From back in the day when nobody seemed to know about trade marks

When they make Computability the Movie I propose Ed Harris to play Kleene.

I found I file from...checks date...14 years ago that I lost. Someone asked on Quora if the long exact sequence you get from the snake lemma applied in relative homology was just some abstract nonsense or if you can actually understand it. So I drew a picture […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

In San Francisco on Friday I saw some of the craziest driving I've ever seen. From what I could see, one driver was so desperate to get past another one (while crossing Market St IIRC) they used their car to ram and push another car out of its lane. They did eventually both pull over and a lot […]

I love getting phone notifications from the washer and drier just because of how they demonstrate brain weirdness. Both are behind closed doors at the other end of the house and are fairly quiet. So I never usually notice when they switch off. But when a notification comes in I'm aware that the […]

Reading Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home because it was probably the kernel that inspired a large swathe of American horror films and books. But I'm finding it hard to read for more than a few minutes at a time. Not because of the horror. Because I just keep wanting to scream at the characters "Get […]

I recently posted an old quote from Dijkstra where he expressed his horror at reading hobbyist computer magazines. By chance I noticed this article from the September 1981 issue of Practical Computing that seems like it might be a response to Dijkstra […]

It'd be cool to have a web site where ordinary people could host git projects. GitHb is no longer that web site.

Vanity purchase on eBay due to having a mention in it. But check out these ads. I tried doing something with Shortcuts on my iPhone this morning but I think that Sharp might do it many times better. Only problem is I now have to figure out how to restore […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

When someone says "LLMs don’t process text; they process numbers." I feel like it's a justifiable claim, but, my experience is that just about every book on "how computers work" claims that text is represented by numbers. But is the claim about LLMs just another case of this or something […]

Hard to imagine a more 8-bit flag than the flag of Nagorno-Karabakh. Anyway, I was excited to have just spotted one in the wild near the curiously architected Holy trinity Orthodox Church in San Francisco.

Too busy. No time for hobbies. But now Claude can get on with my hobbies for me now.

Contrary to the impression you might get from the mainstream media, if you go on a cruise you're more likely than not to return alive.

All day long. Copying numbers from emails and texts to web sites. From little plastic cards to apps. Digging them out from old emails to copy to web sites. 6 digits. 4 digits. 12 digits alphanumeric. All day long. Make it stop! I'm not a number copying machine.

Text adventure games were brutal in the old days. Here's my first move in Kingdom of Hamil

Remember the old days when every guide to a programming language had to start with Backus-Naur form?

People make fun of Americans and our units, but this is a real infographic about hail size from a news station.

No, it is not…🤬 “It's NOT a Coincidence the States redrawing Voting Maps to suppress Black voters are the SAME ones that fought to keep slavery.”

I don't think directories are supposed to grow this large. No wonder I can't get anything done on this Mac.

There have been some amazing technological developments in the last couple of decades in the field of household appliance doors. French doors on the fridge, two-way doors on the dryer. I think it's LG pushing the frontiers here. Having said that, more moving parts means more failure modes […]

Movie idea: elaborate plot to hijack an aircraft involving hijackers making a movie with the sole purpose of winning a large hunk of metal that they could use as a weapon on an aircraft. An Emmy might be better than an Oscar. A friend of mine had a bit of hassle trying to bring his back one year...

There have been many proof assistants. Why did Lean take off?

The US has basically abandoned democracy and replaced it with some kind of weird game involving fractals.

People have ends and means upside down. The problem you're trying to solve, that's the means. It's the means because it gives you the opportunity to work on solving them. Working on solving problems is the end. I seek out problems to solve so I can work on them.

Bell's Books in Palo Alto is pretty amazing. I went in and the proprietor asked me if he could help. Almost as a way to fob him off I said "just browsing for some classic science fiction". And OMG did he deliver. A ton of stuff. Signed, first editions, all the best authors (even some Iain M […]

I'd love to understand the development environment used to work on the 80's microcomputers, especially the firmware. Did they have some kind of emulation environment on the minicomputers of the day? Were they able to download firmware to RAM and run it from there? Downloading from a […]

"Edger Dijkstra, one of the greatest computer scientists of our age and a spiritual descendant of Plato, has claimed that the development of the microprocessor has put computing back twenty-five years. His assertion is based on the view that the easy […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

OMFG I think computers have finally crossed the threshold where I can now say they are useful

A few times I've mentioned that some type constructors give a tensor product and someone (probably years ago) asked me for a fuller argument. So I finally got around to sketching it. It's basically just plumbing but it is a nice example of one of my favourite themes - sometimes we write code […]

Intrigued by the constraints involved in typesetting these pages. If footnote 10 grew any larger the word Undine wouldn't appear on the same page in which case there'd be no footnote 10 but then there'd be space to put the word Undine in. So the footnote is […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Something it took me many years to appreciate is this: a lot of constructions in algebra can be interpreted as figuring out what you can precompute when you're not sure what's coming next. The first example I was taught may have been the free group on some generators. You're basically saying […]

I'm beginning to notice a pattern. If I'm writing code, in just about any language, and in just about any editor, more and more of my time is being occupied dealing with the fragility of LSP.

Astounding story in the news today: the first ever sub 2:00:00 marathon. Even more astounding: two sub 2:00:00 marathons in one race. Sebastian Sawe followed by Yomif Kejelcha. https://apnews.com/article/marathon-record-sawe-london-under-two-hours-8481a99809f19e0dd2cafca36bd3676a

People whose cars are set to sound the horn when they lock the doors. What's the matter with them? Were they born like that? Is it something that happens in their childhood? I mean, how can someone get to the point in their life when they can drive a car and yet have failed to notice at any […]

“It is difficult to get someone to see a break in the road as something to bridge rather than as an uncrossable chasm when their salary depends upon it being an uncrossable chasm.”

Spotted this at the local used book store. It looks like typical quantum woo woo. And Herbert may seem worse than most - he's somewhat notorious for his quantum metaphase typewriter for communicating with the spirit realm. And yet - one of his superluminal […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

I've been revisiting my hairy ball theorem argument over here: https://blog.sigfpe.com/2012/11/a-pictorial-proof-of-hairy-ball-theorem.html I may try to make a video of the whole argument but here is the key step. If you make the sphere a union of two […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Not sure what I'm more excited about: having a job offer in my hand or the new Boards of Canada material.

Web sites that don't exist #7686: The place where all the "reserved for future expansion"s go after the platform ceases to be and the expansion never happened.

Some random historical blasting from the past. 10MB. *Mega*. Ten of them! On one drive.

Years ago I half-wrote an "empirical" hypergeometric function recognizer that tries to guess a hypergeometric function from a sampling of its Taylor series. I got Codex to finish it. Now I seem to be able to churn out random conjectures. Here's one inspired by […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Has anyone ever been both a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist? I mean in the literal sense.

I have this code that can solve any equation but I think it's too dangerous to release.

Imagine I wrote about how utterly awful Gemini for Mac is. You doing it? Great, I don't have to write about it then. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/google-launches-native-gemini-ai-app-for-mac.2481037/

In these days of data centers gobbling up storage you have to be careful how much space you use. But it's challenging on a Mac. I go to bed with 300GB of free space running an overnight process that I know will create a 2-3GB database. Yet this morning I have […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

N-dimensional chess. But people neglected to mention that N=0.

When you compute a finite sum f(i) i = 1 .. n, there's a non-obvious subtlety that the sum comes to an abrupt end at i = n - and abrupt ends result in interesting phenomena that aren't always what you're interested in. For example, it's well know that you get […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

The news is so beyond plausible I'm beginning to wonder if reality has been replaced by the output of an LLM.

OMG I can't wait for the midterms

I don't know, I think asking someone to implement shared_ptr in C++ in an interview is a bit mean. The good news: my implementation passed all their tests, and I'm not sure they were aware of the special handling required for sharing from this. I wouldn't ask that of someone else. Well, maybe I […]