Viewing profile — mreid

laughs in Australian https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/maps/averages/uv-index/?perio...

I'm guessing that what they meant by "proper harmony" is just intonation: where thirds and fifths are expressed by small, integer ratios of frequencies (e.g., a fifth is 3:2 and a …

From the article: > Without fully endorsing all their ideas, I’m now in the LeCun/Marcus camp on LLMs. I'm pretty sure he means "Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus" not "Yann LeCun and Mar…

Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484. I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails …

> When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstai…

We've come a long way in 40 years from Racter's automatically generated poetry: https://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html I always found this one a little poignant: More than ir…

On your site you make the claim that: "Our thesis is that there is 100 years of physics and math research that has gone unnoticed by the CS/ML communities and we intend to rectify …

Is it concerning to anyone else that the "Simple & Reliable" and "Reliable on Longer Tasks" diagrams look kind of like the much maligned waterfall design process?

I also had to convince my parents to buy me books about fractals. My prized possession as a 15 year old was a copy of Mandelbrot's "Fractal Geometry of Nature". A lot of it went ov…

Thanks, I hadn't seen that term before. Just to be clear, I wasn't claiming that "communicating clearly" is a new idea in software engineering, I'm mainly commenting on how effecti…

Another thing I learnt from my math degree that I find helps a lot when programming and software engineering more generally is *defining your terms*. So many communication issues o…

As someone who taught myself 68000 assembler as a kid in order to render Mandelbrot and Julia sets quickly it still blows my mind a little that fairly hi-res versions of these can …

A lot of those skills come from thinking about development in a team as a system and ask where do things frequently go wrong or take too long? Practice clearly and concisely expres…

Really nice presentation of divergences. I made a similar attempt (math + interactive JS visualizations) a long time ago for the Bregman divergences: https://mark.reid.name/blog/me…

A sphere is not a tetrahedron.

I'm guessing it is a derogatory pun, alluding to vibe coders.

These are definitely thought-provoking questions and there are branches of mathematical philosophy such as constructivism and mathematical intuitionism that explore these. Even if …

Sure, “arbitrary” is a suitable term here too. A random process is just one way to generate an arbitrary function. My use of “random” here was referring to the coin flipping proces…

I think you are experiencing the same confusion I felt when I first started thinking about the difference between a program and a function. The set of all possible mapping from all…

I had exactly the same reaction, which prompted me to write this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44122045

This is a really nice explanation of decidability. One extra thing it might be worth mentioning is that there are many more functions `f : string -> boolean` then there are program…

I must have some of that microplastic in my brain since I misread the start of the title as "Human, Brian May, ..." and then couldn't parse the rest properly.

The program Racter (which, from what I understand, was a basic MDP) was generating poetry in the 1980s that was published, read, criticized, and presented in museums: https://www.1…

I've heard a similar sentiment: "It's not lines of code written, it's lines of code spent." It also reminds me of this analogy for data, especially sensitive data: "it's not oil, i…