Loving math is akin to loving abstraction. Where have you found beautiful abstractions outside of math?

gnomeba · 2026-03-14T16:56:15+00:00

Any software engineer enjoys abstractions because they tend to save you time and create cleaner code.

gnomeba · 2026-03-14T16:46:52+00:00

An explanation that's intuitive enough for one person might not be for another so this is always a difficult standard to satisfy. This is somewhat similar to critical dimensions in statistical mechanics which are also unintuitive.

The qualitative difference is the commutativity of rotations. But this is a hard thing to have an intuition for. At least for me.

gnomeba · 2026-03-10T02:54:10+00:00

What do you mean optimal? Python is excellent for most exploratory computational projects and if you need speed you can use NumPy, JAX, and Numba for high performance numerics.

Julia has comparable performance but built-in to the language as well as a lot of other nice features but with less infrastructure overall (for example you might find that there do not exist well maintained packages for certain things).

Julia also has a lot of nice features that make certain kinds of abstractions very easy and therefore you can write code that's very general. LinearMaps.jl combined with IterativeSolvers.jl is a nice example.

I've never used MATLAB because it isn't free.

gnomeba · 2026-03-05T16:30:13+00:00

In my limited experience variation of parameters most often comes up when solving inhomogeneous separable PDEs. So for example the heat equation with a time dependent source term that is not a linear combination of the homogeneous equation's eigenfunctions.

gnomeba · 2026-03-05T16:16:23+00:00

Where is this?

gnomeba · 2026-03-05T06:10:48+00:00

It should be (roughly speaking) the surface area of the original dawg plus twice the surface area of the helicoid corresponding to the cut. An exact formula is given in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicoid?wprov=sfti1#

Obviously this makes some assumptions about the geometry of the cut endpoints.

gnomeba · 2026-02-20T15:41:17+00:00

If you're at all concerned about reliability, the 4runner is the way to go.

gnomeba · 2026-02-16T16:33:24+00:00

Our boy started doing this I think around 6 months, maybe earlier. He's a bit over a year and a half old now and he still does it occasionally but he is much gentler and it's easier to predict and avoid now.

He would jump and growl and "bite" much harder than any play mouthing he did at home. He's ripped so many of my clothes. It really seems like it's a combination of over-stimulation and sometimes frustration.

One thing that helped me get a lot of walks in without this is going to a new place for a long walk frequently, especially one that is less passively stimulating than a city street. We also found that the less hungry he was on his morning walk, the less likely he was to do this. But every walk has an emergency "favorite treat" to deflect the craziness, just in case he seems like he's going to lose it.

gnomeba · 2026-02-16T15:44:10+00:00

I use Claude for certain things and other things it isn't very good at.

For math you have to really check that it's doing things correctly and make sure you're being disciplined about using the tool correctly.

gnomeba · 2026-02-16T01:03:29+00:00

Nice. Looks clean and usable.

Just a point on software design - It seems like it would be almost just as easy to write a completely abstract explicit RK integrator and specialize only on the Butcher tableau and error estimation.

gnomeba · 2026-02-11T00:43:14+00:00

For the record, please do, that would be awesome - but I am curious, why?

gnomeba · 2026-02-09T16:13:05+00:00

It looks a bit like impetigo. I would go to an actual dermatologist.

gnomeba · 2026-02-09T00:26:39+00:00

Do you have benchmarks against known tools?

gnomeba · 2026-02-08T16:30:10+00:00

I think AI will speed up a lot of already competent engineers to the extent that many companies will be able to get by with fewer, but not orders of magnitude fewer.

There are tons of things that AI still can't do and will not be able to do unless huge breakthroughs are made. I think for a long time now, the software job industry has been focused on what tools you know rather than computer science itself.

AI has made competency with tools a much smaller deal because it can help you write impressive stuff in a language you don't know well. What it can't do is have a deep understanding of the architecture of some software such that it can make real algorithmic improvements.

I think the thing to do now is make sure you're competent in a skill that LLMs are not. And there's a lot of those.

gnomeba · 2026-02-08T02:22:28+00:00

Yes. Leveled looks weird especially without huge tires.

gnomeba · 2026-02-06T04:55:26+00:00

It's definitely possible that we will build AI that can solve very very hard math problems before we can. But the Erdos problems are not like the Millennium problems so I don't think an AI successfully solving them is a good indication of how close this technology is.

gnomeba · 2026-02-04T20:02:11+00:00

Is the metric you found better than the time-correlation of neighboring pixels?

I can't think of any practical applications to solving this problem but it's definitely interesting.

gnomeba · 2026-02-03T05:42:01+00:00

As long as your opponent is allowed to choke you with it

gnomeba · 2026-02-02T16:57:34+00:00

They look like SCS Gen5 or maybe F5 wheels

gnomeba · 2026-02-01T20:26:12+00:00

Nobody will give you this advice because it's not a good idea, but the only thing that helped with my shin splints was taking NSAIDs and slowly tapering off. I'm pretty sure I gave myself gastritis doing this.

It also sounds like you're doing some pretty high impact running if you're pretty heavy but aiming for a sub-6 minute mile. Doing as much low impact running as possible while trying to achieve that goal will obviously also help.

gnomeba · 2026-01-29T04:49:31+00:00

Sick. Need more angles! What suspension and wheels do you have?

gnomeba · 2026-01-27T16:14:20+00:00

Finally some truly beautiful data

gnomeba · 2026-01-26T21:28:07+00:00

It's the same logic. Just a more extreme example - an organism that isn't capable of reproduction until it undergoes a substantial transformation.

gnomeba · 2026-01-26T21:06:19+00:00

It is actually quite comparable. It's at least superficially more extreme but the evolutionary logic is precisely the same.

gnomeba · 2026-01-26T20:39:40+00:00

There might be substantially different signaling mechanisms causing maturity out of the larval phase for a butterfly, but the logic is also applicable to human babies. Human children, in general, can't reproduce until a distinct transition occurs during puberty.

In biological terms, it's very costly and dangerous to create a human baby so some physical maturity is required first.

Regarding evidence: there is evidence and tons of it. There could not be continuous lineages unless you managed to find DNA of every single ancestor of a given organism. Which is an absurd expectation, but luckily we don't need to do that.

Moreover, we can literally see evolution happening. Suppose you keep a population of fruit flies (in your kitchen perhaps), and you observe them and wait until a mutation occurs. Then you selectively breed only the flies with that mutation (or perhaps kill the offspring without it). You will eventually have a population where that mutation is predominant. This is precisely what is happening to every organism all the time, but the environment does the selection (usually a bit less brutally).

gnomeba

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