lying4fun

> In normal times people just want research that has life enhancing practical outputs

what about people who study birds, or say, olms? people want that kind of research? the people who are doing it surely do. astronomy and eg star watching in deep space? i could go on for days

people like doing mathematics, similarly to studying endemic organisms or other stuff of no direct utilitarian value

how many parents are happy to pay the fraction of taxes that go into something that their children might want to choose as a calling and fall in love with?

it’s okay to discuss whether something should be publicly funded, using “people want x kind of research” as a supposedly obvious or common sense argument is fallacious in the sense that it implies an idealised steelman model of the general public. that model is divorced from reality

my response is not to the post, but to the parent comment i replied to. the internal structure of mathematicians is their thing, if someone should step in, who? do you think that discrepancy matters?

mathematicians are primarily paid for teaching, and that's their primary function from the pov of the general society. i don't think anybody is debating that part of their profession? i read somewhere that the annual nsf grant budget for mathematics is 57 million, in total. even if it was just spiritual elegance, that's a reasonable number no?

different fields have different communication cultures, that’s not inherently bad. sacrificing inward focus is expensive from the pov of the insider; i see your points but not everything can be written for a general/wide audience. after all, the audience of the author are the specialists, since only specialists spent the effort to be able to engage with the work in depth. perhaps we disagree that mathematics is not a product that mathematicians are making?

what the work was meant to achieve in the first place is what the work was achieving in the first place. it was developing mathematics. if someone wants to use it, they are free to do so, or to write a blog article how it can be used by non experts. mathematicians do that themselves sometimes, but it’s not their job. myb there should be more incentives for them to do more of such work

i keep seeing this myth that mathematics has some purpose to do this or that, but somehow its purpose is least known to mathematicians, everyone else seems to know better

I’m sorry I can’t read past the first paragraph

pretty sure it’s the manim library 3b1b uses (unable to check for certain right now)

this great visualisation of homotopy groups might be helpful

A Sphere is a Loop of Loops (Visualizing Homotopy Groups)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CxGtAuJdjYI

and wars can be led in such ways that it never seems like the enemy is attacking the thing over which you would be willing to end the world. aka salami tactics

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang&pp=ygUOc2FsYW1pIHR...

oof same here brother. chess is killing me. i go cold turkey but i come back eventually. one idea is to replace it with something and then ditch the replacement. or just capitalise next time there’s enough momentum built up for wanting to get rid off of it. i did do it before though, went not playing for months. but when it’s it’s back for good

didn’t open the video, but you can also set double or triple tap on back of your iphone shortcut for this. i have a red filter set up for late night doom scrolling

great article. the information debt and budget seem like very useful things to have in mind

spend 1-2 years learning consistently _any_ undergrad math. id recommend focusing on “mastering” multivariable calculus, dependencies included. but keep taking peaks of higher level stuff or just articles as these. doing this is important as the math can be contextualised in many ways and being exposed to those ways helps you internalise intuitions

you’re right, and I’m in that school of thought, but mainly for math. In essence, I know people who use it in their reaearch and I trust them (and there’s a lot of good people doing good stuff with CT—it’s ubiquitous, so I’m fine with trusting them). I have a beginner understanding of CT, actually I finally started studying it seriously a month ago, after being exposed to it sporadically for some time. I’m not claiming anything about CT in CS, but I’m optimistic about that it can have a more widespread positive effect in it

would you say that 3 reformulates 1+1+1 in another language? because if yes, such reformulations shouldn’t be disregarded just because they’re “reformulations”. so we can say there are kinds of reformulations which make things incredibly easier, and category theory is one of them

~”numbers are the abstract notion, the primitive way of counting is a bijection” W. Lawvere

so the way people use “abstraction” sounds more like they are saying “a thing we (we think) are not used to”

many times I’ve wanted to listen to a summarisation of a chapter from a textbook I’m reading. this can be useful in at least 3 ways:

1) it prepares me for the real studying. by being exposed to the gist of the material before actual studying, im very confident that the subsequent real study session would be more effective

2) i can brush up easily on key concepts, if im unable to sit properly, eg while commuting. but even if i were, a math textbook can be too dense for this purpose, and i often just want to refresh my memory on key concepts. and often im tired of _reading_ symbols or words, that’s when id prefer to actually _listen_, in a way, using a muscle that’s not tired

3) if im struggling with something, i can play this 5min chapter explanation multiple times a day throughout the week, while doing stuff, and engaging with it in a casual way. i think this would “soften” the struggle tremendously, and increase the chances of grasping the thing next time i tackle it

also id like a “temperature” knob, that i could tweak for how much in detail i want it to go

I’m both, at times I don’t want to choose, at times I want full control. I didn’t have TV for years (was pushing a decade), but ~2months ago I got myself an analog antenna that has local channels and it’s been a blast: I caught some olympic games, watched Euro cup, couple of movies (I caught “Decision to leave” from my watchlist——tremendous movie), I saw some Anthony Bourdain shows and now I know who the guy is and i enjoyed the show, saw a documentary on war in my country, watched some live streams of city council meetings… Also, I wanted to say this somewhere in this thread I’m not trying to sell tv to you, you caught a stray bullet, but also I’m sharing that I watched it with a different curiosity after so long of not having it, and did have a great time just with those 17 channels of uncurated content, which was the main motivation——to have uncurated content

I played this custom map called "Assassins", and it was one of the best things I ever played, I'm not exaggerating. Idk if something similar already existed, or if it came out from SC2, but I was really hoping for someone to make a real game based on it. Everything I can find on the internet is just this one yt video, but it's an older version, I didn't play under 3.0 I think - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4hpQouvKA

as far as I know it does have it, and my experience doesn’t match yours-on EU there was 20ish open lobbies (hosted by people) for different custom maps/arcades at all times. but yeah if it was like you are saying it was, I agree with your point. also, check the other reply to your comment from someone who is more up to date

> In Starcraft 2 you could only play what blizzard wanted you to play.

5 years ago when I played SC2 for the first time there was plenty of (iirc) “Arcade” maps which were UMS, and I’m pretty sure, community made. Are you perhaps talking about early days of SC2 when that still wasn’t a thing or? One map I was most impressed by and had lots of fun playing it, was called “Assassins”. I won’t explain what it is, but if someone took it to develop a game based on it, I strongly believe(d) that it’d be another hit game that spawned from SC

this is amazing, thank you

myb i wanted an iphone 6months ago but today i want a ~dumb phone but im stuck with this iphone i already have. i could sell the iphone but i do need the apps i wouldnt have on a dumb phone so i try to do what i can to dumb it down

by doing that they esentially generate a lot of headlines about ai becoming more sentient

amazing visualisation

I’m speculating there could be a more ergonomic workflow combining the vim-latex flow from op and this comment(and the reply). I know you can import anki decks like a .txt(?)(or similar), so I’m imaginig a ‘flow where you live write notes in the ~.txt file and later just import it to anki. It might be a hassle to set it up all but seems way better than using the Add interface, and also I prefer latex over screenshots (but I get that ss is just more convenient for some situations)

The other day I was washing dishes and there was some water dilluted milk residue in my plate, but due to plate having been moved around it painted a nebula like pattern - it was beautiful, a sight to behold. So I thought what’s the invariant here between the milk and nebulas that make them look the same. Do you think that stuff you mentioned could explain this and countless similar phenomena

I’m going to entertain this literally because it’s fun: so we need to zoom out enough to find those big galaxy surrounding atoms which are actually universes, or conversely to zoom in more to find galaxies and a universe within atoms. But it seems that there’s either missing understanding how to cross that zoom in/out threshold or it’s impossible by the laws of physics to zoom so far to make a full circle, like it’s forbidden for the snake to bite its tail. I imagine people have discussed this stuff a lot, and came up with better analogies and more nuanced models