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creataon An Illustrated Introduction to Linear Algebra, Chapter 2: The Dot Product

But at the very least, surely a dot product explainer should talk about the two main ways of looking at a dot product! This article leaves out the "angle and norms" (||a||·||b||·cos(θ)) interpretation entirely. It's like if someone gave you the formula for complex multiplication, without also showing you how it's all about rotations.

And maybe I'm being a pedant, but the dot product should be between two things that are in the same space. In the Minnesota lottery example, the probabilities should be a row vector instead. It's the exact same calculation, so again, maybe a bit too pedantic.

creataon No Socials November

Out of curiosity, why?

creataon No Socials November

> its intentionally addictive algorithm

It's a single list that everyone sees. No personalization, meaningful customization, recommendations, or notifications. I'm not sure how it can be considered "intentionally addictive."

And yeah, every forum has its minor celebrities. People can be a bit silly like that. Doesn't really bother me.

creataon No Socials November

The problem for me with social media is that it triggers intense envy. People are constantly talking about their lives, and everyone's doing well but me.

This website doesn't have as much of that. It has a much larger focus on content than on people, so I can just read in peace.

It's not problematic in the same way.

creataon KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web

It may or may not be as fast, but MathJax has broader support for LaTeX features, better accessibility features, and has slightly better typography in my very subjective opinion, and that's more important to me than a bit of rendering time.

creataon Why don't you use dependent types?

As other commenters have said, this doesn't need dependent types. Rust's const generics / C++'s non-type template parameters are enough.

Even in languages with dependent types, people tend to find it overly cumbersome to use them for actually prevent runtime errors like out-of-bounds access; they instead tend to save the dependent types for (1) data structure invariants that can be propagated easily, and (2) verification after the program has been defined.[0][1]

[0]: https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/division-by-zer...

[1]: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/WG2.8/26/slides/xavier.pd... ("Programming with dependent types: passing fad or useful tool?" by Xavier Leroy in 2009; things might have changed since 2009)

creataon Why don't you use dependent types?

[This comment was responded to by the author in an addendum to their post.]

creataon I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone

Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.

creataon Suno Studio, a Generative AI DAW

> And look at the vocaloid stuff too.

What about the vocaloid stuff?

creataon ChatGPT Pulse

I might be projecting, but I think most users of ChatGPT are less interested in "being a 10x human", and more interested in having a facsimile of human connection without any of the attendant vulnerability.

creataon They Thought They Were Free (1955)

> For why they can't stand up to this.

How have you been standing up to "this"? How do you expect others to stand up?

creataon Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

Reminds me of dazzle camouflage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

creataon Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

Fun!

I always wanted to make text that couldn't be recorded with a video recorder, but that doesn't seem possible.

Maybe if you knew the exact framerate that the camera was recording at, you could do the same trick, but I don't think cameras are that consistent.

creataon WASM 3.0 Completed

> WebAudio is a frigging clusterf*ck

Out of curiosity, what issues do people have with WebAudio since audio worklets became widely supported?

creataon When the job search becomes impossible

> then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?

I'm trying not to upset the people around me.

creataon When the job search becomes impossible

Life used to be even worse than this, though.

I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.

creataon The Mac app flea market

People can complain about false positives and also about false negatives.

creataon Folks, we have the best π

The font stack is just "Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;" so either one of those or a system font is the culprit.

creataon Folks, we have the best π

There are mathematical definitions of the terms "real number", "rational number", etc., but there is no mathematical definition of the word "number".

> we can approximate it with better and better precision

In one of the three common formal definitions of the real numbers, that's what a real number is: a Cauchy sequence of rational numbers, which approximate that real number with increasing precision. (Well, a real is an equivalence class of such sequences.)

(The other two common definitions are the Dedekind reals and the reals as the unique complete ordered field.)

creataon Java 25's new CPU-Time Profiler

Are there any public benchmarks for Perc? Or any hints as to what's going on inside?

creataon The unreasonable effectiveness of modern sort algorithms

"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" is one of those titles that gets imitated a lot for some reason. Maybe even more than "Goto Considered Harmful".

creataon The case against social media is stronger than you think

If you're talking about reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, I really don't think anonymity is the problem here, because the opinions I've seen people express anonymously aren't much different to the opinions I've seen people express with their names attached.

If anything, the ones where people have attached their names tend to be a bit more extreme. Maybe attaching your name to something makes it feel more important to signal what group you're in.

creataon The case against social media is stronger than you think

People should be able to say things without those things following them around for the rest of their lives.

> As in real life.

No, your proposal is very different to real life. In real life, the things you say will eventually be forgotten. You won't be fired for things you said or did years ago, because people will have moved on.

Having a convenient index of everything anyone has ever shared is very different to real life.

creataon The case against social media is stronger than you think

I agree with you, but it's funny that someone else could say the opposite (i.e., that Kiwifarms shows how anonymity lets people get away with saying and doing horrible things) and still sound reasonable.

creataon Java 25's new CPU-Time Profiler

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but does this argument continue to make sense for desktop applications, which don't typically use much CPU unless they're currently focused, but do use the same amount of RAM regardless of whether they're focused?

creataon Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s

I don't think I'm falling for the ELIZA effect.* I just feel like if you have a small enough model that can accurately handle a wide enough range of tasks, and is resistant to a wide enough range of perturbations to the input, it's simpler to assume it's doing some sort of meaningful simplification inside there. I didn't call it intelligence.

* But I guess that's what someone who's falling for the ELIZA effect would say.

creataon Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s

Sorry if I'm being pedantic, but I think you mean arithmetic, not mathematics in general.

creataon Randomly selecting points inside a triangle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function#V...

Affine transformations just scale the probability density by a constant, so a uniform distribution is still uniform.

creataon Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s

> As I understand them, LLMs right now don’t understand concepts.

In my uninformed opinion it feels like there's probably some meaningful learned representation of at least common or basic concepts. It just seems like the easiest way for LLMs to perform as well as they do.

creataon Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah

Fwiw, I don't think anyone should ever be killed, but nobody's entitled to anyone's sympathy, and it's not messed up that many people find it difficult to sympathize with Kirk, given the political positions he preached.

For example, maybe (or maybe not) for you it's just an abstract argument about far-away matters, but when Kirk called Leviticus 20:13 (the one about killing men who lie with men) "God's perfect law", it's not so abstract to gay people.