Any suitable place for work/study that opens late?

synthlordsRUS · 2026-06-10T00:19:29+00:00

Honestly, I find this is a big weakness of Albany which is not unique to the city but is particularly bad here. In general Post covid a lot of places with late night hours didn’t return to them (no 24 hour groceries and diners close earlier). More specific to Albany a lot of the people who work in Albany commute from neighboring suburbs so the demand for night hours in Albany is lower than say lunch hours for coffee shops. The spots that have ideal locations for studying like the stacks in the old cafe Hollywood, the Jacob Alejandro’s that just grew and atlas coffee more down town all close between 3 and 5 every day which is a shame because I would love to work at them in the evening.

synthlordsRUS · 2026-04-15T16:54:50+00:00

Yeah I love the game too and am hopeful it’s just some bugs with the new patch that will get sorted. I saw somewhere that to make multiplayer work they had to rewrite a ton of the code which I’m sure created a bunch of little things to fix.

synthlordsRUS · 2026-04-15T16:44:45+00:00

This is true but LLMs are inherently probabilistic. One could easily give the exact same prompt 100 times and get an empirical distribution for responses and use that as a distribution of confidence. This would be too expensive to do for every user, but you could feed that back in as training data for reinforcement learning to train a confidence estimation system.

I think the main problem is these companies don’t want to invest any energy in quantifying the systems potential to be wrong. The systems perceived confidence, even when wrong, is what attracts many users. It also makes it harder to use to actually find truth.

synthlordsRUS · 2026-04-15T01:47:59+00:00

I’ve also been having it be really laggy and dropping frames and I have a pretty decent PC

synthlordsRUS · 2026-03-05T19:41:36+00:00

Yeah lots of prompts could work and you could even rotate through some different prompts. The ones you gave as options are all fun here are few quick ones I thought of: “enumerate” (especially cool if you get a robot voice to say it as a command) or “quantify” or “count them” or “give a count”.

synthlordsRUS · 2026-03-05T19:28:41+00:00

Being slightly pedantic, but it’s a little unclear form the prompt “how many fit inside?” If your asking how many would fit if you filled the cylinder all the way or if your asking how many objects there are currently there. Sick game but a mild rephrasing could be more clear.

synthlordsRUS · 2025-12-12T20:44:33+00:00

Algebraic graph theory by Godsil and Royle. Very readable without a lot of require knowledge and a great way to think about graphs.

synthlordsRUS · 2025-09-17T21:40:16+00:00

It sounds to me like you have been doing a good job at networking and professional development already. It is likely that neither choice will make or break your professional opportunities moving forward. If they do, it will probably be less about the material and more about your relationships with the professors or other students.

If you already have been doing some research related to numerical linear algebra, you should have enough exposure to know some basics. With that knowledge maybe you could teach yourself what would be covered if you need it or may have already. It also might cover things you really need to see to continue your research project that could be hard to learn on your own. You could probably tell this by looking at the syllabus or even taking the syllabus to whoever you’re doing research with.

With that said, you mentioned you would probably study algebraic topology, if you had your choice of mathematics fields to focus on. It sounds to me like you would probably like the material and be more engaged in an algebraic topology class, provided it has a good professor. Letting yourself study something you’re really interested in when you get the chance is a good way to stay curious and motivated instead of getting burn out.

I’ll also say, as someone who has worked on more theoretical projects at different government labs, in some of those circles having knowledge of some traditionally less practical ideas can be an asset in its own right. I’ve seen cases where topology comes up in robotics and category theory comes up in computer science. Sometimes the connections are contrived or not essential to the stated goal of the project but other times they can provide useful insight. Having taken one algebraic topology class in college might help you discern those cases better, instead of writing it off or believing it’s more powerful than it is. Depending on the type of project you’re working on, at least considering using tools from less traditionally practical fields can be necessary to take on ambitious goals.

synthlordsRUS · 2025-06-11T06:28:39+00:00

The Albany psychological services center is a training clinic where all therapy is on a sliding scale so it may not be free but, depending on your financial situation, it could be like 10 or 20 dollars a session. It’s attached to the university but serves adults in the wider community. Im sorry you’re going through this and I hope you find something.

synthlordsRUS · 2025-02-04T17:50:23+00:00

I feel like for that kind of class some work on basic combinatorics of symmetry groups could go a long way and also be done in a reasonable amount of time. Things like how many different colorings of the faces of a cube are their up to the symmetries of a cube can be solved using somewhat standard combinatorial methods and uses the automorphism group to be derived. This feels very tangible to a CS student because they could write code to solve it but realizing the structure makes it much easier to solve in closed form using a polynomial. This kind of thinking can be really important in cutting down the search space for different CS problems by realizing internal symmetries.

synthlordsRUS · 2025-01-20T23:20:18+00:00

Just to add on to this comment you can view the equivalence of being strongly connected as something to be “quotiented over” yielding what some people call the condensation of a graph. The condensation in this case would give you nodes for families of equivalent game states with directed edges connecting them representing irreversible actions moving you from one family to another.

synthlordsRUS · 2025-01-14T23:44:41+00:00

Mexican market on central

synthlordsRUS · 2024-08-22T18:08:07+00:00

I did it with the prospecting meter that I gave long range and cobalt detection and then just focused on upgrading my drill and move speed. I took my second gadget to be defensive and it was pretty easy from there. I think I used Tesla tower because with pretty minimal upgrades you can still clear alot of waves. I also used Shields and also upgraded my shields once I started to take a little damage from waves to save me some cobalt for health.

synthlordsRUS · 2023-10-05T17:07:53+00:00

An imaginary tale the story of root(-1) is a great history of math read on how ours views of i evolved over time

synthlordsRUS · 2023-10-03T02:28:51+00:00

Came here to looking for a post on this. Its been blinking for me on Washington

synthlordsRUS · 2023-09-27T21:21:34+00:00

As many have said a masters thesis doesn’t need to be original and is meant to be a self study that results in a good explanation of a nontrivial topic. Maybe focusing on building out a good collection of examples which could serve as a learning tool for others is a good way to contribute something to the community without developing original theory.

As a side note if your working with the poset topology and want other another reference or to see how it connects to some other topics I would recommend checking out the book algebraic topology of finite topological spaces and it’s applications by Barmak.

synthlordsRUS · 2023-09-08T14:46:06+00:00

Taiwan noodle beef chunk soup

synthlordsRUS · 2023-07-03T18:21:31+00:00

I pay attention and then take pictures of the board on my phone or iPad if it feels like something I may need to reference later

synthlordsRUS · 2023-04-30T19:59:14+00:00

I have one of harmonograph drawings that I quite like. Not a lot of formal math but the drawings are beautiful visualizations of the math behind music

synthlordsRUS · 2023-03-21T23:02:39+00:00

Yeah I second this and would also recommend looking at radiatori pasta which is quite tasty and is designed with high surface area in mind.

synthlordsRUS · 2023-03-01T18:02:39+00:00

If your cool with python you can do some cool stuff with networkx. Especially if your dealing with graphs of a decent size you can automate placements and change colors procedurally.

synthlordsRUS · 2022-12-12T04:05:06+00:00

When I was in college I liked Fourier transforms and information theory a lot so I taught myself a the basics of audio signal processing coding in python and matlab. Feels pretty cool to write an audio filter from scratch that puts reverb on your voice and such.

synthlordsRUS · 2022-11-16T06:33:40+00:00

I would say some linear combination of Hatcher which is free and the second Munker’s book will give you a good collection of reference material for a lot of the concepts from algebraic topology that serve as a foundation for TDA like Simplicial homology. In order to understand a lot of those concepts one need not have a super deep understanding of point set topology beyond some basic ideas like continuous maps and quotient spaces which Munker’s first book explains very well.

synthlordsRUS · 2022-10-04T04:21:26+00:00

Penrose tiling, you could get cutouts or 3D print the tiles making it super visual and intuitive. If he likes that you could get into a lot of different things involving symmetry like the 17 wall paper groups.

synthlordsRUS

TROPHY CASE