mebassett

the title is a bit clickbait - mathematicians don't disagree, all the "conceptions" the article proposes agree with each other. It also seems to conflate the algebraic closure of Q (which would contain the sqrt of -1) and all of the complex numbers by insisting that the former has "size continuum". Once you have "size continuum" then you need some completion to the reals.

anyhow. I'm a bit of an odd one in that I have no problems with imaginary numbers but the reals always seemed a bit unreal to me. that's the real controversy, actually. you can start looking up definable numbers and constructivist mathematics, but that gets to be more philosophy than maths imho.

large language models are large and must be loaded into memory to train or to use for inference if we want to keep them fast. older models like gpt3 have around 175 billion parameters. at float32s that comes out to something like 700GB of memory. newer models are even larger. and openai wants to run them as consumer web services.

"As with many books, this one is best read piecewise backwards. In describing the contents, I accordingly begin with Part III."

Intro to one of the maths books I had to reference to do my masters thesis. :)

Maritime shipping software | Full-stack software engineers | UX Designers | Implementation Managers & Customer Success execs | Data analysts | Global REMOTE | UCT-8 to UCT+4

Would you like to help tackle one of the most important sectors for the global economy - maritime shipping? We're hiring for multiple roles: software engineers, data analysts, UI/UX designers, implementation managers.

Nearly every person is affected by stuff shipping on the seas - whether its energy, ore, or wind turbines, but the industry itself is antiquated and archaic, and hampered by paperwork and bureaucracy. Our customers are crying out for better solutions. We're looking for people to help us build those solutions.

If you're the sort of person who is: - intellectually curious about new industries - wanting talking to and getting close to end users - keen to use LLMs and other AI tools

Then please get in touch.

--

For our SWE roles we have budgeted ~ 90k USD.

Our tech stack for new projects is largely typescript/vue/mysql (we have several fans of fp-ts and EffectT with us and are investing in using more functional programming). But like the industry at large we also have significant legacy code in javascript. If you're the sort of person who likes refactoring complex projects to make them more workable, then we also want to hear from you.

--

For our Data Analyst or Implementation Manager roles:

You'll be helping our customers in maritime shipping get the most from our software. Initially, a lot of that work will be in helping our customers get their data in and out of it. Lot's of MySQL, Metabase, AWS Glue, DBT, or other ETL pipelines.

--

For our UI/UX designer roles we have budgeted ~ 40k USD.

You'll be helping us on three different axes: (1) designing the user interface for new features, (2) fleshing out the user journeys and mockups for our roadmap, and (3) helping us craft a consistent and learnable user experience across all our software.

--

We hire remotely and globally with offices in Houston, London, Singapore, and Joinville (Brasil). You should be fluent in English. The current team is >20 people. You should be in a timezone within 3 hours of one of those offices.

Interested? You can contact me directly from my profile. I'm the CTO.

Please, no recruiters or agencies.

Maritime shipping software | Multiple roles | Global REMOTE | UCT-8 to UCT+4

Would you like to help tackle one of the most important sectors for the global economy - maritime shipping? We're hiring for multiple roles: software engineers, data analysts, UI/UX designers, implementation managers.

Nearly every person is affected by stuff shipping on the seas - whether its energy, ore, or wind turbines, but the industry itself is antiquated and archaic, and hampered by paperwork and bureaucracy. Our customers are crying out for better solutions. We're looking for people to help us build those solutions.

If you're the sort of person who is: - intellectually curious about new industries - wanting talking to and getting close to end users - keen to use LLMs and other AI tools

Then please get in touch.

For our SWE roles we have budgeted ~ 90k USD.

Our tech stack for new projects is largely typescript/vue/mysql (we have several fans of fp-ts and EffectT with us and would like some more). But like the industry at large we also have significant legacy code in javascript. If you're the sort of person who likes refactoring complex projects to make them more workable, then we also want to hear from you.

For our Data Analyst or Implementation Manager roles... You'll be helping our customers in maritime shipping get the most from our software. Initially, a lot of that work will be in helping our customers get their data in and out of it. Lot's of MySQL, Metabase, AWS Glue, DBT, or other ETL pipelines.

For our UI/UX designer roles... You'll be helping us on three different axes: (1) designing the user interface for new features, (2) fleshing out the user journeys and mockups for our roadmap, and (3) helping us craft a consistent and learnable user experience across all our software.

We hire remotely and globally with offices in Houston, London, Singapore, and Joinville (Brasil). You should be fluent in English. The current team is >20 people. You should be in a timezone within 3 hours of one of those offices.

Interested? You can contact me directly from my profile. I'm the CTO.

Please, no recruiters or agencies.

I would treat them as totally different things. There is a Category of Sets, but a Set of Categories would be a bit harder to define. So axomatic set theory could be a specific case of category theory, I suppose. But you can probably do a Class of all categories. (A Class is sort of a set-theoretic way to get around Russel's paradox, incidentally, you usually use a Class to define categories, so...) Though that's actually quite an irrelevant point. It's a completely different language for describing mathematics. I think describing category theory as an alternative foundation for mathematics (you really mean topos theory here) is a bit of an exaggeration. it's technically true, but most mathematicians I know are using it as a powerful device to prove things in algebraic topology or geometry, etc.

> In the case of GIMP, the very name itself means it cannot be used in commercial enterprises.

I have no idea where you got this info from but it is 100% wrong. Of course GIMP can be used for commercial purposes. Or any purposes you want, really. The GNU GPL does not prevent commercial use.

see also https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#can-i-use-gimp-commer...

I think the main point here is that while this style might make sense for a GUI framework it's not so great for a numerical library like this.

For example: my library is really slow.

> - can you allocate memory for the whole system? - can you make types homogenous so they can fit in tight arrays (unions are common for nodes) - can you batch similar types - specially for auto diff/math can you represent operations as a stack instead of a tree?

these are good questions, thank you! I'm "learning" c++ in a completely different way - looking at books rather than looking at existing code. Appreciate this comment!

Some of these questions I had thought about, but was learning more towards "describe the function in some higher level representation and then 'compile' it down to something computable and autodiff-able". This is exactly where my mind goes when I think about allocating memory for the whole system. that felt more like a racket/lisp way of looking at the problem.

Lean definitely intends to be usable as a general purpose language someday. but I think the bulk of the people involved are more focused on automated theorem proving. The Lean FRO [0] has funds to guide development of the language and they are planning to carve out a niche for stuff that requires formal verification. I'd say in terms of general purpose programming it fits into the category of being "relatively far from haskell in terms of maturity".

[0] https://lean-fro.org/about/roadmap-y2/

much of your experience with this depends on who you are and how society perceives you. I do not drink alcohol, but I am also a 6ft tall competitive weightlifter. People usually don't question my "no, thank you". And while I have had the annoying person persist and try to get me to drink, they're usually gone after I've reached my 2nd stage of "did you not hear me say no?". I suspect the experience of a less tall and muscular woman might be quite different when it comes to people trying to undermine her choices.

society has a lot of "defaults" that we're suppose to accept. drinking is one. cars is another. eating meat is often one. Some people see it as an attack on their identity when you reject choices made by their society.

I bought a framework laptop (13in, intel, 13th gen) at the end of 2023 and have had nothing but problems with it. Mostly stability issues. It freezes entirely without warning after about 3-5min of use, regardless of whether I'm booting into a linux kernel or windows machine, from the ssd or the usb. very unhappy that I spent money on it. support has been unhelpful.

the idea of a DIY laptop that I could upgrade, et cetera, was something I could really get behind. but in practice it just feels like a waste of time and money. The machine does have to actually work.

I usually use "democracy" to describe a situation where there are regular transfers of power through reason, persuasion, and cooperation and not through violence or the threat of violence. I'm not sure that it applies to this case about your neighbor, unless you are stopping them through a threat of violence, in which case it is certainly undemocratic.

I have known two publicly traded companies that fell victim to similar sorts of scams (someone impersonating the cfo or ceo over the phone). One was defrauded out of a seven figure sum, the other got lucky and a bank involved stopped the transaction to verify again. I don't know how the first was able to keep it quiet, I only knew because I chatted with the people in question. I suspect that the deepfake angle makes it easier to admit that they were defrauded in this way.

Talking about how something like this can happen in a big company is fun and all, but the scary thing is is that it is _so much easier_ to do these sorts of scams with deepfakes. Which means they will be deployed against "softer" targets, like you and me, and your parents and grandparents.

yes. learning to doing maths is a bit like learning to play an instrument in that you have to spend lots of times practicing scales or other simple stuff (doing the exercises) before you can really be creative on it.

or like learning to write - you got to spend lots of time practicing and memorizing your letters before you can start getting to words and sentences and novels.

this is old tech - but it had me thinking. Markov chains are picking the next token from a random set and they are giving approximately all possible tokens (from the training set) an equal probability. What if it weighted the probability - say using the inverse vector distance or cosine similarity of the neighbors as a proxy for probability, where the vector embedding came from word2vec...how close would the performance be to a transformer model or even something like lstm rnns ? (I suppose I'm cheating a bit using word2vec here. I might as well just say I'm using the attention mechanism...)

why would someone learn c++ in 2024, assuming one is not about to work on legacy projects? I'm about to start a quixotic new personal project and was considering using (read: learning) c++ for it, but it feels like rust is getting all the new attention. (and I'm already spoiled by haskell and racket.)

There is a lot of disagreement towards this idea in the thread, but I really like this project suggestion for someone to make a multi-faceted project that'll help someone "grow up" and it resonates with something I've long felt missing from comp sci education: that it doesn't focus enough on studying and replicated big successful projects.

You mostly learn by doing, true, but you learn by copying what the masters did. Software engineering education feels more like taking classes and writing code for exercises, whereas it probably should have more projects of the form "study this complicated-implementation-of-X and use those techniques in your implementation of Y", where x = google search, postgresql, whatevers and y is a complicated project [for one person or a small team] like your own single concurrent user search engine

I've held this idea for a really long time, in fact, I've not actually looked at comp sci education recently, so maybe this isn't true anymore, or maybe it never has been

factoring large integers into primes (shor's algorithm). that and grover's search promise to provide ways to crack a lot of encryption.

also quantum computing should improve both classical and quantum physical simulations.

"We also examined whether genetic risk for Alzheimer’s Disease or brain volumes suggestive of early neurodegeneration were associated with a reduction in slow-wave sleep. We found that a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, but not brain volume, was associated with accelerated declines in slow wave sleep"

This sounds like the arrow of causation is pointing the other way.

If you are in the UK you can also contact the competition and markets authority.

I've also created a parliament petition, which has gotten the 5 min supporters it needs before they review and publish it. I will share it on HN once its published.

Edit: removed the link to the petition for now (it'll come back after its published)

or after a few years of postdocs and job security that comes in 12-24 month bouts, you might have moved into industry anyway and just starting making 60% of what you're making now.

https://mebassett.info/essays - whatever idea I have that I think is worth exploring in a rambling essay. some hits have been

Human attention has become a marxist commodity (https://mebassett.info/human-attention-commodity)

AI is Useful for Capitalists but Probably Terrible for Anyone Else (https://mebassett.info/ai-useful-for-capitalist)

Empathy and Failures of Democracies (https://mebassett.info/empathy-failures-democracy.html)

Flyp Homes Ltd | London, UK | ONSITE / HYBRID (flexible WFH) | https://flyp.co

Mid and Sr Engineers (50-100k gbp). Data Analysts (60-75k gbp).

If you've ever sold a home in the UK then you have likely felt that no one in the process had any incentive to help you. Flyp is changing that by building a business that partners with homeowners to help them realize the full potential of their investment into their home, even as far as through renovations to the home.

We're a revenue-generating business and are scaling our operations throughout London and the UK, and to do that we need improve a lot of our internal operations (data analyst) and build tools to help us reach more home owners, estate agents, and contractors (software engineers).

We're big fans of functional programming, using fp-ts (typescript) throughout the codebase, and we run fortnightly haskell and machine learning study groups to improve our skills and think of more clever ways to improve the business.

Some other tech buzzwords we use (apart from typescript and fp-ts) include postgresql, big query (and the rest of the google cloud platform), and looker.

Sound interesting? https://wellfound.com/company/flyp-3/jobs or please get in touch. Contact info in profile.

Flyp Homes Ltd | London, UK | ONSITE / HYBRID (flexible WFH) | https://flyp.co

Mid and Sr Engineers (50-100k gbp). Data Analysts (60-75k gbp).

If you've ever sold a home in the UK then you have likely felt that no one in the process had any incentive to help you. Flyp is changing that by building a business that partners with homeowners to help them realize the full potential of their investment into their home, even as far as through renovations to the home.

We're a revenue-generating business and are scaling our operations throughout London and the UK, and to do that we need improve a lot of our internal operations (data analyst) and build tools to help us reach more home owners, estate agents, and contractors (software engineers).

We're big fans of functional programming, using fp-ts (typescript) throughout the codebase, and we run fortnightly haskell and machine learning study groups to improve our skills and think of more clever ways to improve the business.

Some other tech buzzwords we use (apart from typescript and fp-ts) include postgresql, big query (and the rest of the google cloud platform), and looker.

Sound interesting? https://wellfound.com/company/flyp-3/jobs or please get in touch. Contact info in profile.

I love SICP and am one of those fanboys who say everyone should read it.

Though, really, a lot of what it covers is much more common knowledge now than it was when I first read it. High-order functions and functions-as-first-class-citizens (ch1) are ubiquitous and most programmers I know are comfortable with them (which wasn't the case in the early 2000s, at least in my circle). Lists, maps, pairs, and symbolic structures are covered in ch2, but most people are comfortable thinking in such terms now. Ch3 covers handling state, and I think there are good ideas in that chapter that still haven't been broadly disseminated.

But where the book really shines is the last 2 chapters - I haven't seen much of those ideas (virtual register machine and writing a compiler for it) covered elsewhere. It's still a great way to get exposed to some fundamentals of computing from a pure software environment. But I think you could be quite a capable programmer without ever doing that.

I might point out that today is labour day in most of the world, so that might lead to fewer posts.

Flyp Homes Ltd | London, UK | ONSITE / HYBRID (flexible WFH) | https://flyp.co

Mid and Sr Engineers (50-100k gbp). Data Analysts (60-75k gbp).

If you've ever sold a home in the UK then you have likely felt that no one in the process had any incentive to help you. Flyp is changing that by building a business that partners with homeowners to help them realize the full potential of their investment into their home, even as far as through renovations to the home.

We're a revenue-generating business and are scaling our operations throughout London and the UK, and to do that we need improve a lot of our internal operations (data analyst) and build tools to help us reach more home owners, estate agents, and contractors (software engineers).

We're big fans of functional programming, using fp-ts (typescript) throughout the codebase, and we run fortnightly haskell and machine learning study groups to improve our skills and think of more clever ways to improve the business.

Some other tech buzzwords we use (apart from typescript and fp-ts) include postgresql, big query (and the rest of the google cloud platform), and looker.

Sound interesting? please get in touch. Contact info in profile.

I have used elm for a smallish (10 people or so?) team writing software for revenue, and regretted it. that was 4-5 years ago. my reasons had a lot to do with the community around elm, which other comments allude to. This group had different concerns to mine:

  The thing that ultimately tipped the balance in React’s favour for us was that we acquired another company whose entire codebase was written in React, and whose team knew nothing about Elm. Overnight, we went from a company that was writing about equal amounts of Elm and React (and which might well have decided to double down on Elm) to one that was writing about 75% React.
  
  By that time, TypeScript had grown to be capable enough (and developer-friendly enough) to balance much of what sold us on Elm originally: a usable type system, good-enough error messages, etc. React had baked in some more useful state management primitives that roughly matched Elm’s “batteries included” state management.

if you like the ideas in elm but don't want to commit to it I'd encourage you to check out elm-ts (https://gcanti.github.io/elm-ts/). It has a little bit more boilerplate than elm (I find elm to be quite verbose already!) but a better experience for individuals and teams overall, I would say. It's a good example of how "TypeScript had grown to be capable enough (and developer-friendly enough) to balance much of what sold us on Elm originally: a usable type system.."

many of us are, actually, indirectly as taxpayers. the MIC is really good at unaccountable taxpayer spending. So while reviews of military tech might just appease our inner child they're also useful from a civics perspective!