oddthink

9 ms·

1.
by oddthink 2mo ago
> Although it turned out in the end that C++ developers actually wanted to use C++. Oof, I don't think so. It's just ridiculous how many things Google uses C++ for where something like Go or Java would be a better fit, and ever
2.
by oddthink 3mo ago
> E.g. If I ever see a monetary value stored in something else than integers I'm going to run away screaming (thank you Rust decimals represented as JSON floats). It's always integers unless you have a VERY good reason to do ot
3.
by oddthink 3mo ago
I've found differential forms to be more useful than GA, but that might just be that I was brought up in the MTW tradition and don't quite get GA. Whenever I look at GA, I try to figure out where the metric comes in, and I just do
4.
by oddthink 3mo ago
VSCode binds a lot of basic commands to function keys, so I'm always doing Fn-F12. That seems like a weird choice, and if it really bothered me, I could remap it, but so far I haven't.
5.
by oddthink 8mo ago
I loved that thing. I don't know how many hours I spent on that. I wish I could my kids interested in anything half as creative.
6.
by oddthink 9mo ago
The current version is at https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource
7.
by oddthink 11mo ago
I'm sorry, it's a really inefficient format. I don't want to sit and listen for two hours to what's most likely half an hour of content by reading. Just write down what you have to say already! I guess you could do doubl
8.
by oddthink 1y ago
Does the "standard office" even exist? I have never seen one in my working years. I don't even know what to imagine. The closest I got was a shared office in grad school in the late 90s, but after that it's been cubes at
9.
by oddthink 1y ago
I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical p
10.
by oddthink 1y ago
Yes. For like a simple naive Bayes, you can say we start at 0, a user vote is worth +3, a merchant vote is +5, we decay by 0.1 every month, publish if we hit +13 (95%), un-publish at +10 (90%), etc. etc. It's the same math as logits, b
11.
by oddthink 1y ago
I've been using decibels as a scale for log-odds for a while when reporting results. It works pretty well, since the relevant part of the scale is wide, unlike using nepers, which I had never heard of until I started noodling around wi
12.
by oddthink 1y ago
It's internal. But it's basically hooking up SQL code generation to the docs and schema of most of the tables in the data warehouse. I don't know the details, but probably also some extra stuff in the prompt to give a bit of
13.
by oddthink 1y ago
There was a 1-5 Likert scale self-rating on "leveraging AI" and a free-text box. I rambled about using claude code to help summarize my daily notes, cursor for implementation, using the chatgpt ui for broad questions (what happene
14.
by oddthink 1y ago
Yes, but the message from Shopify leadership is "it's part of your job to mess around with this stuff and see what works". Not "use AI at all costs". The general feeling I'm getting is that using this AI stuff
15.
by oddthink 1y ago
I mean, I could walk down to a bar at 10pm, if I wanted to. I live in a city. But if I'm getting up at 6:30, I don't think I want a pint let alone three that late. Plus, I'd still have two kids up, asking me to extend the wif
16.
by oddthink 1y ago
I don't really get where people with kids found these 6.5 hrs / wk to spend on friendships, or even the quoted current averages of 4 hrs / wk. On a workday, there isn't much time. I roll out of bed at 6:30, get the kids
17.
by oddthink 1y ago
It's probably just a notation/definition issue. I'm not sure if "grad f" is 100% consistently defined I'm a simple-minded physicist. I just know if you apply the same coordinate transformation to the gradient a
18.
by oddthink 1y ago
I'd say a gradient is usually a covector / one-form. It's a map from vector directions to a scalar change. ie. df = f_x dx + f_y dy is what you can actually compute without a metric; it's in T*M, not TM. If you have a di
19.
by oddthink 2y ago
There's just so much C++ at Google that really has no business being C++ and falls into the "networked server" category. At least large swaths of the Search and Maps codebase, large chunks of flume (beam) batch pipelines, etc
20.
by oddthink 2y ago
Looks interesting, but it's not at all responsive. I can't view it without making my window larger than my screen and manually sliding it back and forth. Even basic TUIs know their output size. I know it's a UI demo, but that
21.
by oddthink 2y ago
It goes way too far, IMHO. It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content. So far I've just fed it technical papers, which may be part of the problem, but what I got
22.
by oddthink 2y ago
I always come back to Schutz's Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics as my reference for notation, but I agree. I came to this by way of General Relativity, so that colors my perceptions. The few treatments of GA that I've
23.
by oddthink 2y ago
Elizabeth Bishop was there first: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47537/the-man-moth
24.
by oddthink 2y ago
I know at least one team is at work is using the Assistants API, and I'm talking with another team that is leaning pretty heavily towards using it over building a custom RAG solution themselves, or even over other in-house frameworks.
25.
by oddthink 2y ago
Interesting! Just over the past month, I've reduced my emacs usage a lot. I'd switched to VSCode for most coding a while ago, but I still kept my daily journal notes in org-mode, but I recently switched to Logseq for that. I don&#
26.
by oddthink 2y ago
Thank you! The Lagrangian as projection of energy-momentum actually makes sense, unlike the "let's just subtract potential from kinetic. No reason, it just works" story. I'd been idly wondering that for a while (and this
27.
by oddthink 3y ago
Why would you? For most forward-looking calculations, the uncertainty of the future completely swamps any cent-rounding. Even for plain-vanilla bond price calculations, floats are the right tool for the job. Say you have a bond that pays $5
28.
by oddthink 3y ago
Is the selling point for this easier custom widgets than in other frameworks? Maybe my standards are too low, but for quick internal tools, it's hard to beat 30-year-old Tcl+Tk.
29.
by oddthink 3y ago
This may be too late to this thread to matter, but I've been dabbling with GT for a few months, and I like it so far. I'm using a few of the modalities mentioned in the article. I use it as for "Pharo development" /
30.
by oddthink 3y ago
I fiddled with its python interop a bit. It's OK, but could use some expanding: it runs python code in a single venv that you'd need to populate with the packages you need. I couldn't find any support for switching venvs base

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