abstractbill

6 ms·

1.
by abstractbill 25d ago
Theoretical physics, sure, ok. Not experimental physics though.
2.
by abstractbill 2mo ago
Math is full of such steps, moreso than most other endeavors, probably because the main limit is the abstract reasoning itself. That, as well as how long we've been doing it (thousands of years!) and so how much of the more accessibl
3.
by abstractbill 2mo ago
I've been admining our family minecraft servers for about 5 years, and just handed off that job to my 12 year old daughter who now knows more than enough of the linux command-line to do it. I thoroughly recommend it, it's been gre
4.
Ask HN: Are you teaching your kids to program?
3 points by abstractbill 2mo ago|1 comments
5.
by abstractbill 2mo ago
These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to us
6.
by abstractbill 4mo ago
A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it w
7.
by abstractbill 4mo ago
It's nice to see peoples' success stories with diagnoses. I've been suffering from something for more than 20 years now. I was healthy until 2005. Then it seemed like I got sick with some kind of virus and just... never got
8.
by abstractbill 4mo ago
My 15 year old is devouring them right now. She pauses dozens of times every day to tell me the best jokes. I love it.
9.
by abstractbill 4mo ago
"... though when it tried to animate it the bicycle bounced off into the top and the bicycle got warped." Should be the pelican bounced off.
10.
by abstractbill 5mo ago
I read them as a teenager, and now my teenaged daughter has started reading them. They are every bit as good as I remember them being.
11.
by abstractbill 5mo ago
A complaint asking what this has to do with hackers or hacking.
12.
by abstractbill 7mo ago
A question I enjoy asking myself when I'm wondering about this stuff is "if there are alien mathematicians in a distant galaxy somewhere, do they know about this?" For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.
13.
by abstractbill 11mo ago
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing wi
14.
by abstractbill 11mo ago
Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else. Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging ba
15.
by abstractbill 1y ago
It’s your brain working as intended. As intended by whom?
16.
by abstractbill 1y ago
Sure, but I think there's plenty of room for people to say "I found this pattern that looks really interesting!" without analyzing it further themselves.
17.
by abstractbill 1y ago
It's just "turtle": https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html
18.
by abstractbill 1y ago
I started my kids on turtle graphics. There's a good implementation that comes with python that's very easy to get up-and-running, to the point where it quite reminds me of BASIC on the kinds of microcomputers I got started on a
19.
by abstractbill 1y ago
Honestly my first reaction to seeing these photos was to wonder if they were AI-generated (I'm not suggesting they are, I just have that response quite often now).
20.
A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization(abstractnonsense.com)
137 points by abstractbill 1y ago|26 comments
21.
by abstractbill 1y ago
It's been a long time since I've been a regular reader of any newspaper, but when I was (admittedly at least 20 years ago!) I don't remember it being that way at all. Can you suggest a good example of a recent Guardian articl
22.
by abstractbill 2y ago
Yes, and all of these dates would be considered "young" by most mathematicians!
23.
by abstractbill 2y ago
Congrats on your progress! Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activit
24.
0ad new release, Alpha 27: Agni(wildfiregames.com)
4 points by abstractbill 2y ago|0 comments
25.
by abstractbill 2y ago
Typo: "When we with vectors" should be "When we work with vectors" I think.
26.
by abstractbill 2y ago
A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source. In his post, pg says "Political correctne
27.
by abstractbill 2y ago
Yes! That a really fun problem too -- it feels like it should be tractable but it's insanely hard. If you do start some kind of competition around it, let me know, I'd be interested.
28.
by abstractbill 2y ago
> The link at the bottom doesn’t work. Can you clarify which link is broken and how? What browser and OS? > In my experience, LLMs are terrible at clues. That hasn't been my experience. Without good prompting they give you clues
29.
by abstractbill 2y ago
Thanks! That's a wonderfully hard problem, I'd love to see it get solved.
30.
by abstractbill 2y ago
Great observation, yeah, I've had very similar experiences with prompting, exactly as you said -- one direction giving very bland literal clues, and the opposite direction giving clues that are a stretch even when you know the answer!

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