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eastWestMath

217 karma · joined June 3, 2015

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eastWestMath··on A new kind of symmetry shakes up physics
Is this some flavour of groupoids symmetry?
eastWestMath··on Llama.cpp 30B runs with only 6GB of RAM now
I was in a PLT group in grad school going into robotics. I could spend all day ranting about how Python is just completely unsuitable for professional software development. Even something like F# would be an enormous improvement.
eastWestMath··on NYPD is refusing to comply with NYC’s new surveillance tech laws
As a police officer you also typically have a high school education, and your idea of whether or not something is constitutional carries little to no weight.
eastWestMath··on Taichi lang: High-performance parallel programming in Python
I used to be very optimistic about Julia, but my enthusiasm has really cooled off the last year. I find JAX+jax_dataclasses gives me 90% of what I wanted from Julia (a nice monad library that is compatible with jit’ed code and the ability to cache compiled code would make it a solidly better language).
eastWestMath··on Google stopping coding competitions
These are all, of course, things one should learn in an algorithms class.
eastWestMath··on Google stopping coding competitions
Yeah I’ve always been a bit leery of code competitions. I saw a lot of undergrads spend a lot of effort on these contests, and I was never convinced it was the best use of their time (especially because the university I did my graduate studies at had a professor who put a lot of effort into running the competitive programming club).

I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!

eastWestMath··on Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms
> Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, Lion (EvoLved Sign Momentum).

Come on now

eastWestMath··on [dead]
I didn’t make it past that point, I got confused about how such meaningless dreck was at number 2(!) on my feed.

Mods may want to take a peek if the author used a few sock puppets to give this post a push...

eastWestMath··on David Sabatini lands millions from private donors to start new lab
Yeah, it’s spending a lot of money to start a lab that:

- will probably be stonewalled out of any collaboration with reputable universities (because his reputation is so toxic),

- will have trouble attracting talent (because his reputation is so toxic),

- people will be ready to believe any sort of accusation of impropriety coming out of that lab from sexual harassment to more general academic fraud (because his reputation is so toxic).

eastWestMath··on In a moment, mathematicians merge probability and number theory
The paper is absolutely a construction on categories.
eastWestMath··on In a moment, mathematicians merge probability and number theory
“I’ve discovered a new thing about Y in X’s! Oh, no I haven't actually looked at the X literature about Y.” This is hardly specific to category theory.
eastWestMath··on In a moment, mathematicians merge probability and number theory
My issue is that I can’t see a cursory literature review into the established category literature on these methods - how do they even know they have something new/novel if they haven't checked?

This is a bit like the recent news about the “ML discovered a new fast matrix multiplication” press push out of Google, where researchers in the field just sort of rolled their eyes.

eastWestMath··on In a moment, mathematicians merge probability and number theory
Oh, I’m talking about the paper they’re hyping up. I’m just not terribly impressed, and I think if was written by people at UCSD instead of Harvard nobody would have even noticed it.
eastWestMath··on In a moment, mathematicians merge probability and number theory
Coming from category theory, and having followed the work studying probability theory categorically (e.g. Fritz, Perrone, Lucyshyn-Wright’s stuff, Leinster’s notion of the magnitude of a category), is this actually interesting? The actual category theory seems pretty rudimentary, and I’m not sure if they’ve invented anything new on that side (they don’t reference any of the authors I’ve mentioned, so it doesn’t seem like there was much scholarship on that end).

It feels like Quanta just takes press releases from a few big departments and asks a writer to get a few quotes to flesh out an article.

eastWestMath··on PyTorch 2.0
It reminded me of the sort of lazy Wikipedia regurgitation that a lot of undergrads used to give when I was teaching. So it is a bit jarring to see a response like that in a non-compulsory setting.
eastWestMath··on The dangers of high status, low wage jobs
I feel like the NYTimes could take more papers under its subscription - e.g. give subscribers the option to bundle in a state and municipal paper, that the NYTimes essentially vets as a local affiliate (I’m guessing this would probably lead to substantial overhead on their end, though).
eastWestMath··on National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
Just because someone doesn’t go to college at 18 doesn’t mean they’re “skipping” higher education. Spending a few years making 30k a year to play basketball would be awesome - my father had teammates in college who put off grad/med school to go play in a shitty European leagues or random minor leagues around North America, it never sounded like they regretted it.

If they followed Hockey’s example, where playing a year in the MJ gives you a year of tuition, it could work out great for young players.

eastWestMath··on Cheerleader’s Snapchat rant leads to ‘momentous’ Supreme Court case on speech
> Should she have been fired on the spot without even having any form of communication with her employer?

Too be honest, that depends entirely on the joke and her role, doesn’t it?

eastWestMath··on Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house
Banking seems like the best way to phrase this to prevent people from screaming about socialism.
eastWestMath··on Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house
Ugh.
eastWestMath··on Machine Learning Reproducibility Checklist [pdf]
I mean, sure, it’s easy to say interesting things if you’re not being held to any standard of rigour.
eastWestMath··on Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
The plural of anecdote is not data.
eastWestMath··on I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)
You realize that hate crimes have gone up the past few years? The far right are committing crimes, and Ben Shapiro's rhetoric (along with other far right commentators) is not helping.

You're tying to equivocate throwing a milkshake at a politician with actual violence.

>https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/apr/03...

eastWestMath··on I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)
I never called him alt-right.

And I don't see why the fact that he's jewish negates the fact that he's engaged in hate speech several times - some nice examples here:

>If you wear your pants below your butt, don't bend the brim of your cap, and have an EBT card, 0% chance you will ever be a success in life.

>Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock

eastWestMath··on I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)
I didn't call him Alt-Right, I just pointed out there have been at least three mass shootings in the past two years by Ben Shapiro fans.

Edit: In many countries, hate speech does in fact have a definition. Just because it's not in the US legal code doesn't mean it's undefined - that's why your right wing media personalities can have trouble coming into Canada.

eastWestMath··on Sign In with Apple [video]
It seems like an absolute win for consumer welfare, to be honest.
eastWestMath··on New Taxes and Higher Density Aren't Fixing Vancouver's Housing Problem
That would make sense if location didn’t matter and people couldn’t renovate buildings.
eastWestMath··on Momo-3 is Japan's first private rocket to reach space
Maybe you should specify “aerospace”...
eastWestMath··on 'One Ring' Phone Scam
But if someone else had the same system you’d end up in an infinite loop...
eastWestMath··on Huawei Facts: An open letter to the US media
>I think the protester in Tianemen square had more of a chance than the students in Kent State.

There was literally ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more killed at Tianemen square.

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