will-burner

7 ms·

61.
by will-burner 2y ago
It's annoying that you need so much math to understand the utility of Category Theory. I learned a bunch of Category Theory before I ever saw it used in a useful way. Grothendieck wrote modern Algebraic Geometry in the language of Cate
62.
by will-burner 2y ago
The dot product! That's a good example, thank you.
63.
by will-burner 2y ago
The definition may be simple, but it's not very concrete and I'd argue that makes it not strait forward. While examples of vector spaces can be very concrete (think R, R^2, R^30), I struggle to think of a concrete example of a mul
64.
by will-burner 2y ago
Michael Harris is a great mathematician (number theory, let's go!!), but that review to me is pretty rambling and doesn't point out many inaccuracies in DFW's book, but takes issue with DFW's approach and style or writin
65.
by will-burner 2y ago
I'm surprised by the mathematician's critiques of this book. I have a PhD in math and I read this book about 10 years ago now. I loved it. I'm sure there are some inaccuracies, but he gets the overall story correct. There&#x2
66.
by will-burner 2y ago
This is a great comment. Another important distinction, I think, is that in the AlphaGo case there's no equivalent to the generalized predict next token pretraining that happens for LLMs (at least I don't think so, this is what I&
67.
by will-burner 2y ago
Yeah, eigenvectors and eigenvalues are abstract and best understood in terms of the linear mapping between vector spaces and change of basis, but change of basis for a vector space and writing a matrix in a new basis gets really complicated
68.
by will-burner 2y ago
It's hard to make the connection between matrices and a linear mapping between vector spaces. A lot of the time students in a linear algebra classes do not have a great grasp of what a function is, so when talking about vector spaces a