Viewing profile — xamuel

The Beatles absolutely still exist! They published a new single in 2023 ("Now and Then") and they surgically injected slices from archive footage into new footage for the music vid…

And you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matt…

The drug is called AD109, but the title seems misleading as the drug is apparently still under trial, though it has shown good results there so far

Before birth. ...Hey, don't point that pitchfork at me, point it at Socrates. In his defense, that kind of does describe when LLMs acquired their knowledge (if we consider "birth" …

Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remembe…

Before the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus, enormous ingenuity and whole careers were spent doing calculations which the fundamental theorem trivialized. To be cle…

Mathematics is a bridge to what Neoplatonists call the intelligible world. Currently, mathematicians navigate that world on foot. It's exciting to think that soon we might have car…

I find that I don't necessarily mind when a book repeats itself, and a good helping of anecdotes can help a point get across. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "I cannot remember …

It happens specifically when I wander out of network coverage. If I stay in my airbnb where I have coverage, then 0 spam

Agree. I do a lot of travel and in 3rd-world countries it is quite common to get 2g spam, it's really unacceptable that Apple doesn't offer a way to turn off 2g short of lockdown m…

One place where the big i and small L look almost identical, and a pretty funny/annoying place for them to do so, is when you're typing a WiFi password in OSX (if you toggle "Show …

All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the…

I didn't read the OP but one pet peeve of mine is the uppercase I vs. lowercase L in sans-serif. Especially in contexts like randomly-generated passwords which you have to manually…

Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think abou…

On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this …

I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical an…

Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its…

This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation (based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them before they can submit to arxiv. And papers sub…

>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all…

J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather,…

"The main axiom we introduce [...] states that for any organism in any species, either the species contains at most finitely many descendants of that organism, or else the species …

That argument would apply to sets too, and yet frozenset is builtin.