now complete with trigger warnings

Richard Stallman tried to put his foot down, but there were too many delicious snacks on it

Hasn't a Stallman's intransigence led to the actual developers of various GNU libraries to fork development, only to be later sanctified as the official GNU version of the project? Sometimes multiple times per library.

GCC, in fact.

Edit: It's also why clang is a thing. All the Apple wanted was access to the AST. It's so important for all kinds of tools, developing new backends, static analysis, refactoring, autocomplete, you name it - but RMS forbade it, because he was worried it might let someone do something proprietary with gcc (even though he could have changed the license to prevent that?????). So instead of having a whole bunch of stupid rich companies like Apple and Google dump money into GCC to improve its tooling, they created a whole new compiler instead.

[quote=A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man]
"He used to be so conservative," she says, throwing up her hands in mock exasperation. "We used to have the worst arguments right here at this table. I was part of the first group of public city school teachers that struck to form a union, and Richard was very angry with me. He saw unions as corrupt. He was also very opposed to social security. He thought people could make much more money investing it on their own. Who knew that within 10 years he would become so idealistic? All I remember is his stepsister coming to me and saying, `What is he going to be when he grows up? A fascist?'"

As a single parent for nearly a decade-she and Richard's father, Daniel Stallman, were married in 1948, divorced in 1958, and split custody of their son afterwards-Lippman can attest to her son's aversion to authority. She can also attest to her son's lust for knowledge. It was during the times when the two forces intertwined, Lippman says, that she and her son experienced their biggest battles.

"It was like he never wanted to eat," says Lippman, recalling the behavior pattern that set in around age eight and didn't let up until her son's high-school graduation in 1970. "I'd call him for dinner, and he'd never hear me. I'd have to call him 9 or 10 times just to get his attention. He was totally immersed."

Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar fashion, albeit with a political twist.

"I enjoyed reading," he says. "If I wanted to read, and my mother told me to go to the kitchen and eat or go to sleep, I wasn't going to listen. I saw no reason why I couldn't read. No reason why she should be able to tell me what to do, period. Essentially, what I had read about, ideas such as democracy and individual freedom, I applied to myself. I didn't see any reason to exclude children from these principles."

The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary authority extended to school as well. Two years ahead of his classmates by age 11, Stallman endured all the usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student. It wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his mother attended the first in what would become a long string of parent-teacher conferences.

"He absolutely refused to write papers," says Lippman, recalling an early controversy. "I think the last paper he wrote before his senior year in high school was an essay on the history of the number system in the west for a fourth-grade teacher."
[/quote]

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch03.html

But I think eventually he wanted to eat, by the looks of his belly.

Either that, or he cannibalized wayward GNU contributors for violating our freedoms.

Speaking of RMS and Apple:

[quote=Richard Stallman]
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
[/quote]

I guess he's consistent in his views (if that wasn't painfully clear already).

he's still my hero

He's also getting his wish ^

Topology, but probably algebraic topology so I'll use homological algebra a bit too.

Probably is a bit relative for people.

True. I'm terrified that my 2014 Apple laptop might eventually crap out on me, and I might have to replace it with a new computer. I have no idea what I'll do when that happens. My current laptop is the best computer I've ever owned, by leaps and bounds. It seems like it was also peak Apple, and it's all been downhill from there.

A laptop is a laptop to me, if it can compile code and send email it's sufficient.

It's good when computers are responsive to user input and don't freeze or crash for no apparent reason. My current computer is the first computer I've owned that has remained consistently reliable four years into its life.

And apparently the keyboards on the new Apple laptops are so low-profile that even a tiny amount of dust under the keys can make them irresponsive. Writing emails is difficult without a functional keyboard.

They also don’t have an esc key. So, yeah, have fun using vim with that.

jj bb

Is that some jokey acronym I don't understand, or did you remap esc to jjbb?

i see people recommend remapping esc to jj a lot in "first things to add to your .vimrc" guides

the bb was just to be cute

I came across this today, which nicely summarizes why Reid and I can't seem to get along on the topic of math

[quote=John Baez]
Very loosely speaking - I ain't no philosopher - structural realism is the idea that what's "real" about mathematics, or the abstractions in physical theories, are not individual entities but the structures, or patterns, they form. So, instead of asking tired questions like "What is the number 2, really?" or "Do points of spacetime really exist?", we should ask more global questions about the roles that structures like "natural numbers" or "spacetime" play in math and physics. It's a bit like how in category theory, we can only understand an object in the context of the category it inhabits.
[/quote]

To me, the structure is all there is. I couldn't care less about anything else, and if physics or category theory helps tease out that structure, then to me that is more "real" than asking myself what something in mathematics "is". Of course I admit this makes my writing much less clear, even confused.

Oops. I put the completely wrong quote in there first. Well, it's fixed now.

I think I said a few pages that mathematics is about the form of experience, not the content. Was that different from what Baez is saying?

Not necessarily anything!

More to the point, I feel that my extreme fear of epistemic commitment causes me to think about things before I really know what they are. And then by talking about them, I get into arguments I actually don't care about, except to learn about the thing that interested me in the stuff in the first place. Which is usually quite different than the kinds of questions typically asked when trying to clarify in precise terms what the objects in question "are". It makes sense to do this when I am talking to somebody who can teach me more about these things, and makes no sense at all for me to get into arguments with people who can't teach me about the very specific aspects I am interested in but that I don't understand myself.

tl;dr: I'd be a lot less incoherent if I were in grad school instead of just reading stuff on my own

That said, I've definitely been motivated to ask new questions in order to test my views, so I won't pretend like the conversations we've had were fruitless. One outcome of our discussions on set theory was that my respect for Y. Manin increased even more than it already had, and I will try to read as much of what he has written as possible.

I just want to say I read that quote and I thought WTF does Joan Baez know about math but then I looked again

Maybe not.

On the other hand, I feel that those who hold a "strong" version of this view, on some level also hold the subversive view that, not only is all mathematics secretly combinatorics, but that mathematics would be better off if this mythical, underlying combinatorial structure could be brought out in order to obliterate the existing abstract edifice that humans have erected in order to understand their own arguments (and to "structuralists", they are just that-arguments, and probably full of bugs).

They are cousins.

At first, I thought it might have been a Hedy Lamarr type situation.

Awesome! Glad you got something valuable out of it. I wouldn't say it was fruitless for myself, either.

vr.jpg

someonewholovesyou.jpg

why didn't i take a job in software before i went to grad school?

Because you can't write a formula for odd numbers.

(forget about having half a decade of experience doing actual work, that's not the important part)

i spent today rewriting a (simple) simulation to work on vectors instead of scalars so i can simulations in parallel to plug into my RL stuff. before i could run one simulation in about .6 seconds, now i can run ten in about 1.5 seconds. vectorizing code is neat. i wanted to scale up to 100 in parallel, but i need to be able to generate a circulant matrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulant_matrix just learned this was a thing today) efficiently in order to compute a return at all of the time steps because of a discount factor for each time step. there are ~1000 time steps, so a 100k x 100k matrix took forever to generate.

there are two solutions i see, one of which is to use no discounting (all returns are weighted 1 as opposed to favoring short-term rewards, so it's really just an upper triangular matrix of 1s i'd need to generate, which is fast (i think)) and the other is to reduce the resolution with which i try to update my controls from every time step to perhaps every 10 or 100 time steps. discretizing the controls to update less frequently will probably converge faster, but will also probably not converge to as optimal a solution.

e- lolnope just checked generating the upper triangular matrix is another minute or two (which is okay since it's a one time cost) but then it's another 30 seconds for each matrix-vector multiplication so i guess i'm not scaling up to more than 10 simulations in parallel. god dammit matrix multiplication, why you gotta be O(n^3)?

It’s not.

Idk, I feel like it's not hard to meet clients for programming work? It's all over the place

(/s)

wikipedia page for matrix multiplication stated O(n^2.7), other pages look like they're stating O(n^2.4), so both better than cubic but still bad enough that it's not practical for me

addendum- thinking more on it i'm doing matrix-vector multiplication, not matrix-matrix, so there's already an improvement by a factor of n. i misspoke quite a bit

Oh, gotcha

That said (and although we all might be biased because of our own fairly strong mathematical backgrounds), I kind of think that people should know how to write a function mapping the integers to the odd numbers. But maybe that's more an issue with mathematical literacy than anything else.

I personally would never touch a person who couldn't write something logically correct for that, but hey.

I can't really wrap my mind around how it would not be possible to do that, but also have five years of experience. Surely people stumble upon harder coding tasks than that.. unless if the industry really is more "copying and pasting from stack exchange" than I'm ready to accept.