Viewing profile — kzz102

Since Godot got mentioned, I thought this recent talk by Juan Linietsky provides a reasonable alternative to heavily restricting contribution. https://youtu.be/LDSwP37y_W4?si=fMIsd…

Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not g…

I am criticizing how AI progress is reported and discussed -- given how important this development is, accurate communication is even more important for the discussion. I think you…

It's really tiring that LLM fans will claim every progress as breakthrough and go into fantasy mode on what they can do afterwards. This is a really good example of how to use the …

I was applying a unfair standard to them of course. Every field has a few classics that last a long time, but most old books are not read. But I think Bourbaki maybe had grand ambi…

It's interesting that while Bourbaki had a large influence on modern mathematics, very few people read their books (at least among the people I know). In a sense, their project of …

This is one of the things that everyone gets the reference, but it won't be good to admit it publicly. This quote is known to almost everyone born in that area, and it's the first …

Xiaomi can also mean millet. I think it's a reference to this Mao quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_plus_rifles?wprov=sfla1

I use to read about the power border agents have over foreigners and was amazed at how easily they can destroy me. The only reason this hasn't happened seems to be that they're mos…

In academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there …

Even if we pretend nepotism doesn't exists, academia is still not a strict meritocracy. In addition to merit, at least two factors play an important role in success, which having a…

One of the biggest problem of maths education is that they are taught by people who dislike it. They think of maths as eating bitter medicine or training of a complex, rigid skill.…

I am wondering how much of the hate of LaTeX document is due to the default font. Computer Modern seems to be disliked by many users of LaTeX as well. I personally am very conflict…

> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment. Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.

I think of efficiency as one example where naive economic thinking has poisoned common sense. Economists view inefficiency as a problem. Because a healthy economy is efficient, the…

In my view, prosecuting the bad actors alone will not fix science. Science is by its own nature a community because only a small number of people have the expertise (and university…

I want to distinguish two sources of "feeling of stupidity". One come from the challenge of grasping a difficult concept. The other is the smack on the head when you fail to see a …

It's interesting that humans would also benefit from the "chain of thought" type reasoning. In fact, I would argue all students studying math will greatly increase their competence…

I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave…

If one works in a field where there is already an issue of abundance, which is (nowadays) basically any field that produce information, it's better for the society to produce less,…

I buy the argument that work arrangements can significantly shape psychology. I am really annoyed by the culture to "sell" your findings using grandiose phrasing. It's a observatio…

Interest and competence is a feedback loop that drive each other. I really had it with the reductionist views that "don't force kids to learn things they don't like" and "keep up t…

This looks like the result of an abuse of the foreign students visa as work visas, partly due to leftover pandemic era policy. In a typical government response, instead of actually…

What I learned as a parent and from interacting with other parents is that most parenting advises are useless because it's what "works for their kid". Most parent's style is coevol…

Speaking as a researcher, I think the whole citation business was invented by and consumed by administrators. Researchers don't need citation numbers to discover new works and eval…