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tutfbhuf

1,882 karma · joined December 8, 2017

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tutfbhuf··on Applied Category Theory Course
> And when I talk to people who are actually on the front lines that try to use category theory to solve some problem, they tell me that it ended up being completely useless. I'm open to having my mind changed.

I aim to provide an example of applied category theory in computer science. Your understanding may differ due to the encompassing time frame, however, I ensure that even the most recent findings can rapidly transform into a practical programming concept.

The concept of 'monad' was initially introduced by Roger Godement in 1958, known as the 'standard construction'. The term 'monad' itself came into use later in 1967, credited to Jean Bénabou. The connection between monads and functional programming was first established in 1989 by computer scientist Eugenio Moggi. Moggi implemented monads in semantics to interpret the lambda calculus, a computational model that employs variable binding and substitution for function abstraction and application. The formal incorporation of monads into Haskell occurred in 1992 by Philip Wadler. Since then, monads are increasingly being integrated into mainstream programming languages, including JavaScript. For instance, JavaScript Promises can be viewed as a kind of monad. They encapsulate a value and allow its transformation with the .then method, which can be equated to the 'bind' operation in the realm of monads. Furthermore, a new Promise can be generated from any value using Promise.resolve, an operation analogous to the 'return' operation in monads. Promises have a very practical application and are used in programming by millions of developers every day.

The concept of a monad is one example that is well-understood; however, there are numerous other such ideas. One of these is the Functor, often referred to as "mappable" in mainstream programming languages. Research in this field is ongoing, with concepts like applicative functors, introduced by Conor McBride and Ross Paterson in 2008, already gaining popularity in languages such as Haskell.

tutfbhuf··on Strong arrows: a new approach to gradual typing
When we talk about arrows in terms of functional programming, we really mean Hughes’ Arrows (or Freyd-categories) a generalization of monads. The term arrow represents a level of abstraction over computations, essentially modeling them as objects with inputs and outputs. Hughes' Arrows extend beyond the traditional notion of functors and monads in handling side effects and common computational patterns in a more structured manner.

Arrows are useful because they provide a computation model that can implicitly make use of state without ever exposing that state to the programmer. The programmer can use arrowized computations and combine them to create sophisticated systems.

A strong arrow is an arrow A having an extra structure known as strength. The strength for A is a natural transformation, generally denoted by t, which consumes a pair of objects (X,Y) and gives back an arrow in the category. In a concrete manner, the strength has this form: t_X,Y: X x AY -> A(X x Y), called tensorial strength. The strength obeys some particular coherence conditions. A deeper explanation involves the monoidal structure of a category and how the 'strength' aids in elaborating the combination of values in the arrow context.

tutfbhuf··on GCC Preparing to Introduce “-Fhardened” Security Hardening Option
Does it make sense to compile the linux kernel with -Fhardened?
tutfbhuf··on Category Theory Illustrated – Sets
> I never feel quite at ease with sets being some universal foundation

That's not a big issue nowadays since there is univalent foundations, which is based on ∞-groupoids instead of sets.

tutfbhuf··on Exllamav2: Inference library for running LLMs locally on consumer-class GPUs
How is 2.5 bits possible? Is it an average between 2 and 3 over all weights?
tutfbhuf··on Ask HN: What niche task/tool websites have you built?
https://madnight.github.io/imdb-series-chart/

Visualize the IMDB rating of every episode for any TV series.

tutfbhuf··on FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds
50 feet is about 15 meter

450 m/s is 1620 km/h

tutfbhuf··on What does it mean for a monad to be strong?
If you're interested in that topic, I've just compiled a list of various category theory resources: https://github.com/madnight/awesome-category-theory
tutfbhuf··on Blue-light glasses may not reduce eyestrain from screens, study says
What should one do if something works for them, but scientific evidence suggests otherwise? Tough to say.

However, if you experience eye strain after prolonged computer use (as I do), consider a blue light filter glass from Amazon. I recommend the ones with a strong orange tint. They're also available as clip-ons. Give them a shot and see if they alleviate your pain. If they don't help, return them. Essentially, you're making a no-risk investment. In the worst-case scenario, you lose nothing, but in the best-case scenario, it could remedy your eye strain, just as it did for me.

tutfbhuf··on Ask HN: Is GPT 4's quality lately worst than GPT 3.5?
For all that have the "feeling" that GPT4 has become worse. Please try Bing Chat in creative mode, it seems that this is using some old GPT4 March Version + Bing Search. In my opinion this is much better than the current Chat GPT4 version from OpenAI.
tutfbhuf··on Is technical analysis just stock market astrology?
If I understand you correctly, you believe that "micro behavior is unpredictable", thereby suggesting that technical analysis (TA) is not possible on shorter timeframes. However, you seem to allow for some applicability of TA on larger timeframes, such as the concept of a "positive trendline", a term that occurs quiet frequently in TA. That's an interesting perspective.
tutfbhuf··on Is technical analysis just stock market astrology?
This question can essentially be simplified to: "Is the stock market truly random?", as randomness is defined as the absence of patterns and TA is all about patterns.

Currently, the random walk hypothesis remains just that - a hypothesis. There is no definitive evidence to confirm that the stock market operates in a random manner.

On the other hand, many believe that there are some long-term patterns and invest huge chunks of money based on that belief. For example, one such belief is that the S&P 500 will continue to have an annual average return of something between 8% - 10% in the decades to come.

If the movements in stock charts, including ETFs like SPY, were truly random, such a pattern could not exist. Consequently, our expected average annual return from the S&P 500 should be 0%. This is because in a genuinely random environment, the likelihood of a rise and a fall would be precisely equal.

tutfbhuf··on An invariant from category theory solves a problem in mathematical ecology [pdf]
This presentation is getting into the idea of "magnitude" the invariant from category theory and how it can be used in mathematical ecology, especially when we're trying to max out diversity. It's put forward as a possible answer to a head-scratcher in mathematical ecology: How do we find the maximum diversity if we're given a list of n species and a similarity matrix?

The presentation gives us a whole range of views on biodiversity, making it clear that we need to think about both common and rare species when we're figuring out diversity. It hints that this magnitude idea might give us a more detailed picture of diversity by considering how important different species are relative to each other. Then the presentation gets into the weeds of category theory, chatting about enriched categories and size-like invariants. It talks about stuff like monoidal categories, V-enriched categories, and linear categories. These ideas are brought up as tools to help us understand and calculate magnitude.

The presentation also explores how these category theory ideas relate to metric spaces. It suggests that getting a handle on this relationship could give us even more insight into how to max out diversity. Lastly, the presentation brings up the Euler characteristic, which is a concept from algebraic topology. It hints that the Euler characteristic and magnitude are pretty tight, and understanding this connection could give us even more insight into how to max out diversity.

So, to wrap it up, the presentation is a thorough look at how category theory ideas, especially magnitude, can be used to tackle problems in mathematical ecology. It suggests that these ideas can give us a more detailed understanding of diversity and might even help us figure out how to get the most diversity.

References:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.02113

https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00095

tutfbhuf··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://beuke.org/ A personal blog about computer science topics. I write a about category theory, llms, cosmology, haskell and generic linux releated topics.

Some favorites over the years:

- https://beuke.org/programming-language-popularity/ - GitHub Programming Language Popularity based on BigQuery

- https://beuke.org/arch-linux-archive/ - Arch Linux Date-Based Versioned Upgrades

- https://beuke.org/boltzmann-brains/ - The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

tutfbhuf··on I Built Linux from Scratch
How does it compare to install Arch linux without an installer? I remember that it took me a day or two of tinkering, when I did it for the first time (circa 2009) and I learned a lot. As of today, Arch remains my distro of choice.
tutfbhuf··on The NixOS Foundation’s Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support
I can recommend Hetzner Storage boxes https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=us its quite cheap (€40.60 for 20 TB).

Just order 25x BX41 Boxes with 500 TB for 1015€. They do not support S3 protocol, but have plenty of other protocol options (FTP, SFTP, HTTPS, rsync, mount as network drive, ...).

tutfbhuf··on A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics
A computer program can also be considered a form of constructive proof. One may be confident that the program functions as intended until a bug is discovered. This is why theorem provers have such a strong type system, which reduces the likelihood of bugs compared to mainstream programming languages. However, it is important to note that bugs may still be present, just as they can be found in formal proofs on paper.
tutfbhuf··on Watermark Remover (AI Powered)
I think you're talking about AI lawyers.
tutfbhuf··on Show HN: I built a Hacker News userscript to make this site more legible
I think someone should tell dang that the HN news font is too small. If hundred of people on HN complain about the small font size (including me), then the font size should be increased IMHO.
tutfbhuf··on Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
> I want you to act as a command line terminal. I will type actions and you will reply with what a linux system would show. I want you to only reply with the command output and nothing else. Do no write explanations. Do not perform actions unless I instruct you to do so. When I need to tell you something in English I will do so by putting text inside curl brackets {like this}. Start with: cat /proc/cpuinfo

... model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8275CL CPU @ 3.00GHz ...

ChatGPT Virtual Machine claims to run on Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8275CL CPU @ 3.00GHz. Interesting.

tutfbhuf··on Finding a kernel regression in half an hour with git bisect run (2018)
In addition to that I find it confusing that the term kernel is often implicitly defined as kernel := linux kernel, although there are many other kernels where `git bisect run` is useful.
tutfbhuf··on Google is capping Meet’s group video calls to an hour for free accounts
But then you are in the middle of a presentation (screen sharing).
tutfbhuf··on IBM unveils first quantum computer in Germany
> Can any current so called quantum computers actually perform any computations faster than a classical one? To be called a quantum computer, I would expect they should ...

But why? A very slow silicion based computer is still a silicon based computer. It doesn't matter how fast, same applies for quantum computers. There is no such definition as IF (> 1000 qubits) THEN "quantum computer" ELSE "nothing".

tutfbhuf··on Last remaining 1000+ user community channel seized by Freenode staff
The reasoning is quite simple: Lee wants to force everybody away from Freenode to Libera so that he has full control and power over an empty Freenode network.
tutfbhuf··on FSF and GNU channels seized by Freenode staff
It seems to me as Lee wants to force everybody away from Freenode to Libera and other servers. I just don't understand why.
tutfbhuf··on AlpineJS
In a few year we are back at jQuery.
tutfbhuf··on The memory models that underlie programming languages (2016)
This website does not support HTTPS.
tutfbhuf··on Summary of June 8 outage
Except when there is no connection (except for chaos theory) between certain systems (strict isolation).
tutfbhuf··on Chrome is faster in M91
What's the mean speedup? "Up to 23%" means that this is the maximum speedup that is possible for individual users.
tutfbhuf··on Show HN: I Built Multiplayer Deathmatch Joust
Browser vim plugin prevents me from playing.
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