gunnihinn

N=1 and all that, but I ported 500k lines of a Python 2 monorepo to Python 3 this year and it took like two weeks, including a week spent reading Eevee’s post on the subject half a dozen times and playing with six and futurize.

So it sucks as it cuts?

> This seems just as magical as the original algorithm.

If you do a "change of coordinates" the original algorithm becomes trivial: If you know that any loop in the list doesn't begin after the node you're on, you can just mark where that is, run ahead, and check if you ever come back. In the general case, "change coordinates" so that with every step, the origin advances one step. Now you'll eventually be in the previous case.

Fuck cables.

Wow.

Fewer.

As a mathematician and long-time sufferer of that Douglas Adams meme:

GIVE A FUCK?

That restricts you to mathematics, logic or philosophy. Engineering, or the rest of the world, operates _at best_ on statistics.

> [Cold outreach] Rating: Not successful. Kapwing’s most senior engineer said that he gets multiple cold emails from recruiters daily, so it seems impossible to cut through the noise.

You are the noise.

Yeah. I’ve never been unhappy with reading a long commit message.

> I’m still rather unwilling to hand over my email to a third party.

Didn't you do that already by having a Gmail account?

> It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech.

And lord forbid us for writing in a way or about subjects that don't please as much of the potential readers as possible. They might not click on our data-mined ads if we did. The fucks.

And projections. Without them you only get linear maps with nonzero determinant.

Maybe I miswrote it. I’ve been very unimpressed with all other crowbarrings of category theory into programming than this one. Other attempts feel like language for its own sake, while Pijul really seems like a Grothendieck-style compass bearing use of category theory. The point of using it wasn’t just language, but it really informed the design of the system.

I am a mathematician and generally bearish on category theory in programming. The best argument for it I've seen so far is that it can inform the design of your system to give it desirable properties, like how the DVCS Pijul [1] bases its data structures on patches and its merge operation on categorical pushouts [2] -- also explained at length in a series of blog posts [3]. I found the whole idea and reasoning behing the merge system very convincing, and am not sure it could have been arrived at or explained as clearly without category theory guiding the way.

[1] https://pijul.org/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.3903 [3] https://jneem.github.io/merging/

I don't want to discourage you from learning things. If you think category theory might enrich your life, go for it. That said:

I have a PhD in mathematics in a field that uses quite a few category theoretic notions, so I've had extensive hardcore contact with the theory. After my PhD I converted to being a developer, and have by now quite a bit of experience doing that.

I have not once found category theory useful, beyond the absolute basics of the idea of a universal property, either in my work as a mathematician or as a developer, despite going on many expeditions to find some use for it.

I'm not saying category theory is not useful. I'm just saying you might do just fine without it.

Also, in an attempt to maybe say something useful, "Categories for the working mathematician" by MacLane is a good introduction if you know some maths already.

It will come for you, too, one day. We all float down here.

I’m sorry, I didn’t make clear enough I was expressing surprise at your casual sexism.

Umm... what?

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a ballpark estimate for what a no-ad online subscription would cost if we assume the parent is true?

> Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets messed up.

OK.

Is it more or less messed up than that a private corporation can and is willing to perform surveillance on foreign citizens on behalf of those citizens' government that would be unacceptable anywhere else?

Gimlet [1] has been doing "not Squarespace, but obviously ads" for a while now. I think it's fine; I always know when their ads are on, and the ads aren't repetitive enough that it's worth it to skip them.

edit: Just to be clear, Gimlet runs a fuckton of Squarespace ads. They're just done differently than "read spiel n+1". The "Reply All" hosts, for example, have a more than a year-long joke running where one of them has a Squarespace site for old people-y gripes.

[1]: http://gimletmedia.com/

As a PhD in mathematics who converted to development, please, go into the details of what you mean.

I know tensor products. I know SQL joins. I see superficial similarities between the two, but no unifying underlying principle.

The world has had quite enough of nonsense thrown around because it's "obvious". Put your money where your runaway mouth is.

You _could_ introduce the One True Lamport Clock, and as long as you're in its light cone you can get global syncronization, but that comes at the cost of having to learn a lot about patience.

I suppose those continue working fine in very local systems (contained in a ball of a few light-seconds radius) whose components move at speeds where relativistic effects can be discarded. Drop those constraints and you also need to drop even system-local globality because of relativity.

Make pandoc convert the txt/md/whatever to roff and pipe it to man, and you're pretty much there. It would also work on more than OSX, unlike um itself.

Count bytes via wc?

I keep thinking I should be more interested in Jupyter than I am.

Maybe someone who knows things can tell me this: Can I use it to develop and debug larger existing programs? That is, can I take 10k lines (say) of Python, that are spread across some modules, load them into Jupyter, not get a horrifying mess, and work on my program?

There are academics interested in building journals on top of the arXiv. It's an idea that's been kicking around for a while. In math, Tim Gowers is one of the people who has been pushing for something like this.

If your background is in not-academia, you may well be forgiven for looking at the scene and seeing no progress. However, academia is more slow-moving and conservative in some aspects than other places. This is not a bad thing; not everyone has to move fast and break things. But at academia's normal pace, things are going pretty fast.