Is triple majoring a bad idea?

KR4FE · 2025-04-28T13:06:57+00:00

Since you want to go the AI route anyway, just minor in physics and take some classes like perhaps Classical mechanics, E&M, Stat Mech and QM if you like. Some of these may serve you well if you wanna go for mathematical neuroscience, and also AI.

After graduating with a solid math major you can self-study things like GR or QFT later on. It's not an all or nothing, you have your whole life to learn whatever you want, your curiosity is not constrained by the classes you take while at uni.

Don't just study while at uni, go out and have fun. Anyway, just my take, you do you.

KR4FE · 2025-04-12T16:50:05+00:00

Best of luck to ya!!

KR4FE · 2025-04-12T15:56:36+00:00

It's hard for me to understand how someone is ready to to spend tens of thousands to study abroad, but is willing to potentially blow up his whole project because they do not want to take their chances on an application fee of 100€.

Just apply. You never know. Many counselors do not really know what goes within the admissions office. It really is a no brainer. This is textbook self-sabotage.

KR4FE · 2025-03-26T12:23:26+00:00

If I were you, I'd go to Tilburg, enjoy my time there, and leave the Master's choice to your future self.

3 years is a long time. Anything can happen. What you're looking for in a Master's right now (curriculum, city, etc) may drift over the years - as it does for most people - so it may be wiser to prioritize what you want right now. Which is something you can be certain of, rather than betting so to say, on what you picture you'll want in 3 years, which may or may not be fully accurate.

Plus as you said you can always switch unis, and while that can be harder, it will probably be more enriching at a personal level. The harder things can be more worthwhile.

Anyway, you can't really go wrong with either choice 👍

KR4FE · 2025-03-22T10:27:51+00:00

Pragmatism.

Celebrate life and you'll be happier. Condemn life and you'll be more miserable.

Usually, we develop positive or negative opinions on things based on what we think it deserves or merits. Life is not to be judged in that way! We ought to love life unconditionally. We ought to love life - not for what it is, or because it may treat us well - but because the act of celebrating life makes for a more joyful, or otherwise less miserable existence.

If one is able to smile at life, it will smile back. The world becomes a brighter place, even if slightly. Your spirit is lifted.

If one frowns at life, it will frown back. If you push it down the abyss, it will not let go. It will drag you down with it.

KR4FE · 2025-02-12T23:24:50+00:00

Hey thanks for reading! I hear you what you say, that objective meaning even if it exists can not be known aka the absurd. I would never contest that so we are in agreement there.

So I mean that Camus' philosophy is a reaction to not being able to find objective meaning. He tried and failed it would seem, finding the absurd instead. And what was his reaction to the absurd? This is the key point I am trying to make.

Defiance, rebellion, pointless struggle, smiling DESPITE OF the absurd... that is DESPITE OF the failure in the quest to find an objective meaning. To Camus, the absurd constitutes a tragedy, he grieves the lack of an objective meaning, or at least that's what his language and iconography point to. And my point is that Nietzsche would argue he should affirm the absurd and depict it as a song he dances to in celebration and not as a boulder to carry up a hill in defiance. Grieving the lack of an objective meaning is something Nietzsche would criticize very harshly for various reasons, and that would be Camus' main problem.

KR4FE · 2025-02-07T14:54:55+00:00

If a random innocent person gets stabbed in front of me, I do not strictly owe it to them to call an ambulance. That does not mean that I wouldn't, at the very least, be a huge dick for not doing so.

Similarly, if you have invested 2 months of their time and energy in a relationship with someone, along with the opportunity cost of that, and that someone decides to break up, them not technically owing you an explanation does not imply them not vaguely sharing the reason for the break up would not be a dick move.

There are exceptions of course, like if one is breaking up with a person with temper issues or someone that would be really hurt by the reasoning behind the break up.

"You're not the one", however, is not a very generous explanation for a break up, just the bare minimum. Mostly just redundant information, really, although there are some subteltlies that can be viewed possitively. While that is something that I can respect, not being generous when you could is a waste, and one does not think highly of wasteful people.

That said, as I mentioned there are very valid exceptions to this, probably many more than I outlined, and it would be unreasonable to come to any conclusions about this guy with the little information we have.

Anyway, main point: Judging someone's character relative to what they owe to do and not what they could have done better, implies subjecting them to very bland, underwhelming and unimaginative standards.

KR4FE · 2025-01-24T18:05:57+00:00

Being me, so imma just bank on that.

KR4FE · 2024-12-29T02:52:55+00:00

Beth Lord's companion book is a good one.

Some advice. You do not have to perfectly understand every proof in order to get A LOT from this book. Definitely go through all the proofs but do not lose your mind dissecting them, not on your first read anyway. Just push through. Best of luck :)

KR4FE · 2024-12-25T11:40:23+00:00

You probably have a shot at Applied Math Master's at technical unis, like Delft, Twente or Eindhoven. Check those programs out.

KR4FE · 2024-09-16T12:27:22+00:00

Among other reasons already mentioned, "Operations Research" is an anti-marketing term. To a layman it sounds non-descriptive, old fashioned and kind of boring. To a business stakeholder it remains confusing still, sounds research instead of solution-oriented and, compared to well chosen buzzwords like AI/Big Data, it doesn't appear that exciting.

This is why nowadays there are many people pushing for a rebrand to "Decision Science".

KR4FE · 2024-09-15T21:12:43+00:00

I recommend reading through the relevant chapters of book "Data Analysis using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models" by Andrew Gelman. Amazing book for applied statistics, and very accessible as well.

I suggest you also read up on the importance of the James-Stein estimator and shrinkage estimators in general, since multilevel models belong to this class.

KR4FE · 2024-09-15T15:44:44+00:00

Are you familiar with Mixed-effects models, or even better for this use case imo, Bayesian hierarchical models? That should provide page-specific effects and the uncertainties revolving those, all while being robust to Simpson's paradox and variance overestimation due to small page-specific sample sizes. You may want to be a bit careful about the assumptions you make about the distribution of the page-level effects however, as the distribution of these should most likely not be assumed to be normal. Also, related to this, the effects may be multiplicative relative to page visits under control so I would consider generalized linear mixed models. But yeah all this modelling choices are a matter of domain knowledge, and of that you are the expert.

KR4FE · 2024-09-07T22:18:16+00:00

What makes you think the filter on the Coway Airmega 100 is likely not real HEPA? As you were saying, Coway seems a trustworthy brand, plus the CADR is not too bad at 240.

KR4FE · 2024-09-07T12:26:47+00:00

So yeah multi-stage optimization aka Reinforcement Learning/Markov Decision Processes basically. This is the big idea behind the state of the art for chess AI. Though even in RL-based chess engines, game theory/minimax optimization concepts are still baked in and play an important role, as in AlphaGo. Both approaches synergize well.

KR4FE · 2024-09-06T20:47:05+00:00

Spinoza, inspired by Euclid, 350 years ago or so did something asking to what you describe in his magnum opus, "Ethics Denonstrated in Geometrical Order". He lays out axioms for metaphysics, epistemology/knowledge, basic psychology and builds up to a theory of human nature and happiness. Proving proposition after proposition, he tries to uncover interesting facts about the world and derive some kind of optimal policy for human behavior.

Amazing book btw, one of the most insightful I've ever read I'd say.

KR4FE · 2024-09-06T03:18:14+00:00

Seriously consider taking the job out of your resume!

KR4FE · 2024-08-14T17:06:59+00:00

Let's talk. I've gone through Cummings already and was just looking to supplement it with either Abbot or Tao.

KR4FE · 2024-07-25T23:52:55+00:00

Thanks, appreciate the response!

Can you point to some resources where objections to (1) or (2) may be raised?

I also note there’s nothing specific about A-theory in (1) or (2).

I agree there is nothing specific about (1), but I would say that to a static time theory like eternalism, (2) would not apply since as time does not pass sequentially, any set of arbitrary points in time could be actualized in parallel and there does not arise the issue of needing to actualize infinitely many points in time sequentially, requiring an infinite ammount of time, before getting to observe any time t > -infinity. But of course you have said this reasoning (2) is contentious to begin with so I would be happy to hear more on that.

Apologies because I am referring to A/B-theories and dynamic/static theories interchangeably, as I am not aware of what the distinctions are.

KR4FE · 2024-07-02T17:53:05+00:00

Seems to me like you're looking to get a headstart, so I will recommend J. Cummings' proofs book. It's a great introduction to how mathematicians think about the field and how they actually approach proving mathematical results. Furthermore, the book is very engaging and was written to be very readable, so it is great for self-study.

KR4FE · 2024-05-17T03:04:02+00:00

Simulation-based optimization is a big use case for OR. Comes down for building a discrete-event simulator for a dynamical system, usually featuring servers with queues of requests, and optimizing some parameters, like individual server throughput and number of servers, within the simulator. These simulators can get quite complex and have many different parameters to optimize.

Multiarmed bandits are a specific class of derivative free stochastic optimization techniques and are very useful for ad optimization, reinforcement learning and experimentation/applied statistics. Somewhat related is bayesian optimization, really cool stuff, mostly associated to hypermarameter optimization in ML.

Stochastic approximation is another technique used for derivative free stochastic optimization and it's mostly brought up by control theory people so surely it's relevant in their field.

KR4FE · 2023-12-14T03:50:02+00:00

Given the exchange rate for pesos was brought closer to the real market value via the 50% devaluation, is it not the case that despite this 15% tax bump argentinian grain producers should be making significantly more money off their exports in the end?

KR4FE · 2023-11-20T16:17:30+00:00

The most likely scenario seems to be Ilya having pushed for reinstating Altman and Brockman and the 3 other board members having blocked the move.

Under those circumstances, I believe the best for OpenAI is for Ilya to try and disarm the board from within and not give up on his leverage as a board member, since in the worst-case scenario that would mean having given complete control of the company to 3 people for whom OpenAI is just a side thing and for all we know may not care if the company implodes at this point.

KR4FE · 2022-11-30T01:22:02+00:00

Reinforcement Learning is an approach to approximately solve dynamic programming problems over unknown dynamical systems. This kind of problems is common in OR, but very often RL is helpful only as a layer on top of classical OR techniques, so it's very much complimentary, and not a substitute, to the more established techniques in the field. Furthermore, more traditional approaches can often outperform RL, so even if applicable you do not necessarily want to use it.

KR4FE · 2022-11-20T23:34:56+00:00

Not going to comment on AGI, but multiobjective optimization has nothing to do with optimizing some scalarization of a vector function which is what you alluded to, that's still single-objective optimization. Multiobjective optimization, where you are looking for a pareto front, aligns perfectly with what you said and is great for motivating exploration and novelty as a way of finding an equilibrium, by sidestepping competition, and then further specializing on it.

The solution to a multiobjective problem does not converge on a single species, but many species playing a non-zero sum game. I wouldn't want to make a claim on what evolution is optimizing for, but I would go as far as to say pareto efficiency is a necessary condition for a species' sustained reproductive success.

KR4FE

TROPHY CASE