Viewing profile — agrounds

Thanks for the reply, this is very illuminating. I never got to this depth in algorithms. I’m but a humble programmer with a math background, but no CS degree.

> That Ring wiki page though, um, nope... :D Fair enough! At a super high level, a ring is just a collection that has a similar structure to what you’re used to “numbers” having. T…

I studied a lot of abstract algebra in college and grad school and I’m surprised that rings and algebras would come up in a CS degree. What algorithms topics used those concepts? S…

Absolutely agree. All formal statements (like mathematical ones) are going to have some level of assumed background. And as the assumed background expands, the language naturally b…

Z is the ring of integers, t is a formal variable allowing us to discuss polynomials whose coefficients are in some ring. That’s what R[t] means: the ring of polynomials of the for…

I dunno, why own a car when you could ride your bike instead? They’re just different things and people may choose to use one over the other for a variety of reasons.

>if an AI is confidently telling you something wrong it's hard to work with. But they all do that. It just comes with the territory. Grok will absolutely do the same thing another …

And everyone you ever want to share files with locally also has access to your home VPN?

There are dozens and dozens of cheap-looking restaurants in San Antonio with absolutely no online presence that will serve you the most delicious tex mex you’ve had in your whole l…

Thanks very much for sharing these notes. I studied algebraic topology in grad school but somehow avoided knot theory entirely. Reading these has sparked that feeling I had when I …

This is a naive take. Are there specific instances involving individuals of many nationalities/ethnicities? Yes. Is ICE then ignoring race during its operations? Absolutely not. IC…

Agreed. But generally it very much depends on the school and the effort of those in and around it. Terrence was very fortunate to have parents who supported him and likely lobbied …

I use a subset of omz by cloning it and manually sourcing the plugins I want myself rather than initializing the entire omz system. No themes, no checking for updates, etc. For me,…

Superficially, these look the same, but at least to me they feel fundamental different. Maybe it’s because if I have the ability to read the script and take the time to do so, I ca…

>> I also like how you can manage Python versions very easily with it. > > I still don't understand why people value this so highly, but so it goes. Well I do need some way to inst…

> What I was not aware of: `venv`s need to be created with the version of python they are supposed to be run. So you need to have a downgraded Python executable first. This is one …

Yes

Scala 3 has failed to be widely adopted, and now the language as a whole is more or less dead. Not that that’s due to the 2-to-3 transition entirely.

Scala 2’s implicits have been a source of great pain in many Scala codebases at many different organizations. They are too powerful. The situation is comparable to languages that d…

Seconding quartz. I also use it and love it. It converts your markdown files to static HTML, understands Obsidian-specific markdown features, and just looks really nice IMO. For pu…

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Inertia. There are still a ton of Java shops out there, and many of them will not switch even partially to another language anytime soon. The hope is that these orgs might find it …

Category theory was not a response to any limitations of set theory, but rather a collection of new abstractions, still grounded in set theory (originally anyway). The first paper …

I was lucky enough to take two IBL courses from Dr. Michael Starbird at UT Austin. Both were wonderful courses, very engaging and very fun. I never collaborated so much with other …

Mathematicians commonly refer to two objects by the same name if they are equivalent in the given context. In this context, topology, any space that is homeomorphic to a sphere mig…