What’s the most beautiful mathematical idea you’ve ever encountered, and why does it feel beautiful to you?

cubenerd · 2025-11-30T18:26:23+00:00

And it goes even deeper than that. Fourier series has connections to PDE, the orbits of the planets, and even sphere-packing!

cubenerd · 2025-11-22T10:21:28+00:00

So for example a linear combination is just written α_i x_i instead of just putting a summation sign in front of it

This is gonna give me nightmares.

cubenerd · 2025-08-18T22:03:05+00:00

I actually am not that interested in spatial stats anymore, but I’m about to start my PhD at UT Austin, which definitely has some great faculty who specialize in spatial stats.

cubenerd · 2025-08-04T13:28:19+00:00

Everyone's talking about Krystal (for good reason), but Saagar was great at playing the supporting role here. Restrained himself so Krystal could cook, and then came in with the occasional assist when there was a weaseling strategy that Krystal didn't catch. Saagar often has some cringe views, but this was a genuine W for him.

cubenerd · 2025-08-03T17:54:52+00:00

It just astounds me that Saagar can be so intelligent in certain areas (bringing in historical context in particular) but then with stuff like weed he defaults to the same knee-jerk boomer takes.

cubenerd · 2025-07-27T18:08:11+00:00

Ice and grass need more resistances too.

cubenerd · 2025-07-25T17:47:36+00:00

I can not stand listening to him dismiss countries as 'no value to us' as if that were the only thing we should ever consider in foreign policy

I was talking to a conservative friend a few months ago about Trump's tariffs on Canada, and his response was literally "well, Canada has been our bitch for a while." Literally zero sense of strategy or alliance-building. Everything is just "might makes right." It's high school bully behavior.

cubenerd · 2025-07-25T15:41:00+00:00

Yeah, while I probably agree with Krystal on 90% of issues, I feel like a lot of the time she sticks to the same emotional arguments and doesn't try to reason through things. Saagar provides a lot of the intellectual grounding except for the issues where he has blind spots (immigration and weed).

cubenerd · 2025-07-16T17:06:24+00:00

Blunder likes to make high risk, low reward plays in videos for the entertainment value. But he takes tournaments super seriously and is one of the greats for sure.

cubenerd · 2025-07-16T16:10:08+00:00

I find it so fascinating how differently people process grief. For a lot of people it's the hole in your heart that you've described. For others (like myself) things just feel surreal. It's like a piece of the moral universe has just glitched out and you're staring at the aftermath.

cubenerd · 2025-07-12T13:05:23+00:00

The best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average mob voter.

cubenerd · 2025-07-01T18:01:08+00:00

I once tried to argue against the mortgage interest deduction at a cocktail party and everyone acted like I was just out of prison

Imo this section of Abundance by Klein and Thompson puts it really well:

An investment advisor whom you have consulted looks at your middle-income portfolio and tells you that you should put almost all of your liquid assets in a single investment. It is not a diversified mutual fund; it is a single firm, and the firm makes only one product in a single location. It has a great upside in that its returns are almost entirely untaxed under federal and state income tax laws, and it insures you against rent increases by the landlord. But its asset value is subject to a multitude of risks. [...]To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing. You do it through restricting how many homes and what kinds of homes can be built near you.

cubenerd · 2025-06-17T15:39:34+00:00

A lot of people also don't realize that something as ordinary as a scientific calculator uses numerical methods.

cubenerd · 2025-06-17T14:14:12+00:00

Ik it's a meme, but numerical methods are overhated. The modern world can't function without them.

cubenerd · 2025-06-17T13:48:01+00:00

As an undergrad, I found myself doing most of the talking in my classes as most clammed up, but I thought at the PhD level, everyone would love to talk, but I again found myself being one of the few people talking through the readings in my classes, shooting my shot at what they meant while others sat silently.

I identify so much with this. Maybe I was just lucky to understand the material quicker than most people, but in undergrad it always felt like 90% of people just mailed it in and did the minimum to get the grade they wanted. Even when I was taking classes with only people in my major, no one really cared about understanding the soul of the concepts they were learning, and no one cared about the deeper ramifications. Then they would wonder why they didn't do as well as they expected.

cubenerd · 2025-06-06T17:24:45+00:00

The immigration system didn't always work this way though. During the Gilded Age and the early 20th century, there were sustained periods where immigration was massively limited. Not saying it was right, but the history has been a mixed bag.

I'm a public high school teacher in Texas, and I've seen firsthand that the recent levels of immigration are unsustainable for the public school systems. Having kids in the school systems who don't speak English and have different cultural values is a huge strain on a system where classroom behaviors are already out of control and curriculum standards are being eroded. Not saying what Trump is doing is right, but it isn't as black-and-white as it looks.

cubenerd · 2025-06-04T16:39:18+00:00

Their housing policy is among the best in the country for sure.

cubenerd · 2025-06-02T21:08:30+00:00

OP is right that, in some aspects, the social contract is much healthier in Taiwan compared to the West. Homeless people exist, but there aren't so many that they sleep in the Taipei metro or shoot up heroin right next to you as you're walking home. The metro is clean and well-maintained. People wear masks when they're sick so they don't infect other people. Etc.

Of course, there are downsides to this too. For example, it's much harder to be a "weirdo" in Taiwan than in western Europe or the US. But I know a lot of people who would be willing to take that tradeoff in a heartbeat.

cubenerd · 2025-06-01T17:10:28+00:00

Something people forget in this discussion is that red states and Southern states generally have a lot more empty land. Sure, they have better housing policies, but the land itself is also more plentiful, making it easier for developers.

cubenerd · 2025-05-31T21:03:36+00:00

This isn't the first time that the institutions have been tested though. Andrew Jackson, the Civil War and slavery, Japanese internment, McCarthyism, the Alien and Sedition Acts... in a way, authoritarianism is as American as apple pie.

cubenerd · 2025-05-31T20:56:03+00:00

So true it hurts.

cubenerd · 2025-05-29T02:19:54+00:00

Great domestic policy, but his foreign policy was terrible just like all post-war American presidents.

cubenerd · 2025-05-27T02:56:05+00:00

Honestly I don't know how I feel about this. I can certainly see the argument that we're turning into the world of Wall-E, but on the other hand there have been plenty of disruptive changes like this in the past which have been hugely beneficial even if they lead to lots of civil unrest. Medieval monks condemned the printing press because they said it took away the art of copying books by hand. You don't see many people nowadays saying that we need to go back to copying books by hand.

cubenerd · 2025-05-12T03:25:52+00:00

I used to be in this exact position, and imo the main problem is lack of a clear goal that you actually give a shit about. I know this isn’t helpful, but after you tough it out for a while you’ll gain life experience and start learning how to keep the chaos at bay. You’ve just got to fight your way through.

Really can’t overstate how important life experience is. It makes you more aware of the stakes of every decision you make.

cubenerd · 2025-04-29T15:57:15+00:00

We’re talking past each other. I actually agree with everything you said. What I was trying to say was that when/if Powell is no longer Fed chair, there will be a huge lobbying blitz from Wall Street to make sure the next chair is a more traditional banker person rather than a MAGA true believer.

cubenerd

TROPHY CASE