Viewing profile — madhadron

Counterexamples are clarifying. For everyone condition in a proof, it's really handy to have a maximally simple, memorable counterexample that makes it fail because it violates tha…

The ACM should probably have run this by a statistician before publishing it. As another commenter pointed out it opens with bad experimental design, then goes on about random allo…

You're describing a very small number of companies that all copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general a…

> tens of thousands of lines of code Perhaps this is part of it? Tens of thousands of lines of code seems like a very small repo to me.

This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs…

> Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not. No objective reader of t…

I'm puzzled by your statement. The activities you're describing have lots of exfiltration routes.

Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on training data got traction, it would be neither, so it doesn't matter i…

I’m not sure what you mean by a change of basis making a nonlinear system linear. A linear system is one where solutions add as elements of a vector space. That’s true no matter wh…

All these transforms are switching to an eigenbasis of some differential operator (that usually corresponds to a differential equation of interest). Spherical harmonics, Bessel and…

"Time Enough for Love" is the only Heinlein I've felt any inclination to reread in the past few decades that held up at all (and it's still a good read).

Lamport's website has his collected works. The paper to start with is "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system." Read it closely all the way to the end. Ev…

Look up the admission of the Dakotas. There was a minimum number of people a state had to have to be admitted, but that was ignored in order to pack the Senate.

I mean it is psychologically irrelevant to almost all scientists in the US and not something they consider in their career choices at all.

The actual constituted nations of Europe as they exist today? Aside from the UK, not long. Most of them are states that came into existence in the 20th century. Germany was the 198…

Because they're not negligible. It's worth calculating it out. Length contraction produces a very slight increase in charge density of the nuclei, but there are a lot of charges an…

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.

No, there's a senate to get the small states in the late 18th century to ratify the constitution. There's still a senate because various groups added states without enough populati…

Lawsuits take a very long time, but a court injunction can control which way that time is spent.

> (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit merciless…

The BCG vaccine is not protective against tuberculosis in adults. It helps prevent miliary tuberculosis in children. I did my graduate work on tuberculosis. Those of us who weren't…

Here speaks someone with no scientific training or knowledge of the NIH, public health, or how any of it operates.

As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and nav…

It's a tradeoff. You can have excluded middle in your logic or infinitestimals in your extended reals. For mathematicians dealing with all the wild stuff coming out of studying inf…

> how do you guys keep up to date with tech? I don't. There really isn't much that's new that shows up. Spend your time exploring stuff people have already done, then learn whateve…