CurtMonash

9 ms·

1.
by CurtMonash 13d ago
If I counted corrected, Fischer went 24-3 in the world championship series around then. That excludes many draws and one forfeit vs. Spassky, a few draws vs. Petrosian, and nothing at all in his sweeps of Larsen and Taimonov.
2.
by CurtMonash 1mo ago
I was thinking that his views were those of a philosophy student even before I got to the point, early on, where he said he was a former philosophy student. To the extent my views are similar, they were first developed in philosophy classes
3.
by CurtMonash 2mo ago
Perhaps the point is to signal virtue while they actively pursue the opposite.
4.
by CurtMonash 2mo ago
Why do you think David Brin's Transparent Society proposals can't work?
5.
by CurtMonash 2mo ago
A large fraction of the problems assigned in the Ross Program were of the form "Prove or disprove, and salvage if possible." The rest were usually a calculation, meant to motivate a general proposition you would encounter soon aft
6.
by CurtMonash 2mo ago
I first heard that kind of story about a thesis defense at Princeton. The twist was that they had been short one person to judge it, so they roped in a professor who was available at that moment ... and he found a counterexample on the fly.
7.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models(transformer-circuits.pub)
2 points by CurtMonash 2mo ago|0 comments
8.
by CurtMonash 3mo ago
No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. Factory-level stuff -- well, the product idea isn't th
9.
by CurtMonash 3mo ago
I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by invent
10.
by CurtMonash 3mo ago
My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.
11.
by CurtMonash 3mo ago
Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946. JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same
12.
by CurtMonash 4mo ago
Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property
13.
by CurtMonash 4mo ago
There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent. B
14.
by CurtMonash 4mo ago
I first encountered it in the 1981 James Clavell novel Noble House. The character using it was a well-educated Hong Kong gangster, or something similar to that. (The plot of the book revolves around massive favors that a certain character i
15.
by CurtMonash 4mo ago
For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online. There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the
16.
by CurtMonash 6mo ago
Lovely man. I wanted him to be my adviser, but he was on leave my second year of grad school, and I changed direction greatly. When I visited Japan as a tourist in 1979, I asked him in advance to write me a generic letter of recommendation.
17.
by CurtMonash 9mo ago
My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A
18.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
I type em dashes as double hyphens. Sometimes the software resolves them to a true em dash, but sometimes not. I never use hyphens where em dashes would be correct. I do have issues determining when a two-word phrase should or shouldn'
19.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
My English professor criticized me for allegedly excessive use of em dashes in 1973. Once I started self-publishing in the 1990s, I disregarded her opinion.
20.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
ab and (-a)(-b) can each be quickly proved to be the additive inverse of (-a)b. So they equal each other. No intermediate theorems are really needed.
21.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
I was one of several math grad students who started at Harvard at age 16 or 17 aroud the same time. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi went on to conventional academic math careers. I took a less straightforward career path. But I was offered an as
22.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
I was told that a book published in honor of Oscar Zariski's 80th birthday included a paper by Oscar Zariski, either proving or at least making progress on a longstanding conjecture by Oscar Zariski. I was in the relevant department at
23.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his student, Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus. I confirm
24.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
I stopped reading early, when the article said that in the 1970s one big relational database did everything. In fact, relational databases did nothing in the 1970s. They didn't even exist yet in commercial form. My first prediction as
25.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
I'd completely forgotten that one!! I just recall the (non-mathematical) poem about the haircut. Certainly that section generally comes more to mind these days in the age of LLMs ..
26.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
Robert Heinlein's "... And he built a crooked house" is both hilarious and mathematical, although perhaps in different parts of the same story. https://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/CrookedHouse.pdf
27.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
Like many classic science fiction "novels", including Foundation, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos is really a collection of linked novellas. The last one has the hero and heroine recruiting the spirit of Lobachevsky to help t
28.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
Mathematical fiction is tough, because of the problems with "mathematical counterfactuals". Why not go with mathematical poetry instead? There are nice sections of same in the Clifton Fadiman anthologies. The first of these is als
29.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
I'd push back. Starship Troopers can be argued to be about political science or the like, but there's nothing about the reasoning that's inherently mathematical. Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely stro
30.
by CurtMonash 1y ago
That's where I'd start. If memory serves, Fantasia Mathematica was the first/best one. And at least one of the recommended works -- The Devil and Simon Flagg -- is anthologize there.

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