jfarmer

6 ms·

1.
by jfarmer 5mo ago
No, it's really sets of measure zero. The Cantor set is an example of an uncountable set of measure 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_set The indicator function of the Cantor set is Riemann integrable. Like
2.
by jfarmer 5mo ago
"Almost everywhere" means "everywhere except on a set of measure 0", in the Lebesgue measure sense. Here's an example of a Riemann integrable function w/ infinitely many discontinuities: https://en.w
3.
by jfarmer 6mo ago
The picture isn't quite so clean in the constructive context, which is what many of these proof systems are rooted in, e.g., https://mathoverflow.net/questions/236483/difference-between...
4.
by jfarmer 6mo ago
So they'd need more robust experimental designs and statistical methods. They exist. And unlike the university context, there’s a glut of data. A basic technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_probability_w
5.
by jfarmer 6mo ago
Seems like a straightforward solution would be to get people to opt-in by offering them credits, increased limits, early access to new features, etc. Universities have IRBs for good reasons.
6.
by jfarmer 10mo ago
Plants "want" nitrogen, but dump fertilizer onto soil and you get algal blooms, dead zones, plants growing leggy and weak. A responsible farmer is a steward of the local ecology, and there's an "ecology of friction"
7.
by jfarmer 10mo ago
I think of it like this: Friction is an element of the environment like any other. There's an "ecology of friction" we should respect. Deciding friction is bad and should be eradicated is like deciding mosquitoes or spiders o
8.
by jfarmer 10mo ago
I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessar
9.
by jfarmer 1y ago
From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct , the fallacy that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." “The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most
10.
by jfarmer 1y ago
I sometimes find Paul Watzlawick's five axioms of communication helping in thinking about situations like this. Link: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi... ) 1. One cannot not communi
11.
by jfarmer 1y ago
CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them. The essay: https://www.peirce.org/wri
12.
by jfarmer 1y ago
From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct : “The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philoso
13.
by jfarmer 1y ago
John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." > The fall
14.
by jfarmer 2y ago
Always a pleasant surprise to see Peirce linked here! He influenced many people, both directly and indirectly, but had a...difficult personality. He has many thousands of pages of written work, but resisted finalizing anything "publish
15.
by jfarmer 2y ago
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advanc
16.
by jfarmer 3y ago
I sometimes use a Turing Tumble to demonstrate this: https://upperstory.com/turingtumble/ I've also had occasional success first convincing them they know how to add "mindlessly", by just manipulating sy
17.
by jfarmer 3y ago
I did this years ago to demonstrate to my students that the "exact solution" can still be written in code. There are implementations in Ruby and Python, with some benchmarking code: https://github.com/jfarmer/
18.
by jfarmer 3y ago
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was sudden
19.
by jfarmer 3y ago
Love this. The way I think about it is that you assume a level of responsibility whenever you tinker with default affordances. Your "feature" isn't restricted to whatever narrow conception or intention you had when you design
20.
by jfarmer 3y ago
If folks are looking for terms to Google, try "spectral graph theory" and "algebraic graph theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_graph_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#
21.
by jfarmer 3y ago
I'm not proposing anything WRT the depth or scope of the material. If the premise of the material is that phrases like "dot product" can be used freely or with minimal explanation then images like the "place the apple qu
22.
by jfarmer 3y ago
I understand that, of course. Is your goal to make it feel like a typical university course or like something else? If like a typical university course, start with a syllabus and a course description and all the logistics. If like something
23.
by jfarmer 3y ago
> We've just published a lot of original, visual, and intuitive explanations of concepts to introduce people to large language models. Kinda frustrating that the main link dumps me onto what reads like a university syllabus, and not
24.
by jfarmer 3y ago
The original video is neat. Right after this quote he plays + critiques one of his old broadcasts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
25.
by jfarmer 3y ago
Oops. Yeah, I knew some of them did and then at some point I just started tossing more programs in the list as I ran across them.
26.
by jfarmer 3y ago
Thanks!
27.
by jfarmer 3y ago
One nice thing about macOS is that many of the system GUI tools are graphical wrappers around a command-line tool that does the real work. Most of them live in /usr/sbin I keep a list for my students. Here are some: diskutil
28.
by jfarmer 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_density
29.
by jfarmer 4y ago
I do think "blog post learning" can work, but agree with you that this ain't it. The "explanation" on the blog post would really only work for someone who more-or-less understood Fourier Series already. You're
30.
by jfarmer 4y ago
Glad to hear our students worked out for you! We tried hard to give students a career, not just their first job. Some of the other anecdotes in this thread are disheartening, for sure. Flatiron, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright also had similar

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