steppi

8 ms·

1.
by steppi 1mo ago
A failed hypothesis is not the same thing as a logical error. Would they have been more free of flaws if they believed it was impossible and thus didn't try? We'd all be the poorer for it
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by steppi 1mo ago
Wittgenstein didn't find logical flaws in the Principia and deeply admired it. He found flaws in Russell's follow up work on Epistemology, "The Theory of Knowledge."
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by steppi 1mo ago
This is commonly believed, but Gödel didn't identify a logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise, he proved astonishing theorems revealing limitations of any sufficiently powerful formal system. One can kind of think of the Pr
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by steppi 6mo ago
Tao does state his hopes in the article: "My hope is that the winning submissions will capture the most productive techniques for solving these problems, and/or provide general problem-solving techniques that would also be applica
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by steppi 6mo ago
It seems like the lift in the open-source models is being used as a proxy metric, and the core goal is a human understandable yoga [1] for approaching these kinds of equational proofs in universal algebra. [1] https://mathoverflo
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by steppi 6mo ago
I spent some time in industry working on ML-based credit risk modeling. In my experience, successful shops that have a genuine interest in applying their models to practical decision making with real stakes care deeply about uncertainty qua
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by steppi 6mo ago
Yes, people try this. Check out dynamic tonality. It doesn't necessarily need a system. Experienced guitar players often find themselves unconsciously making little microtonal adjustments through bends and other techniques when playing
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by steppi 9mo ago
I was planning to make a similar comment. Conjecturing that some theory in the string theory landscape [0] gives a theory of quantum gravity consistent with experiments that are possible but beyond what humans may ever be capable of isn&#x2
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by steppi 9mo ago
I don't think they usually make the distinction in a formal sense, but I think most are aware. The space of explorable mathematics is vastly larger than what the community of mathematicians is capable of collectively thinking about, so
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by steppi 9mo ago
I'd say that I care deeply about the meaning behind theorems, but just find results which swing widely based on foundational quirks to be less interesting from an aesthetic standpoint. I see the most interesting structures as the ones
11.
by steppi 10mo ago
It seems like a typo where "integers" is used when the intention was to write "natural numbers". That is the solution to exercise 194 part a) which asked if the set of natural numbers is a field.
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by steppi 10mo ago
Vladimir Arnold famously taught a proof of the insolubility of the Quintic to Moscow Highschool students in the 1960s using a concrete, low-prerequisite approach. His lectures were turned into a book Abel’s Theorem in Problems and Solution
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by steppi 10mo ago
Just a couple of corrections. Let's take the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus as an example[0]: f'(x) = lim_{h->0} {f(x + h) - f(x)} / {h} This isn't the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, it's the usual de
14.
by steppi 11mo ago
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate Decimate is a word that often raises hackles, at least those belonging to a small but committed group of logophiles who feel that it is commonly misused. The is
15.
by steppi 1y ago
Your intuition's not bad. The expected value for the longest run of heads in N total flips of a fair coin is around log2(N) - 1 with a standard deviation that's approximately 1.873 plus a term that vanishes as N grows large. log2(
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by steppi 1y ago
Yeah, I think surrogate gradients are usually used to train spiking neural nets where the binary nature is considered an end in itself, for reasons of biological plausibility or something. Not for any performance benefits. It's not an
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by steppi 1y ago
It sounds like jongjong was probably using surrogate gradients. You keep the step activation in the forward pass but replace with a smooth approximation in the backwards pass.
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by steppi 1y ago
Very cool project. If you haven't already, for JAX and PyTorch support take a look at the Python Array API Standard, https://data-apis.org/array-api/latest/ , and see https://data-apis.org/arra
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by steppi 1y ago
If I had to give a loose definition of topology, I would say that it is actually about studying spaces which have some notion of what is close and far, even if no metric exists. The core idea of neighborhoods in point set topology captures
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by steppi 1y ago
There are many situations where you have something you want to compute to within low number of units in the last place, that seem fairly involved, but there are very often clever methods that let you do it without having to go to extended o
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by steppi 1y ago
I think the truly surprising thing is just how well floating point numbers work in many practical applications despite how different they are from the real numbers. One could call it the "unreasonable effectiveness of floating point ma
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by steppi 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristic_function_(pro...
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by steppi 2y ago
Wittgenstein himself states that the Tractatus is nonsense in its closing pages. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over t
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by steppi 2y ago
Check out The Science of Programming Matrix Computations by Robert A. van de Geijn and Enrique S. Quintana-Ort. Chapter 5 walks through how to write an optimized GEMM. It involves clever use of block multiplication, choosing block sizes f
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by steppi 2y ago
The Fortran implementation is just a reference implementation. The goal of reference BLAS [0] is to provide relatively simple and easy to understand implementations which demonstrate the interface and are intended to give correct results to
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by steppi 3y ago
There’s a wonderful book on the subject by Raymond Smullyan, of knights and knaves recreational math puzzle fame which helped make it click for me. https://lib.undercaffeinated.xyz/get/pdf/5823
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by steppi 3y ago
I’ve found code generation tools a boon to my Emacs-ing because I can use them to help write Emacs lisp code for any customization I think I might need in the moment without breaking the flow of concentration towards my primary task.
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by steppi 3y ago
I've developed a workflow that's working pretty well for me. I treat the LLM as a junior developer that I'm pair programming with and mentoring. I explain to it what I plan to work on, run ideas by it, show it code snippets I
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by steppi 3y ago
The 'eu' in eucatastrophe – Why SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle https://labs.quansight.org/blog/building-scipy-with-flang
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by steppi 3y ago
I think even timbre matters. I got a 95% match singing the first verse of Smells Like Teen Spirit using vocal fry to add some rasp, but couldn’t get over 80% singing in an unaffected soft head voice, though I got a 79% match for a cover by

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