BlackFingolfin

Who makes the tests? Who runs the tests? And who evaluates that the tests have meaning? As long as it is the AI, or you (with your self-admitted limited experience), how can you be sure it is meaningful?

> at a fraction of the cost

We'll see about that, long term. The billions and trillions being wasted right now to get the foot in the door need to be earned back somehow at some point...

"Nice company you have there, totally reliant on our AI tech. Oh by the way we gotta increase the rent again."

I am a research mathematician. In my field (abstract algebra, computational group theory), a sum or some such notation is like the most trivial of trivial things in terms of notation. There are a few things like sums that could in theory be made to "look more like what a computer programmer would expect", but that'd be just a tiny corner of it.

And if you think about how summation would look in Lisp or APL (which some smart people use to this day), I am not even convinced your argument for the "sum function" notation being superior holds in general.

This is almost funny to me, because in many jurisdictions, software companies sure invested a lot of effort into painting people copying software as thieves. In Germany, they (the software producer lobby, and later politicians influence by the former) even coined and spread the term "Raubkopie", which you could roughly translate as "robbed copy", i.e., that's one step worse than "theft", as a robbery in Germany legally means " theft accomplished by force or intimidation". So, yeah: like putting a knife to the throat of someone while you copy the software.

So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?

Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.

Not sure what you are talking about (is this sarcasm?), but on iOS, Safari allows you to add any website as an item to your home screen. I am pretty sure Android has a similar feature.

If the numbers were all that is wrong, that'd be OK. But it fails to list all data -- so the only way to navigate to the missing PRs is to know their number, and manually inserting the right URL (or to go to another PR, and then edit the URL in the navigation).

Sorry, but I don't think there is any way this can be classified as "not actually a bug"

GitHub stability has been bad for me. And recently even the data they show me in the web has been unreliably.

Since yesterday, me and several colleagues noticed that the pull request lists on the website are incomplete, across many repositories. For example, on https://github.com/gap-system/gap/pulls it says "Pull requests 78" in the "tab list", but the PR list view reports "35 open" (the number 78 is correct, and confirmed by e.g. `gh pr list`)

And that despite <https://www.githubstatus.com> reporting "all systems operational".

which is also driving me nuts because it frequently fails to update the issue and PR counts when I close issues or PRs. Only a hard reload, or closing the tab and opening a new new one, fixes it.

I find it strange to compare "math" with one programming language. Mathematics is a huge and diverse field, with many subcommunities and hence also differing notation.

Your rant would be akin to this if the sides are reversed: "It's surprising how many different ways there are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notations for dictionaries (hash tables? associative arrays? maps?) or lists (vectors? arrays?).

You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. "

For me one is that one can write `for i = 1:3` is one when `=` means assignment otherwise (at least `for i in 1:3` is available.

A follow up post is at https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2025/03/16/think-of-a-numb...

And sometimes one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.... (Not to defend terrorism, but it's just not that simple)

Actually in math parlance, the map G \to GL(V) is the representation while V is the underlying module, and yeah its elements are vectors.

No you literally can (and the attackers did) change version 44 (the tag for it) to point to a different compromised commmit

> Nobody bothers explaining why the primes are spaced like they are

I take it that means you also haven't taken (m)any number theory classes then ;-). Because people wildly care about that.

This is in a sense the background of another well-known conjecture, the Riemann conjecture...

Which robber baron do you consider to be responsible for curing polio?

Marc Zuckerberg being popular is not the same as his platform being popular.

I am a professor for algebra at a research university. I make a point out of teaching my students that `a/b` is NOT the same as multiplying `a` by the multiplicative inverse of `b`.

The standard example is that we have a well-defined and useful notion of division in the ring Z/nZ for n any positive integer even in cases were we "divide" by an element that has no multiplicative inverse. Easy example: take n=8 then you can "divide" 4+nZ by 2+nZ just fine (and in fact turn Z/nZ into a Euclidean ring), even though 2+nZ is not a unit, i.e. admits no multiplicative inverse.

Wow, what a clickbaity title. The article just states that Tim Cook prefers a different mouse than Apples's own Magic Mouse. Now that might be because he finds the Magic Mouse bad. Or just that he prefers the one he is using instead for whatever reason. Actually the article even mentions he sometimes uses the Magic Mouse, so it can't be all that bad in his estimation?

Granted, some people love to hate on the Magic Mouse. Perhaps it is bad (I also prefer different mice). I am happy to discuss it. But does it really have to be framed like that? This makes me want to skip over anything that site produces, I just can't take it serious.

Chrome removed support for JPEG XL last year, see e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/free-software-group-...

I just activate reader mode on his pages, works great. (Not disagreeing with you, just stating another workaround)

Also wish his pages had dates on them (one or both of first posted / last updated) AFAIK he intentionally leaves them out, I don't get why.

Well, Qualcomm at least claims that. Whether they can deliver is to be seen. Wouldn't be the first time they fail to do so...

Well... "it appears to have fallen on Fedora and GCC developers" suggests they are are forced into doing this. But it's the reverse: they decided this is a sensible goal. OK, they are free to do that, but painting it as if they are unfairly left alone in their plight is framing it rather strongly.

That's not 15 minutes per host; that's 15 hosts per minute.

A bit off-topic, but: I am somewhat confused by the claim “Subversion was created by Jim Blandy”. I was around back then, and the names I think of when it comes to “who created Subversion” are Ken Fogel, Ben Collins-Sussman, and Mike Pilato. And certainly many other people, including Jim Blandy. My recollection seems to be supported by e.g. https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software... and also by looking at the early subversion repository history and mailing list posts.

But I was only a bystander (and early adopter), so maybe something went on "behind the scenes" that warrants this attribution? Or maybe it is a just a bit careless and was meant to be more like "... he was one of the creators", which one probably could justify.

Coincidentally, I just checked the Wikipedia page for Subversion and was surprised that there is basically nothing on the history of Subversion and who created it, which I find sad.

Sorry, I was unclear: I know what weakly solved means. What I find curious is that the title and abstract refer to "solved", and don't mention what they actually mean. To me "solved" would suggest "strongly solved". But perhaps equating "solved" with "weakly solved" is default in this area? Still, I would like expect an abstract to say something like that explicitly.

But given the overall state of that paper I think this is a side concern at best anyway.

But none of this explicit. This is at best an announcement of a potential proof. But it isn't a proof yet.

Also curious: in the end of the paper they talk about having "weakly solve" Othello... the paper overall reads really strangely.

Fiat is from Italy, so probably no

Oh man that leads me into an infinite Cloudflare captcha loop on my iPhone :-(

Fun fact, Doom was actually developed on a NeXTStation, so with a Unix based OS (and predecessor to modern day macOS).