Syzygies

6 ms·

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by Syzygies 9d ago
One of the high points of my acting career (such as it was, second only to doing a scene with Russell Crowe as math consultant to A Beautiful Mind) was MacBeth. While Avatar actor Stephen Lang was still in college, he played MacBeth. I brou
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by Syzygies 12d ago
https://vimeo.com/194116649 Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question. Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded
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by Syzygies 16d ago
My favorite nonfiction book in years is "Storia della pasta in dieci piatti" by Luca Cesari. The signature chapter explores the day in 2015 when celebrity chef Carlo Cracco stated on television that a clove of garlic is an ingredi
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by Syzygies 26d ago
I grew up in Greece, a suburb of Rochester, New York where Kodak Park and its research labs were located. Aliens would have spotted the labs in 1965 as the one place in the northeast still lit up during the great blackout. Researchers bough
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by Syzygies 1mo ago
This is helpful, proving this entire discussion is subjective. I'm a retired mathematician with a primary research project, and too many tangential projects I fear revisiting; tokens be damned, will they burn all my time? Translate t
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by Syzygies 1mo ago
Pub tourism is one of my favorite ways to spend a day in London. The pub "density" isn't all it's cracked up to be. To be able to make it to the next pub for a bathroom (and to preserve my ability to walk) I've foun
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by Syzygies 1mo ago
I also use Arq and Time Machine. How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-delet... SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Clon
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by Syzygies 1mo ago
Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials. They both have decades of experience providing astounding suppo
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by Syzygies 1mo ago
I thought this was how Nobel Prizes sickened fields. Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because Gösta Mittag-Leffler was sleeping with Nobel's wif
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by Syzygies 1mo ago
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not." I tried this, long ago. I just wasn't getting Haskell, so I'd retype my programs from memory and reconstruction. Obvious for music, why not fo
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by Syzygies 2mo ago
It is mathematical folklore that one should attempt to prove a conjecture by day, disprove it by night. Jordan Ellenberg recently popularized this in his 2014 book. He and I both heard this from Barry Mazur, but it dates at least to Bing, i
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by Syzygies 2mo ago
https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare I spent far too long comparing dozens of languages, only some of which are part of the above project, before switching from Haskell to Lean for a new phase of my math research. Lean
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by Syzygies 2mo ago
I loved the appearance of Bill Thurston. He proved enough of what he saw to be considered one of our greatest mathematicians, but his brilliance was what he saw. The obvious question Terry Tao seems not to address: AI mops up our unsolved p
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by Syzygies 2mo ago
The sum from 1 to n is easy various ways, a matter of personal preference. One can "make rainbows", pairing 1 with n, 2 with n-1, ending up with n/2 copies of n+1. I prefer to tear an n by n+1 rectangle of squares in half dow
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by Syzygies 2mo ago
> Rich Hickey has a joke about semi-colons in language design I didn't see semicolons, but I saw plenty of {} braces, and I can't explain why they're needed. https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare "
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by Syzygies 2mo ago
> I think most of the substantive criticism of Zuckerberg has been about burning funds. The 2017 Rohingya massacre in Myanmar? They handed him the death toll. He filed it under growth.
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
I can't believe I'm the first to Rick roll this thread with the most famous XKCD comic of all time: https://xkcd.com/327/
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
I've spoken before a thousand several times saying with a straight face "Every audience is an audience of one." My first example, I was asked to give one more talk on how one needs to shuffle seven times. There were four peop
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
I came close to adopting Scala, many parallels to Ruby with vastly better performance. I'm Ruby or Lean 4.
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
I nearly adopted OCaml for my current math research, in no small part because of Jane Street contributions. I instead chose Lean 4, as LLMs became able to help code in Lean. I give up a factor of two in performance (a gap likely to close) f
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
As a mathematician, this reads to me as the most informed comment. Various priors inoculate me from feeling some of the rejection expressed in other comments. I knew Sammy Eilenberg, perhaps the most famous mathematician to work at Columbia
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
Thanks for saving me the time. I have email locally dating to the dawn of the internet; it's one form of external mind-mapping for me. I'm completely baffled that a decent mail program can't handle the mail for a small town,
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by Syzygies 3mo ago
There's the finished knot, and there's his way of tying it, which is easy to grasp. That strikes a chord for me. In grade school my teachers could not distinguish between these perspectives, for the standard shoelace knot. I found
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
Continental Airlines had an active frequent flyer community. A student emerged as a legendary figure (think "Hunger Games") after she noticed that Continental announcement URLs were numbered sequentially, and a not-yet-released an
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role. In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
We have not yet converged on a best (or even adequate) way to present a structured mountain of information to AI, not already in its training corpus. AI agents fielded by major AI players still fail at the basic task of providing immediate
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
Not everyone expects to appear on HN, but chasing links this is a par two golf course: UFBT: Unofficial Flipper Build Tool (installation guide) uFBT is a cross-platform tool for building applications for Flipper Zero.
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
Yes, I was going to guess semantic embedding from playing around and seeing the search responses. Thank you for "About this project". I'd love to extract just the foreign language from Pimsleur foreign language lessons, for f
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
I was hoping for Lean 4.
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by Syzygies 4mo ago
J is unclear on the concept, it's a hack to port APL to ASCII. I'm typing on a ZMK keyboard now where an APL unicode layer would be trivial. There are modern APLs. One can code a iOS keyboard with AI help. While a native APL would

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