and data is on a single stack. One might be tempted to call Piet a fungeoid given the description
340.
by boothby 3y ago
This is fun, thanks for sharing! I'm currently developing a much worse language and I've spent quite a few hours on it. I think that the space of simple languages is very enlightening to explore. If nothing else, returning to a
341.
by boothby 3y ago
Responding to William here because I was once a student and collaborator of his. I was long considered "bad at math," a thing my dad said about himself* and an excuse that I readily took on when I got bad grades. I got a career i
342.
by boothby 3y ago
As a bit of a joke I wrote a library for this once https://github.com/boothby/dissert The big problem is that some people use assert wrong. There's a distinct time and place for asserts, and that's for testi
343.
by boothby 3y ago
For what it's worth, mutable default parameters do have their use. def foo(x, cache = {}): value = cache.get(x) if value is None: ... cache[x] = value return value This simple ex
344.
by boothby 3y ago
I've done this. In my experience it ends up stuck in local minima from which there are no obvious correctness-preserving improvements. Add Monte Carlo to escape valleys and this mode of exploration is still too timid to find anything
345.
by boothby 3y ago
Small qubits count machines could be useful for teaching about qubit operations. I can see several lab assignments based around these machine: measure the readout fidelity, measure the gate fidelity, measure T1 time, etc.
346.
by boothby 3y ago
There is much better, faster, cheaper hardware out there to generate random numbers. Using a quantum computer as an RNG is akin to buying an airplane and using it to blow-dry a carpet.
347.
by boothby 3y ago
related: FRACTRAN to brainfuck translator https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/5210/convert-fr...
348.
by boothby 4y ago
I'm quite fond of Pixel Dungeon. It's quite simplistic compared to NetHack but it's good fun (if you like dying early and often) and looks nice. And, bonus, it's GPL3-licensed and hasn't seen an update since 2015,
349.
by boothby 4y ago
> ... without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use ... > ... Permission is not granted to use this software ... Is this going to hold up to legal scrutiny? It looks like it's blatantly contradicting itself
350.
by boothby 4y ago
No specific book, but generic advise about how to use a math book. Homework, homework, homework. Read the whole thing, but focus on the exercises. Do every exercise as soon as you can manage: don't wait until you've read the
351.
by boothby 4y ago
When I went back to school, I went to community college while freelancing to pay for it. I saw some of that hand-holding you refer to, but I discovered that after I was admitted (and took some remedial math because I'd blown that off
352.
by boothby 4y ago
No, I got into web development straight out of high school. I'd been taking community college courses through an early-entry program; took some programming classes, did some networking, so come Monday after high school, I had a job.
353.
by boothby 4y ago
Yes. In the early '00s, I was unfulfilled doing web development and bored out of my mind. I went back to school hoping to get into more interesting tech. I got a bit sidetracked from that because I found immense pleasure in mathem
354.
by boothby 4y ago
This is really cool, William! A lifetime ago, we were pondering what it would take to get Sage running in the browser from a static server. It feels like you're nearly there. Is that in the plans?
355.
by boothby 4y ago
Obligatory plug for Sloane's encyclopedia of integer sequences! Every time I embark on a combinatorial investigation, I collect some statistics and search Sloane's. It's rare that I don't get useful hits. https:/
356.
by boothby 4y ago
Sadly, the chip art I'm responsible for is not public. But yeah, folks still do this.
357.
by boothby 5y ago
I treated this the same way I started when solving absurdle, wordle, and hurdle: find the database, get crackin' on a decision tree. But, after estimating 1.2e17 possible passwords in the "database," it only feels fair to ac
358.
by boothby 5y ago
Got it in one "guess." Apparently どうぞ means "here you are." Makes me think the brick was deliberately left in the door for folks who look for such things.
359.
by boothby 5y ago
Yes, that is what I said. You'll find that the internet is full of people who don't care what you think, and fairness is either enforced (cat and mouse) or nonexistent (top-tier play is bots).
360.
by boothby 5y ago
I don't know about everybody else, but I computed a decision tree, and I "solve wordle" by entering guesses and scanning down the tree to find how to respond to hints. If I was going to compete (and I won't, because it

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