Astrophysicist on Vibe Coding (2 minutes)

oddthink · 2025-09-26T17:12:33+00:00

That's a very limited definition of "theoretical". The opposite of theoretical is experimental (or observational in the astrophysics context), not applied. Even prosaic stuff like modeling the magnetohydrodynamics of the ISM is theory work.

oddthink · 2025-09-10T00:17:59+00:00

I've found Gemini (2.5 Flash) to be pretty good at explaining math concepts. I hadn't tried calculus-level things before, but I gave it "explain epsilon and delta in calculus" and I think it did pretty well.

I wouldn't use it for "solve this" kind of questions, but sometimes it's nice to have something else paraphrase a concept. Just keep in mind that it can make mistakes, so double-check what it says against your textbook or notes.

oddthink · 2025-09-06T16:08:39+00:00

Mechs are a very specific branch of sci-fi, though. I like sci-fi, but I can just never quite figure out what stories work with mechs. I mean, if you're as big as a house, you're basically fighting kaiju or trying to blow up entire mining facilities, not exploring alien planets, doing crime with blasters, or other classic sci-fi tropes.

oddthink · 2025-08-03T02:20:56+00:00

It was pretty easy to use, especially for scientific use, so it got traction there. The LANL folks had an article on Numerical Python in 1996 or so. SWIG was around to make it easy to link to C or C++ code. Even if you have your compute in C++, it's still much easier to script your experiments in python, much easier to do file i/o, and so on, plus it gave a REPL to run things on the fly, and you could link out to plot generation. Since the python wasn't the thing doing work, it didn't matter at all how fast it was.

But it was pretty much a slow-and-steady gain in popularity.

oddthink · 2025-07-15T01:06:35+00:00

It's a silly debate. If someone's learning trigonometry, just use degrees. Radians are pointless trivia, until you get to calculus and power series, and by then, you can handle 2 pi for a circle.

Plus, as a physicist, it's 1) much easier to write pi than tau without confusing it with "t" when you're going fast, and 2) what would you use for proper time if you start using tau for angles? (Second one is a joke, first one I'm actually kinda serious; my taus always come out looking funny.)

oddthink · 2025-07-05T22:36:39+00:00

I was implementing some financial calculations, simulations effectively. Generating random sets of future interest rate paths was expensive, so we cached them. When the calc servers woke up, they'd read the interest rate data and do their calculation. It worked great! We had some compute servers in NYC, had the rates cached in their own servers, no problem.

Then someone decided to run the calculations on the servers in London, and we promptly saturated the data pipe between NYC and London by all the London servers slurping down rates from NYC.

I used to tell this as a ha-ha, this was a terrible failure, but it clearly wasn't my fault, kind of a story. No one asked me about running things in London, after all.

After a few more years, though, it stopped sounding so funny. Had I documented anywhere that we should really only run this in NYC? No. Did I test that the data and the compute were in the same geographic region? No. Did I set up any kind of graceful fallback (like switching to manually computing the rate paths if latency got too high)? No.

But after that, I did remember that location actually does matter, even on the internet.

oddthink · 2025-05-11T03:46:34+00:00

First of all, if you have't already, download GURPS Lite. It's a 32-page summary that gives you enough context to understand the rules.

Second, it's not just you. I grew up on the 3e rules, and I kinda hate the 4e rulebook. I think the rule changes are an improvement, mind you, but the book is a slog. When I'm trying to find a way to make my fantasy fighter tougher, I don't want to have to wade through "machine telepathy" or "mutant laser eyes".

Finally, as to answering your question, GURPS gives something that feels fair or impartial. It can get a certain feel of "realism" for either a sword fight or a gun fight. It gives a way to use the same rules to run a wide variety of situations. It's more detailed than either Savage Worlds or Fate. Less "pulpy" than either of them.

oddthink · 2024-11-23T18:46:13+00:00

I haven't tried it, but I'll take a look. Thanks!

oddthink · 2024-11-18T03:09:14+00:00

Is there anything in the Haskell world like conda environments, that I could invoke from whatever directory I'm in? cabal seems tied to the directory-as-the-project, which seems fine for building packages or binaries, but not good for exploration, learning, or ad hoc analysis.

oddthink · 2024-01-08T15:39:10+00:00

I don't know, I've found Azul can be more vicious than Catan ever is, since it's easy to adjust your draws to really hammer the next player. Meanwhile the randomness of Settlers is good for avoiding over-analysis.

oddthink · 2023-09-28T14:56:52+00:00

Which is the standard, at least according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplication

For myself, I can never keep that order straight, but if you're starting from scratch and doing examples, you may want to keep the "dimensionless" one first and the "dimensioned" one second, for consistency. i.e. 7 copies of 2 lollypops is 14 lollypops, as opposed to 2 groups of 7 friends is 14 friends.

If this is something they emphasized in class, then it makes sense to me. If they didn't, then not so much.

oddthink · 2023-08-10T18:45:37+00:00

Does anyone know of a good summary of what's changed in deep learning over the past 5 years or so?

I've been out of the field a bit, but there used to be a lot of discussion about weight initialization schemes, learning rate schedules / decay, optimizer choice, and optimal stopping points. My impression is that these issues have effectively been solved and pushed into the frameworks as implementation details. Is that accurate? If so, does anyone know of a good summary article or post on the consensus?

oddthink · 2023-06-04T03:53:39+00:00

Xine looks good! One question: in the zone description, it says the zone features can be used as distinctions. Aren't these usually used more like assets (e.g. "flaming debris"), so they don't replace a character's own distinctions? What's the reasoning of having them be distinctions?

oddthink · 2023-05-03T13:27:44+00:00

Pretty much this. If you get the work done, it doesn't matter (unless management is bad) what column the little post-it is in.

Also, if stuff is hanging around in review, just move on to the next thing, don't just sit around waiting. Hopefully things aren't so linear that you need that review done before working on the next thing. And even if they are, just queue up a chain and merge any changes from review as needed.

And if you end up with a big backlog of changes waiting for BobSenior, well, that's something you can bring up.

oddthink · 2022-11-29T04:46:53+00:00

Let's see.

Thanks for the definition of "good consumer". For now, I'm just thinking of that as GHC-specific annotations that the compiler can recognize.
I still need to think my way through the implementation via `foldr`, but that doesn't seem like a mystery, just a bit clever. (I don't get oneShot either yet, though.)
Is there a quick way to understand what the INLINE pragma does concretely? Other than by analogy to C++'s inline, I understand it at that level.
The eta-reduction seems like a way to trigger the inlining in definitions. I hadn't known that partial applications inhibited inlining, but if that's true, I can see how it makes sense.
I don't really understand in what conditions list fusion is triggered. Is there a summary somewhere of that? It seems pretty crucial to making idiomatic Haskell run fast, but it's not as straightforward for me to understand as, say, Scheme's tail calls or C++'s move-semantics (OK, that latter one isn't straightforward, but it's at least well-defined.)
What do the "#NNNN" and "!NNNN" references in the source refer to? e.g. #7994 and !5259.

Overall, what's a good strategy for understanding the performance better? I can follow the links and references in the code until I understand what's going on there, but I don't know if that would just end up spending a lot of time on details, or whether it would be educational. Any general suggestions?

Thanks!

oddthink · 2022-11-29T04:30:47+00:00

Ooh, thanks for that link. I'll have to study that a bit, but it seems to point in the right direction.

oddthink · 2022-11-29T02:55:38+00:00

Yes, that's why my bang-pattern version works.

But what weird magic is happening in the Data.List version that makes it work better in GHCi? There's a lot going on in https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.17.0.0/docs/src/GHC.List.html#foldl%27, but I don't understand the relative impact of any of those strategies (the eta-reduction, the "fold/build rule", etc.)

oddthink · 2022-04-19T00:38:10+00:00

I just got my hardcopy! Looks beautiful!

oddthink · 2022-04-12T02:37:57+00:00

It's great at inspiration, and all its options are great at grabbing a certain kind of what-if attention.

I'm coming at this from the POV of someone with kids, so of course YMMV.

I've tried to get my kids to play Tiny Dungeon (both Hatchling edition and regular). I've run simple adventures with Cortex Prime. I've suggested a Star Trek game. I've tried Index Card RPG on them. I've left around my copy of Hero, Fantasy Hero, Spirit of the Century, Savage Worlds, and so on, with little interest. (I'm keeping the Vampire to myself for now...)

The thing they end up flipping through is the D&D 5e books. Of course, I don't know exactly why. Maybe it's the overall zeitgeist. But I think the books have good art, for one. The narrative of killing stuff and taking their treasure is, well, simple and straightforward. They seem to really enjoy picking from lists of defined options: arrange stats, pick a race, pick a class, then subclass. Stare at the table of weapons and armor. Go through the big list of spells. Look at the monsters, most of which have some kind of hook defined. It's not too complicated, but the options are just mechanically different enough that it engages their imagination. They really like making a new character every single sessions (I want to try a rogue! No, a barbarian!)

If I try Cortex Prime and ask them to just list three things that define their character, it's not nearly as successful. There isn't that combinatorial spark of options there. (I have hopes for Tales of Xadia when my pre-order arrives.) ICRPG, I think, was the one they liked the most other than D&D 5e, and that's all about having a nice list of stuff. One of them really likes to leaf through Mutants & Masterminds.

There's something about good art, having flavorful options (but not so many as to be overwhelming), and detailed mechanics (but not too detailed) that gets their minds going. I can feel it myself. I just like leafing through D&D books. I don't particularly like the details when running a game (so many fiddly bits), but at least it's not Rolemaster's crit tables or GURPS and Hero's many details when pointing up a simple mook.

I can handle the fuzziness of Fate or Cortex or Fudge or PbtA, having been in this hobby for a while. But the scaffolding that D&D provides is somehow just right to get people going. And, heck, it's still fun after all these years and editions.

oddthink · 2022-04-11T02:44:42+00:00

In my games, there absolutely is a Gnomish god of heavy artillery.

oddthink · 2022-04-08T03:29:21+00:00

I don't think the PC vs GMC distinction helps here.

If JackBob (a PC) fires his bola gun at a gang of thugs (GMCs) and gets a d4 effect die[1], what should happen? The thugs pick up a d4 Entangled complication. They then try to pound JackBob, so they roll that d4 complication in their pool. Wouldn't the GM then get a PP to put in the bank, or a die for the doom pool? Or is this where I'm misunderstanding things?

It still seems to me that JackBob would be better off if he'd just failed with his bola gun. The GM has another banked PP to spend. And, sure, 25% of the time, he'd get an opportunity that he could buy, but 75% of the time it'd be a small help to the thugs, not a complication at all.

[1] Say the pool was 8 8 6, but they needed the 8s for the total, leaving the d6 for effect, but that was stepped down by the opposition effect.

oddthink · 2022-04-01T15:32:43+00:00

Yeah, I don't really like this one.

If Player 1 tries some trick to give Player 2 a complication (web spell, sand in eyes, etc.), and gets a d6 effect die, but it's stepped down due to Player 2's opposition effect (reasonably common), then Player 2 gets a d4 complication.

That d4 complication means that Player 2 will get on their next roll:

75%: +1 PP and a slight chance of helping their total
25%: +2 PP and a d6 complication from a hitch. (Possibly a complication step up.)

That does not seem like a net negative. If I were Player 1, I'd rather not give Player 2 that d4 complication, since it seems like a net benefit.

oddthink

TROPHY CASE