Viewing profile — dawnofdusk

>Mathematicians are prone to taking words from elsewhere, either twisting their meaning or inventing wholly new meaning out of thin air, all according to their whimsy for their own…

>what this routing mechanism is (heating a substrate, maybe?) You can engineer a waveguide if you understand the nonlinear theory they propose. There's no heat exchange involved, w…

I really like the second part of the blogpost but starting with Gaussian elimination is a little "mysterious" for lack of a better word. It seems more logical to start with a probl…

>My goal is to develop a practical, working understanding I can apply directly. Apply directly... to what? IMO it is weird to learn theory (like linear algebra) expressly for pract…

Although I am not an expert in quantum information, I think the problem you pose is resolved by the fact that the no-signalling theorem is about measurements of a quantum state, wh…

I have some minor complaints but overall I think this is great! My background is in physics, and I remember finally understanding every equation on the formula sheet given to us fo…

If it is factually wrong please tell me how.

The error in the OP is a typo that could never seriously confuse anyone, as the element Gr does not exist. An interesting perspective is Terry Tao's on local vs. global errors ( ht…

As any practicing scientist knows even good research papers may be littered with blatant but unimportant errors. There is unfortunately no good reason or system to "correct the rec…

From what I read in the comments of the first post, the Pyon guy seems very toxic and pedantic, but the rebuttal by Ned isn't great. For example, nowhere in the rebuttal is the ped…

>This seems to be quite a bit of a strawman to me. Not really, if you ever listen to CS undergrads or people in non-traditional schooling (bootcamps, etc.) talk about software engi…

It's reasonable but essentially every "common misconceptions about Big O" is because people didn't have the necessary notions in calculus. For example, the fact that O(x^2) can be …

Whenever I read content like this about Big O notation I can't help but think the real solution is that computer science education should take calculus more seriously, and students…

Agree. Science communicators should stick to talking about well-established or at least peer reviewed results. They do not need to be peddling fringe crackpottery. I don't think Ti…

>but we know that reasoning is an emergent capability! This is like saying in the 70s that we know only the US is capable of sending a man to the moon. Just because the reasoning d…

It's not that troubling because we should not think that human psychology is inherently optimized (on the individual-level, on a population-/ecological-level is another story). LLM…

Optimizing for one objective results in a tradeoff for another objective, if the system is already quite trained (i.e., poised near a local minimum). This is not really surprising,…

Basically the same as decrying why we should have to learn foreign languages instead of everyone speaking Esperanto.

Essentially all physics simulations are either particle based or based on integration of differential equations (although in a computer both approaches involve a discretization whi…

Yann LeCun (Meta AI head) is still all-in on energy based models, which are basically Hopfield-like. Not sure if there are any major developments in that direction, but the hype/op…

Pretty cool. Makes me think if we're overdue for another 1960s era tech boom?

>FWIW our CS program mandated a programming languages class and the first third of the class was taught in Scheme. This is important but doesn't replace having a dual-track intro s…

I think the solution is to have, as is the case in math/physics, an honors intro CS sequence compared to the regular intro CS class. The latter would be the recommendation for all …

Another take along similar lines can be found in the book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. Highly recommend.