> Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.
"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"
Acme is just a way of calling your company "Best Brand" or "Peak Product" while being just a tiny bit less pretentious about it (and, conveniently, getting yourself listed before "American Anything" in lexicographically sorted lists).
It was only a matter of time before company names like that would be mocked.
That said, Best Buy is still a thriving business / brand (as are American Apparel and AAA).
A long time ago, I wrote an ORM to serialize/deserialize object data seamlessly into SQLite, with massive arrays of floats being stored as blobs.
In code, I could effectively mark which class members need to be stored/restored, and optionally provide a custom serialization function for them if needed.
The latter was effectively never necessary, because all the bases types and multi-dimensional arrays were handled by templates.
Really wish I open-sourced that thing then, but the corporate bureaucracy around that was tricky.
I remember sufficiently little about implementation details now that I think I can get to writing it again, without producing a copypasta of that code - and maybe I should :)
It almost always does. People put so much effort into building layers of abstractions to avoid using SQL, while just writing it directly would be much faster, easier, more readable, easier to maintain, modify, and debug. I do not get it.
That was the part I really missed from my Google days.
That, insane achievement badges, and terrible-ideas-discuss (if anyone at Google is reading this, I have one word for you: dirigibles). It was like /r/NonCredibleDefense but for Google.
It's a pixel-perfect modern clone (with some actually useful extras that won't get in the way unless you look for them), and yes, you can clone the repo and run it locally.
>precisely the countries that should know better, since they were the principal recipients the "love and friendship" from Russia
Goes to show that 1984-style conditioning really does work, decades later.
Remarkably, it can even be passed through generations, as it gets ingrained into the mentality of how parents raise children: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Don't rock the boat."
Which was a survival trait in those times.
The current incarnation of Russian propaganda is different, but is even more virally poisonous:
> I'm not political. Politics is dirty. There's nothing you can change anyway. "Two sides" is an illusion. Everybody is lying and has an ulterior motive. Only naive fools believe otherwise, only naive fools ever trust. You can't know anything for sure. What you think is true is actually a lie. The only thing that's real is who you're with. That's the only truth. That's the only thing to look for in anything anyone says, that's the only thing one really says. That's what makes something true or false. The words uttered don't matter at all.
You might have seen this kind of mentality spouted by your friends on either side of the political spectrum.
Remarkably, whatever the political persuasion of people who have it is, the end result is the likes of Orban/Fico coming to power.
Sadly, this thing not only spreads, it also sticks.
If you know of an antidote, please tell me what it is.
>As an API it might not be convenient but consider converting angles internally into a tuple of sin and cosine
My friend,
it's called a complex number. A unit complex number, to be specific.
>Recall rotation is a linear transformation with a matrix whose entries are in terms of sin and cosine.
That's what multiplication of complex numbers is.
Can't wait till people here rediscover that a 3D rotation matrix has an axis-angle representation whose composition is given by quaternion multiplication.
At that, children, is why learning mathematics is important.
You have to wait and inordinate amount of negative time then.
Or maybe it's us who has to do the waiting for you to catch up on what HN folks in general are knowledgeable about.
I have a suggestion. Scroll to the bottom of this page. You will find a search box. Plug in the names of concepts you were thinking of. Enjoy.
To be honest, I too have come close to sounding a smug clueless smartass in my youth - lectured a guy on longest common subsequence not knowing that he was the original author of the file compression utility on AT&T Unix that used the same several decades ago.
The bandwidth is absolutely there ("we tried this and it didn't work" is totally the stuff of conference discussions).
The incentives are not.
The incentives are skewed towards "a magician never reveals her secrets". The results are presented as if a rabbit got pulled out of a hat, with a maximum ta-da! effect, and little backstory of how the hell did we get there.
Don't get me wrong, these things are discussed, often over beers (you better drink it you want to make a career in the field).
But not published.
The younger mathematicians are trying to change that with the blogging culture. But the professional incentives aren't there. (In corp-speak: can't put blogging on perf). They burn out.
That's why math blogs usually come from either the top dogs in the field, like Terrence Tao, who don't need to care about perf, or people outside academia.
That's one thing that I hope the disruptive/destructive effects of LLMs will force mathematicians to face.
As one of my fellow mathematicians sarcastically wrote¹, we've reached a point where we should become a cult because we're acting like one anyway.
The other possibility is, of course, that the shake-up will take us precisely into that direction.
My point here is that the real problem here is not mathematical; it's a social one: incentives and politics, organizational structures, policies, allocation of jobs and funding.
All of this directly impacts how we do mathematics, who we do it with and teach it to, how we teach and communicate, and, of course, what math we even do and look at.
Given that, I'm neither too worried about humans vs. AI standoff, nor hyped about the Glorious New Future full of AI-assisted discoveries.
AI or not, the organizational issues in the field are still there, as are the incentive structures (including the infamous publish-or-perish).
We are doomed, yes, but by our own hands and committees. And it's up to us, not the AI, to get us out of there.
The little shove from the AI might be just the thing we need.
This is not specific to math. To non-academics, you basically have to rewrite your commit history to make it seem more impressive. You often write the motivation section last. At least math publication culture allows saying "We consider the problem of" and then solve it. In AI/ML academic papers you need much more "story" around why, what the applications are, why aren't you doing something else, defend against lack-of-novelty attacks, defend against "this is just A + B known techniques used together" etc.
Because your institution's PR department and the journal you're publishing in want the publicity of "scientist cures cancer". And you probably wrote "I'm curing cancer" in your grant application, team charter, or whatnot.
I think its a total travesty of our society that people are desired to identify both the problem and the solution
people without solutions are told not to point out the problem
and people with the skillset to bring solutions dont have the skillset to search for problems or apply their seemingly unrelated disciplines to it
so you get a lot of capital and energy thrown at people who purport to be both
If AI can address this too, that would be profoundly impactful. The cross disciplinary work that a single college course is supposed to reveal, finally realized
"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"
Solid logic, mate.
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