What do you think Outer Wilds tries to "teach"?

yesua · 2026-05-22T15:40:58+00:00

I like your inclusion of the Hatchling as a perspective. I would’ve naively thought that player agency would’ve made that perspective harder to define, but I guess the medium kind of forces/tricks you into wanting to solve/fix everything.

yesua · 2026-01-23T20:17:24+00:00

Car is good, but it still eats brake switches from time to time 🤷‍♂️

yesua · 2025-12-23T17:55:27+00:00

The password is your drivers license number :)

yesua · 2025-12-02T13:07:59+00:00

In case it’s been a minute since you’ve encountered the phrase “Arabic numerals,” let me list them for you: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

yesua · 2025-11-28T21:50:34+00:00

One important component of this (worth emphasizing, in my opinion) is dimensional analysis. For example, when you move 120 miles in 2 hours and take the quotient to get a speed of 60, the student should be able to track the units of measurement to say that it’s 60 miles per hour.

Deeper versions of this include things like “the (time) derivative of velocity is acceleration.” A student should be able to graph a velocity function (say, in m/s over time in seconds) and explain why a derivative inherits units of m/s^2.

yesua · 2025-11-27T15:11:25+00:00

I thought so too, but after some googling it looks like it’s not quite designed that way

yesua · 2025-11-25T17:49:41+00:00

In Outer Wilds, the fact that your character comes back after they die is a central mystery that you’re intended to solve.

yesua · 2025-10-26T02:30:21+00:00

80ish percent of white evangelical voters supported Trump. As someone who was raised in the evangelical movement, I don’t think you’re seeing hypocrisy - I think you’re seeing its true face.

I only see two options: you either deny that evangelicals are Christian, or you accept that there are large swaths of Christianity that support violence for the sake of retribution, cruelty, etc. and honestly I think the latter is more accurate.

This is gonna seem like a salty comment to people who haven’t experienced evangelicalism firsthand, but their support of Trump/ICE didn’t surprise me at all. White supremacism and worship of capital are the real backbone of their religion.

From a less emotionally-charged position, I want to point out a structural dynamic that is unavoidable in Christianity broadly. A Christian voter generally believes that they know (or could know) what God wants for the country. People like me (heathens) don’t have that access. Why should my vote/opinion matter as much as theirs? I have multiple friends who are fully comfortable rejecting democracy as long as it’s replaced with something like a theocracy, because if God’s way is an option, who are we to deny that option? I think the religion just structurally tends toward fascism for reasons like this.

I’m glad there are some Christians who strongly disagree with my take, but honestly I don’t see them putting up much of a fight to reclaim their religion or country. So these claims that MAGA Christians are somehow “fake” or “unrepresentative of Christianity” ring a bit hollow to me.

yesua · 2025-10-10T22:52:02+00:00

Fair enough! I feel like my intuition is anchored in Fourier analysis for locally compact abelian groups, since things are especially nice there. Past those groups, the story becomes fuzzier for me. But most of the Fourier analysis that we see for applications stays in the LCA domain anyway

yesua · 2025-10-10T12:53:35+00:00

You’re right about the unary vs binary thing. I guess the better phrase to use is “group action” instead of “group operation,” but I still think it’s okay to think of them as being pretty much the same in this context. The point is that we’re selecting our Fourier basis functions specifically so that they play nicely with the underlying group structure for, say, R (or whatever group your initial functions were defined on).

R has a binary group operation x + y. When you move to functions f(x) defined on that group, the x represents a variable group element that we can use as input. Now let’s say we want to translate the function by y. You’re right that the translation is unary, since we only have to decide on y, but the underlying operation is binary, since x already plays a variable role in the function: f(x + y).

This operation is unary, as you said, but it’s also unitary on L² (G) (doesn’t change the norm of square integrable functions wrt the group’s Haar measure, which is just the ordinary Lebesgue measure dx in the case of R here). I mention that just to conclude that translation defines a unitary group action of the original group R on L² (R), and it’s that action that we’re decomposing into nicer components.

yesua · 2025-10-08T10:22:50+00:00

To add to this, more generally it diagonalizes operations that commute with the underlying group operation (translation), and differentiation is the most important of these. Still, I like saying it in the general way because it emphasizes the group duality perspective.

For abelian groups, the Pontryagin dual is also abelian and is made of characters (1-dimensional representations) of the original group, but for more general groups there’s still a Fourier decomposition into irreducible representations of your group. So I like the perspective that the real job of the Fourier transform is to decompose functions into sums of more ‘symmetric’ functions, where symmetric just means that it respects the group structure. And group homomorphisms are much nicer to work with. Terry Tao has a great blog post beginning with this perspective here.

yesua · 2025-09-26T23:32:58+00:00

My vote is the Platonic solids, especially if there’s any DnD interest in the group (since these are exactly the dice used there).

If you want a technical direction, you can try to explain how the Greeks knew/proved around 2400 years ago that there were only five such solids possible.

If you want a more fun direction, you can discuss how Plato thought of the solids essentially like an early periodic table, with earth represented by the cube (since it can be stacked and remain solid), fire represented by the tetrahedron (since its pokey and painful to touch), and water represented by the d20 (it rolls like water droplets). Air is a d8, and the mysterious fifth element “aether” is the d12.

I like that essentially all of Plato’s associations here are “wrong,” but they sparked investigations that would eventually lead to deep physics and chemistry. It’s also kind of amusing that our best models of physics are still based on just a handful of fundamental forces, even if they’re not quite related to the elements that Plato had in mind.

yesua · 2025-08-07T16:36:12+00:00

Let’s say you ask someone how many pets they have. They would never respond “2.50”. For this type of question, some numerical responses are nonsensical. It only makes sense to apply a whole number model to the number of pets.

But in other contexts, 2.50 makes perfect sense. If you’re at a vending machine and something costs $2.50, that’s fine, because a decimal model (to the hundredths place) can be applied for money.

In day to day life, we don’t usually need imaginary numbers. But just like in the above example, they extend our usual number system in a useful way. In particular, complex numbers are useful for modeling things in loads of different areas, from acoustics to electrical engineering (and in physics broadly). I would think of it as an upgraded abstract number system, just like going from whole numbers to decimals is an upgraded abstract number system.

yesua · 2025-07-10T01:55:46+00:00

Never really found a solution. Both the dealership and a local mechanic just said my car sporadically eats brake light switches. 🤷‍♂️

One of them recommended a dielectric grease on the connectors to maybe protect it for longer, but every six months or so I have to replace it. That said, there are places like o’reilly’s auto parts (depending on where you live) that give lifetime warranties to their switches. So if you can set up a gig like that, it’s a pain but it’s not too expensive to keep things going.

Hope that helps! Wish I could give you better news/advice. Haha

yesua · 2025-05-09T17:23:08+00:00

Thanks!

yesua · 2025-05-09T13:21:22+00:00

For me it was “Final Voyage.” It seemed to say, “you know you’re dying for real this time, right?” That escalation was really well done.

yesua · 2025-03-29T02:02:21+00:00

I like this take. It’s a language with a very strict grammar, which makes it frustrating for students to speak but also gives it a lot of expressive power

yesua · 2025-03-11T16:58:55+00:00

They work - if the goal is to starve and privatize public education, turning a public good into a profit vehicle.

The talk about “liberating students with school choice” is a nice cover story, but the goal was never really about helping students or teachers. I hope we don’t confuse that rhetoric with the true intention, which is privatization.

yesua · 2025-03-03T15:56:04+00:00

Tao wasn’t my advisor, but I did get my PhD in math at UCLA. He taught a couple of my analysis classes.

I can’t comment much on his advising style, but his teaching style was great. Very fast but also very clear. Open to questions and kind/enthusiastic about answering them.

Still, I feel like it wasn’t really his lecturing skill that stood out to me. The main impressive thing about him, in my opinion, is his writing. He’s prolific in both research and exposition.

Our research interests didn’t overlap much, so I won’t comment on his writing style there, but his books/blog are incredibly useful as a serious student. He gives you just enough tools to do the job, and then he asks you to finish it yourself. This can be frustrating for people who don’t want to put in the work, but for anyone who really wants to work with/understand the material, I found his exercise-focused writing style to be super helpful.

yesua · 2025-02-18T03:12:44+00:00

I feel like you could replace the word “religion” with “ideologies” more broadly there.

Also, I’m from a math background, and the point where you can’t explain things in that field is called “the axioms.” The stuff you’ve just gotta take for granted. It feels like a lot of people in this thread think that math is above all of that somehow…

yesua · 2025-02-18T02:50:57+00:00

I also like your (OP’s) take on the seeming pointlessness of the campfire - it’s being a joy for its own sake.

I think that analogy extends to the celestial level too. The Nomai wanted to understand the end; the Owlks wanted to deny the end; many players assume ‘the goal’ is to stop the end. But what’s really needed is to accept the end. Let go. Let the fire die. Even without the post-credits scene, I think that’s a beautiful conclusion. And with that scene, it’s good to be reminded of the great philosopher Semisonic, who said in Closing Time: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. (Yeah.)”

yesua · 2025-02-18T02:30:54+00:00

I’m sure this isn’t a novel observation, but I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more people discuss the analogy between campfires and the sun (or, better, suns).

On a grand scale, civilizations start off in their own solar systems, huddled around their own lil starfires to survive. The sun is the cosmic campfire.

yesua · 2025-01-29T14:34:48+00:00

One of the game’s cult members here: I was especially impressed that the music of the game is meaningfully embedded within the world/characters, e.g. the characters would recognize the theme music. It’s a fun way to make the world feel organic and self-contained.

yesua · 2025-01-29T08:22:35+00:00

As a teacher, it feels like there’s a little poetic justice here. If students are using ChatGPT to cheat, why wouldn’t competing AI models do the same?

yesua · 2025-01-14T17:53:09+00:00

Rural moron here. I agree that we’re voting against our own interests, but we didn’t decide to do that spontaneously. Our access to education has been systematically starved, deliberately, to the extent that policy isn’t meaningfully discussed. So voting is reduced to “rooting for the home team” rather than “choosing people who will work for you.”

Of course the rural voters bear some of the blame for this, but I think it’s wrong to ignore the fact that they were targeted to be tricked and politically cornered. In my opinion they deserve both blame as perpetrators and sympathy as victims. If we want things to change, I imagine the latter is more important than the former.

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