kkwteh

In high school, I thought my French classes were mostly pointless, but then 14 years later, I moved to Paris where I have been living ever since, which is something I never could have imagined as a teenager. It's hard to predict what knowledge will end up being useful. To be fair, I had to mostly reteach myself French when I moved here, so I guess the real lesson is that it's useful to be a strong autodidact.

$1B at a $3.5B valuation. Seems problematic from a cap table perspective.

One advantage of PRNG assignment is that you can reproduce your assignment procedure whereas this is impossible with true RNG. If you use true RNG how could you ever prove to anyone that that was what you actually did?

It seems telling that there are no comments 2 hours after this has been posted. The community is literally speechless.

Maybe it’s a remnant from a nuclear ancient civilization.

What makes you think that other countries aren't seeing the same decline? In France, as far as I can tell, the situation is similar.

For instance, I've seen a lot of interviews like this https://youtu.be/7Pl4rvZ9amc?si=RMm8B1BmSSdNt0vq

My brother, who is a high school teacher in Canada tells me similar stories from his first-hand experience.

We had one such case at our startup in San Francisco. Several coworkers came together to get him a bed frame as a group birthday gift.

Watching Doug Polk discuss hands on YouTube really opened my eyes as to how professional pokers think about hands.

One theory is poor facial structure that develops due to faulty breathing technique.

Reference https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4686746/

It’s because they just launched Europe.

For one they tend to be located at certain places: intersections, tourist attractions, entrances to the metro, and bridges, among others.

Jonathan Blow tweeted that Mac support will come later on in 2024.

https://x.com/jonathan_blow/status/1722710169744757071?s=46&...

I never knew how to square this with stories about Feynman’s sexual predation. Were these two distinct phases of his life?

I’m still waiting for Threads to be launched in Europe.

I read on Twitter that it’s a reference to the introduction of barbed wire fencing that marked the end of the wild era that the book was set in. It makes sense but I never looked into it.

I've lived in Paris for over four years now, and I have no idea what these no-go zones people are talking about. I've never heard anyone in Paris talk about them. There is no neighborhood in Paris that I would flat out refuse to go to, even though there definitely a very small number of sketchy areas where I would be more on guard (the Barbès metro comes to mind). There is nothing here that is near as bad as the misery on display in the Tenderloin, or Skid Row.

I have also lived five years in San Francisco, and Paris overall feels much safer to me.

The top google search always comes with a lot of ads and other crap that you have to filter through. Also the response might not be exactly what your looking for (you might not have the same materials.) For instance you can ask chatgpt to create a practice plan that doesn’t require cones, or is focused on a certain set of skills, etc.

Can anyone comment on the viability of solving the global carbon dioxide problem by sequestering it in topsoil, as Dyson proposes in the video?

I submitted this post a day or two ago to no response, so I'm surprised to see it land on the front page now. Thank you to whoever recycled it!

A concrete example of how math unveils a hidden structure and order is how any rotated spherical harmonic can be expressed as a linear combination of other (unrotated) spherical harmonics within the same family. It is one of many examples of an amazing fact so wild, that no one could have dreamed of it before it was discovered. I chose this as an example, because it can be expressed purely in terms of geometry, is straightforward to understand, and yet stunningly beautiful (at least to me). Here's a link to some visualisations:

https://vinequai.com/sphericalharmonics

Looking at some of the comments, I wonder if the blog post would have been less confusing if I gave it the more appropriate title "Living in a Torus".

A donut is a way to embed a two-dimensional torus in our three-dimensional space. What we have here is different. It's a visualisation of a three-dimensional torus. On a two-dimensional donut, there are two directions which loop around. In the space shown here, the only difference is that there are three directions.

A three-dimensional sphere also loops around, but it's not quite the same. One way to get the three-dimensional sphere would be to glue each points at the cube boundary to every other point on the boundary. One way to show that this three-dimensional sphere is not the same as the three-dimensional torus is that in the three-dimensional sphere, you could gather up any tied rope by passing it around the cube boundary.

I'm sorry my explanation wasn't clear. The reason why duplicate copies are seen in is because the light can loop around space multiple times before reaching your eyes. If you launch a long rope to a distant cylinder, look at what you see in the bottom left miniature. That's an indication of the looping path that the light is taking from that cylinder to reach your eyes. Launch a rope at different cylinders to see what some of the different paths are.

As a side note, if you lived in a small three-dimensional sphere, you would be able to see an object located at the antipodal point smeared out in every direction, because following a geodesic in each direction leads to the antipode. I've seen this visualised in the video game Hyperbolica.

What would have really helped me during my PhD, would have been to learn some project management skills. Just basic stuff like tracking where you’ve spent your time and using documents to track various projects. I wasn’t exposed to any of these things until I entered industry and by that time it was too late.

What about R?

I was really depressed while doing my PhD, and something that helped me a lot was getting seriously involved in a social dance community.

I think this could help you a lot. It really seems to me that what you’re missing is human connection, and social dance is a way to facilitate it.

There are dance communities with plenty of people your age. It’s a totally different scene from bars and clubs. People don’t drink very much because it gets in the way of dancing.

It’s also a good way to find potential relationship partners, although the primary interest should be the dancing, since people can tell if you’re just there to hook up and that will come off as creepy and predatory.

This is essentially what I did, and I feel like it worked out really well for me. Besides the benefits you mentioned, I feel like my money goes a lot further over here too in terms of healthcare, education, and housing.

French wordle: https://wordle.louan.me/

This post was flagged and now it’s not, which is pretty interesting in and of itself. I’d be curious to know why the post is controversial. Is it a subject that is simply considered beyond rational discussion?

I think this question stems from a confusion as to what school is actually for. It seems to me that school is at least as much about orderly management of the social hierarchy as it is about teaching useful skills.

The reason why math is taught in school is not because math is useful (it is useful in certain situations, but this is only tangentially related). We teach it because it keeps students busy and out of trouble, and lends itself well to unambiguous testing and is therefore an effective tool for sorting students into the various social classes.

This all became clear to me when I was in the middle of my math PhD and wondering why all of the math courses I had taken did next to nothing to prepare me for actual mathematical research.

Viewed from this perspective, it’s obvious why we don’t use the math we learn in school.