fireworkcrayon

Thanks for stepping me through that. I was able to reread and understand your original explanation.

To be honest, though, I was really just trying to understand what my roadblock is in general. As I mentioned, I experience this kind of friction with most math-related writing. And, sadly, I do have at least a "passing familiarity" with math. I don't really struggle with the concepts. For me it's the communication layer: the variety of conventions that exist never seem to jell into a coherent system in the way that natural languages do - even with all of their idiomatic and arbitrary features.

Anyway, thanks again for the discussion.

I wasn’t trying to be critical - sorry if it came across that way!

> Also, "a fixed number of features ... call it d_f", I don't know how to more clearly define what d_f is?

Perfect example. I would expect a fixed number to be represented by a single letter, like x. But here, a the fixed number seems to need two letters to represent it: d and f. When I see this, I wonder “what’s d?” “What’s f?” So I scan ahead: I see there is a d_k, so I think there must be some sibling relationship between f and k, but I can’t see what it is. As far as I can tell, Q/q and K/k are the ones that belong in a pair.

It gets very confusing trying to decipher the meaning and relationships.