nyssos

7 ms·

1.
by nyssos 4mo ago
The relevant paragraph literally starts with "In India", where, yes, it's obviously the case that Hindus are not marginalized.
2.
by nyssos 4mo ago
Be absolutely ruthless with technical debt. Opus is perfectly capable of producing idiomatic code in any mainstream language you please, but will seize on any opportunity to justify writing basically-python instead because that's &quot
3.
by nyssos 4mo ago
I also work on a large complex rust project (>1M LOC) with extensive use of Claude Code. It is very consistent with my experience. Claude frequently subverts the obvious intent of the system - whether that's expressed in comments or
4.
by nyssos 5mo ago
Yes, and? Something can be both scare and inadequate to a given task. FAANG L5s cost a pretty penny but I wouldn't trust a random one to prove a crypto library correct.
5.
by nyssos 5mo ago
Agreed that we're not at saturation, but we don't have a canonical "best" either. For example ChatGPT 5.5 + Codex is, in my experience, vastly superior to Opus 4.7 + Claude Code at sufficiently well-specified Haskell, bu
6.
by nyssos 5mo ago
You're presuming too much about what OP's quality standards are. Can SOTA models outperform the average junior engineer? Yes, obviously. Can they match the best human engineers, if those humans were given all the time and interest
7.
by nyssos 5mo ago
I do this for debugging. Models are extremely vulnerable to framing effects and it's usually easier to spin up a fresh instance than it is to get an existing one to generate new hypotheses.
8.
by nyssos 7mo ago
> The C that shows up in quantum mechanics is likely an example of this--it's a case of physics having a a circular symmetry embedded in it (the phase of the wave functions) and everyone getting attached to their favorite way of wri
9.
by nyssos 1y ago
Classical logic is the presumed default for mathematics, if someone is working in a different system they will say so explicitly.
10.
by nyssos 2y ago
Lawyer rates are extremely high variance, and the NYT is not hiring anywhere near the median. White shoe firms break $1000/hr routinely.
11.
by nyssos 2y ago
> I thought a partner at a large law firm might get $ 500k or more per year Easily.
12.
by nyssos 2y ago
> but my understanding of copyright is that if a person when into a clean room and wrote an new article from scratch, without having read any NYT, that just so happened to be exactly the same as an existing NYT article, it would still be
13.
by nyssos 2y ago
Life expectancy at birth is irrelevant, people who die in infancy don't consume many resources at all. What matters is the percentage of the population that's of working age, and here Germany is fairly typical for a developed coun
14.
by nyssos 2y ago
Here's a less galactic version. Suppose you're implementing a binary tree where every leaf has to have the same height - a toy model of a self-balancing search tree. Here's an implementation using GADTs and type-level additio
15.
by nyssos 2y ago
> Yet Turing machines are about as far from abstract mathematics as one can get, because you can actually build these things in our physical universe and observe their behavior over time (except for the whole "infinite tape" pa
16.
by nyssos 2y ago
Imaginary numbers aren't a field, so there's no such thing. Clifford algebras over the complex numbers work fine, but it's usually not what the people talking about "geometric algebra" are doing.
17.
by nyssos 2y ago
"Geometric algebras" are Clifford algebras over the reals. Differential geometry is probably the field where you're most likely to see mathematicians discuss them, though they also come up in certain (closely related) areas o
18.
by nyssos 2y ago
There's no mathematically natural choice. In physical settings, on the other hand, you almost always want the one induced by the metric.
19.
by nyssos 2y ago
Sorry, yes, typo.
20.
by nyssos 2y ago
To an extent. A truly completely formal proof, as in symbol manipulation according to the rules of some formal system, no. It's valid or it isn't. But no one actually works like this. There are varying degrees of "semiforma
21.
by nyssos 2y ago
You're conflating a few things here. Constructivists are only interested in constructive proofs: if you want to claim "forall x in X, P(x) is true" then you need to exhibit a particular element of x for which P holds. As a ph
22.
by nyssos 2y ago
> That's just a good practice in the general case: an intermediate type that fully described the data wouldn't have saved you from overwriting it unless you actually looked closely at the type signature. The issue isn't th
23.
by nyssos 2y ago
> Do you have an anecdote (just one!) of a case where TypeScript's lack of type system soundness bit you on a real application? Sure. The usual Java-style variance nonsense is probably the most common source, but I see you're n
24.
by nyssos 2y ago
There's not much connection. Typescript's record types aren't sound, but that's far from its only source of unsoundness, and sound structural typing is perfectly possible.
25.
by nyssos 2y ago
Because you don't want to have to enumerate every possible combination up front. Mixins are probably the closest OO concept.
26.
by nyssos 2y ago
Informally, a sound type system is one that never lies to you. Formally, the usual notion of soundness is defined with respect to an evaluation strategy: a term-rewriting rule, and a distinguished set of values. For pure functional programs
27.
by nyssos 2y ago
> What do you gain from an unsound type system? The ability to type most idiomatic javascript circa 2014. It's definitely a Faustian bargain.
28.
by nyssos 2y ago
> In Physics, entropy is a property of a bit of matter, it is not related to the observer or their knowledge. We can measure the enthalpy change of a material sample and work out its entropy without knowing a thing about its structure. E
29.
by nyssos 2y ago
Scala, OCaml, and Haskell all have very powerful type systems. OCaml and Haskell even have good ones.
30.
by nyssos 2y ago
> Then again, I believe even mathematicians are fine with ideas of an empty set, or of a one-element set being distinct from the element itself. Especially mathematicians. Distinguishing stuff and structure is a common theme throughout

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