mablap

    Yes, you can't trust the good biz monkeys.

My experience as well. Sadly, the only really good biz person I know does not share the same values as me. Very intelligent and good at what they do, but they'd fuck you over in a second if that meant them "winning". Don't care for a second what business they're running, as long as it's a money-making business. Whereas I have to feel like I'm working on "important" problems, that person couldn't care less.

Pretty sure that person is sociopathic - at least borderline.

    Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. [...]

Formal mathematical training (graduate) will do that to you too. I often find myself thinking with abstract algebra ideas (groups, vectors, vector spaces, commutation relations, etc).

Now try to go back to MS Word and typeset equations. You will miss LaTeX.

It would seem the video is also hosted YouTube[1]. It has better quality.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU.

If you use PGP it doesn't matter where you host, right? If you're concerned about local officials having access to your data I don't think it's much worse than Google scanning my email to better target ads or "just to remind me" that I'm going at X or Y place in Z days.

I'm not saying Java is bad or not. All I'm saying is that, from my perspective, why should I bother? It just seems very big and unwieldy and if I'm not going to do these JVM optimizations anyway, why bother?

It's really just an impression.

Yeah, I've actually heard about ND4J and was interested in learning about it. But as I said in my parent post, Java seems (from the outside) as this huge unwieldy language that is hard to get into.

What could I do with Java/ND4J in scientific computing that I couldn't do with other packages, or that is much easier/better done on the JVM?

For me, as an outsider, the JVM looks a bit like .NET: this huge, extremely complex codebase which does everything and anything, very optimized and comes with great tools.

But to me that is a problem. Even though the JVM could do X or Y better than another platform, just the time spent learning about it feels like a waste of time, as I could already be productive in another language which is less optimized and less complex, but much faster to develop with. It seems just learning to use a Java IDE is a job in itself.

I do mathematical modeling, by the way. If I need speed, I use optimised libraries. So I might not be the target user of Java, although I've often heard good things about it for scientific computing.

Here are some useful shortcuts:

power = n; (where n is whatever you need)

sol.mass = 3e7;

Cool game!

The only find for "Example" is http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/intro.html#examples.

Did one of you use this to generate PDFs? If so, how does it look? I'd like to see examples!

Woah there, how do you support your first claim?

The Milky Way is about 100K light years in diameter.

If we assume that life is common enough* that it will evolve independently multiple times in the future, then the chance we are "the first" is closer to that of being "the last", unless you have a convincing prior I'm unaware of. So it should be a pretty low probability.

Don't you think?

*Common in the sense of "easy enough to create", i.e. the macrostate corresponding to "life" can be made up of a very large number of microstates.

    "Probably" is one of favorite words in medicine, btw :).

Right as it should. If somebody answers my question by "It depends", then I know I'm in good company!

Personal experience (I've met many pre- and current doctors during my studies) suggests that few doctors are scientists. They know a lot of things, but they're not what I'd call scientists in the same way a physicist or biologist would be (and I've often wondered why they'd get a "Doctorate" at all). So this might explain the abovementioned behaviour...

Yet I'm surprised by your colleagues behaviour nonetheless. I would have thought they'd have more retenue.

No. Step 1: Do no harm. In practice, this means staying up to date on the latest research (by law), but follow the guidelines. These are updated regularly, just not after each and every study that comes out. And it's a good thing a lot of doctors exercise caution.

    And that state is a completely made up mathematical artifact.

The wavefunction is not measurable, but its absolute value squared is. This does not mean it's not "real". I understand what you mean, but you need to provide us with another better answer that supports all observations before saying it's "completely made up".

And yes, the Schrödinger equation predicts exactly how a state evolves, even after a measurement. It does not tell you what the outcome of a measurement is - you give it the outcome, and it gives you the time evolution.

There is a problem, and it lies in what happens during measurement - or what is the exact nature of measurement. But given any state, the SE tells you how it evolves.

The Schrödinger equation alone predicts how a state evolves in time. Just not what the result of a measurement will be.

The theory is the equations. Take the Schrödinger equation. It is often misunderstood in discussions of time-symmetry and determinism. The Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of a wavefunction, deterministically, and symmetrically in time. The equations are "indeterministic" in another sense, that of Heisenberg: can't know position and momentum with infinite accuracy. But that's a subtly different point.

The result of a measurement is not dealt with by the equation. Schrödinger only lets you calculate the probabilities of measurement outcomes, but not which one it will be. That's why Einstein proposed we just didn't knew the whole picture. He thought we needed more information.

I had never heard of that man before, but as soon as he started talking my bullshit radard beeped. He's talking to an audience of intelligent engineers like they've never heard of the blockchain. Come on give us some meat.

    because it [the blockchain] has legal implications, you
    have to look at it from a legal perspective as well,
    because its a transaction validation mechanism without
    anybody in the middle. So when these transactions are
    actually validated, they hold, they are true, and they are
    respected - and that is the legal aspect of it.

That man is a "special advisor" to the Ethereum Foundation. (BTW, this was filmed on July 6 2016. Maybe he should have mentioned the DAO.) He then goes on to say that banks, not wanting the legal and business model innovations blockchains propose to affect the status quo, only see/use it as a technological innovation - implying this is bad.

    The blockchain is only one ledger. Once you write a line
    on the ledger, its just like any accounting ledger: you
    cannot erase the line above it. You just write a new line,
    and then you have a chain of history, and everything is
    recorded, and nothing can be erased.

Absolutely clueless in his vision. Just another rich guy evangelizing the blockchain. His explanations are absolutely trivial, he should be going into the details, he's on the Google campus.

This copy[1] has md5 of 6d62f3c0a63242a318ddd691d3974cd2.

[1]: http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Dr_Catarina_Dut...

What is "not quite" referring to?

Well in absolute everything is ad hoc but think about it this way:

You are pretty much guaranteed that, modulo some events, any US president from any party will honor their predecessors' decisions, pacts, treaties, etc. And you can be assured that the whole nation will follow them, because of of the Rule of Law!

What you've just witnessed in Ethereum is a bunch of rich, moderately intelligent, technocratic and very technologically literate (but not necessarily well educated ("who would want a government when you have code bah!")) visionaries and mostly speculators crying to get their money back by abandoning the very characteristic (immutability) that distinguished them from traditional systems of governance! They had a modus operandi that "Code is Law", and they've now turned against it. "Code is Law unless X". Why have that when you can just have plain and simple "Law"?

And this is why I'll be pouring my money into a serious government backed digital currency. It's a shame Canada isn't going all in on this, they were pioneers with their digital money project last decade. I'm reassured by Bank of England's latest (95 page) note on the matter.

The reality, every blockchain is vulnerable to such forking. The system is still decentralized, as the miners have to make their choice. However, the Ethereum Foundation decided to force the fork upon geth users, as the software defaults to pro-fork. So in effect a lot of users will be coerced into forking, without knowing.

This particular fork is political and not technical. The previous ETH forks were modifications to the protocol. The current fork is a modification to the account balances. The rich Ethereum fanatics are completely and absurdly delusional in thinking this will be a great event in their history. To me, the canonical chain is all but dead. The protocol will survive, just not on this chain.

    “Invent a new version of the universe” is normally not
    permitted by the software protocol, which is why this
    involves a client update and a hard fork.

To have "separate universes" is to have separate blockchains with different genesis blocks. There's an incentive to do just that with Ethereum[1] since the effective doubling of funds (X ETH on each chain) is bound to cause disruption.

Anything other than a new fork is going to fail for the reasons the author mentions.

[1]: https://reddit.com/r/etheregen

Where I live, it's a buyer's market. We have plenty of choice. I can live with not making money on my investment, or even losing a bit, as long as it means losing less than I'd have lost renting.

EDIT: Wow. I have just used the NYT's calculator with numbers to the best of my knowledge (assuming 0% house price growth). Per them, I should rent. I'm paying $840 in mortgage plus about $180-200 in utilities etc. Their estimate is that I should rent if I can rent a house for less than $1800 a month. That's definitely possible here. Way to make me rethink my investment!

If I assume a 3% growth in house prices, I should definitely buy, by a 300$ margin.

    I want more people to own homes.

Yet

    my distates for homeowners

and

    Home owning is passing the buck around.

I don't really follow your argument.

So what do you suggest I do in my mid-20s: buy a house or stay a tenant for life? Why shouldn't I buy a house?

Usually one would mention that you need to consider the billiard balls as point particles. At least that's how the analogy was given to me.