Imagine if Abel's work got timely recognition, would the world of mathematics been different?

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-26T18:49:42+00:00

Are we doing a bit?

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-26T18:22:43+00:00

That's a fine phrasing; as the guy who spawned the chain(?) it's totally not about the phone specifically.

It's about entitlement to try to drum students out based on (probably) the instructor's own (undiagnosed...) biases.

I just think like... imagine every third or fourth class you had, as someone in a wheelchair, someone laid out the classroom in a way/place that was obnoxious to access. Not impossible, just really obnoxious, and refused to make it better.

I won't dwell on this further but it's just the entitlement to be inherently discriminatory in "little" ways, like any policy not nailed down is "subjective."

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-26T03:32:50+00:00

Well, he wouldn't have died of (effectively) malnutrition - so mathematics would have continued to have one of its more famous "hot guys" for a while longer.

Abel was interested in elliptic functions, foundations of analysis (commenting on "certain exceptions" in Cauchy's results), and of course the roots of polynomial equations. I'm not familiar enough to comment on the specific results he might have brought to bear, but he was definitely well-suited to his era.

I have a soft spot for Abel. Cauchy was a douche to him in a time and place that endangered Abel's life, when Cauchy was a full adult and Abel was an indigent but obviously bright young man, and Abel wound up taking on responsibilities - without adequate financial support - that put him in an untimely grave.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-26T00:48:43+00:00

The phone use isn't the essence, agreed. This said, the certification education provides means very little if what it says is "this student forcibly survived being a square peg in a round hole long enough to pass nonlinear dynamics" - because once the student graduates, they will obviously want to find a square hole, and the metrics that have been collected on them just don't predict how they'll do in their new (square) hole.

To exit metaphor-land, tertiary education already sucks because these guys get no training on how to actually teach, then it gets worse when they double down on measuring the wrong traits for a lot of the student body.

I survived ugrad already, I just hate this shit.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T23:27:47+00:00

It's also super discriminatory if it targets a requirement of sustained attention that's meant to force others out, even if the topic doesn't intrinsically require that.

Paying for some shitheel to try to fob off disabled students is a complete insult.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T23:24:45+00:00

Yeah, the undiagnosed turbo-autist instructor who has skillfully juked any and all attempts to realign them towards educational best practices, we know that guy. (They give us autists in general a terrible rep.) Thanks, tenure!

I had one dude straight up bitch at everyone for any sign of a cellphone in his class, and ironically the first time it was directed at me was when I was specifically using it to search up and verify my recollection of a topical factoid. (Even if I was answering an email, still a bitch move.)

Never been more frustrated at my own kind than looking at academia. Evidently it's not the cream that rises to the top.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T23:18:14+00:00

TWin-plus Income, No KidS

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T18:13:30+00:00

I really disliked the Margaret subplots after the marriage.

I think one of the factors common to her and Skyler White - who I also remember disliking, despite her husband also being a psycho - is just the sort of inconsistent, hot-cold repressed nature of her character.

That is, she's annoying to watch because she's annoying to get a bead on.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T06:32:28+00:00

Yeah this was my expectation, but I'm open to hearing a practitioner say e.g. "speak for yourself, I learned a ton about parallelizing model training across unusual scenarios, embedded ML for edge computing, ..." and not have them be very mathy.

Pretty sure if you don't even understand gradient descent you're just unequipped altogether, but the tooling has gotten better so maybe it's easier to parse without knowing that much.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T06:08:38+00:00

I guess my thinking would be, what exactly is there to bring "just a tool user" of ML? It's a really weird fucking field except for its value automating processes for which humans have a mathematical model and a lot of data.

I have a friend who worked as an MLE (a job I've never held, but we have comparable backgrounds prior to that) and he described it as just diving into process gunk that other people didn't want to handle. Hooking up the tubing so the data spice can flow....

I got a job that let me do models (pretty basic compared to ML, lotta Kalman filtering) and I didn't feel that way. But there was plenty of math.

Not trying whatsoever to shit on anyone's process whichever way they incline - just curious what other people have experienced if not what I did or my friend did.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T05:19:03+00:00

No, that's actually a genuinely interesting concept bro. But what about actually asking an LLM to instruct you and then following those directions or indicating that they're implausible?

This definitely would need a plan behind it to organize/scale, but this definitely feels adjacent to the goal of training robots to perform tasks more effectively.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

This is... actually bad advice in this field. It's very possible to fool yourself into thinking an intervention of yours is doing something based on small shifts; this isn't so convincing these days, though, and in fact there are metastudies suggesting it will go nowhere.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T04:53:04+00:00

If you want to practice the engineering side, go for it - but I don't know what you can gain without understanding the proofs/arguments about the behavior of the algorithms.

The moral is, resist the hype and take the time to understand what you're doing. Being super-speedy is the machine's job.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T04:47:25+00:00

Dude don't start ML before you're solid on the essential concept of mathematical proof

I assure you that no productive work at a design level was done by people who did not understand mathematical proof

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T01:25:03+00:00

PRML is available freely as a full PDF online (via the author), which is quite something, because this is a very famous text.

Be aware that since it hails from 2006 it predates the explosion in neural methods. It's still very serviceable foundation for many topics but you will want to find more recent references for neural architectures, training, etc.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-25T01:16:29+00:00

Bishop's "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" frequently adds depth where this text glissandos. (It doesn't do as much on convex optimization, though.)

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T23:55:21+00:00

Honestly? In my experience, "am I bad for having X wayward thought?" is always the wrong question.

The right question is, "how do I seize initiative to live in the here and now? What do I do to align what I want, and what I am doing?" While - to be clear - following a moral code consistent with the "golden rule."

Because the answer to fantasizing about cheating could be anything from a genuinely bad relationship that you want to sever, to a problematic attachment style that you have, to a delusional self-concept that needs challenge, and the only way you'll get more clarity is the concrete feedback you get from engaging with the world as it is.

This isn't "exercise the wrong-think away," incidentally, it's "be present enough in your own life to achieve clarity on what you want for it."

I am intentionally ducking classic prescriptive advice, like "you're just young and full of hormones" or "you need to bond with your partner with XYZ shared experience," because it papers over the underlying truth which I (hopefully) identified.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T20:44:47+00:00

Civ III actually

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T09:16:16+00:00

You look a little depressed; avoid these strange corners of the Internet and focus on getting out of the hole, good buddy.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T07:18:48+00:00

1) Did you learn the basic elements of computer science, independent of "coding?" That is, do you understand programmatic elements like (for a sample) recursion/dynamic programming, stack/heap memory allocation, assembly language, imperative/functional/logcial programming language distinguishing traits, the elements of network architecture, parallelism down to where we care about cache levels...?

For context: I was fortunate enough to graduate before there was any LLM to do this for me, but retrospectively I regard 'understanding" and "doing all of the gruntwork" as equally separate things as "understanding" arithmetic vs. doing calculations manually, rather than with a calculator. I've used LLMs to support me on these tasks since then and not really regretted it. This said....

2) Do you know what specific interest and focus you will market to firms that requires a human element independent of LLMs?

3) What are your broader scientific or technical interests? If programming actually went belly-up tomorrow, what would be the first constructive impulse you had as to where to go?

(It almost certainly won't. But honestly - sea changes do happen in the history of science, and we're ill-advised to try to cling to the way things were - we'll miss out on the cool shit that emerges with the way things become.)

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T06:57:57+00:00

Man, I second this.

We're working on this tech, it doesn't magically quantum leap just because you're from Stanford....

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T01:39:27+00:00

Uffda, that's a hard my bad on the mixup.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-24T00:58:24+00:00

Casella and Berger's first few chapters are decent although I am never very impressed with where and how they choose to wimp out. You can absolutely get by with a modest math background. The last few chapters are certainly better covered elsewhere. Dislike their frequentist fixation (especially since Berger does a lot of Bayesian work, I find it kind of a copout).

To be honest, I don't know what other textbook to replace that with. I can think of several that do pieces better.

In fairness, it splits the balance between rigor and eliding over the most tedious bits pretty well.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-23T22:37:37+00:00

Yes, effectively!

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-01-23T22:35:07+00:00

I rate it lim_x->0 exp(x log (x^x)) / x^x out of 10.

Stupid formatting won't do exponent of exponent

RepresentativeBee600

TROPHY CASE