zrkrlc

Clojure? It's not purely lazy, but with liberal use of `seq`s it pretty much is.

That is just brilliant! Although I do wonder how they deal with noise because I remember in my undergrad lab classes just how difficult it is to do low-light spectroscopy.

The problem with Clojure/Script is that there isn't a consensus on how to do things properly (IMHO, leiningen isn't transparent to beginners). Every language has its rituals, but as far as things go I'd pick Clojure/Script over npm-equipped JS any day, if only because it is such a blast to use once you do get things running correctly.

That said, I had to spend a couple of weeks agonising over my setup until I came across the newer and frankly, much simpler CLI tooling [1]. Today, I just manually create `deps.edn` and extend it as needed: pastebin.com/c8Ut928B

Setting up ClojureScript is a bit more complicated though, but not by much: pastebin.com/WdVyrd9T

Then I just run `npm install shadow-cljs react react-dom create-react-class` before doing `clj -M:shadow-cljs watch :client`, based on [2].

----

[1]: clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli

[2]: shadow-cljs.github.io/docs/UsersGuide.html

I think if you’re responsible for eradicating polio, you can be as shitty as you like.

Can anyone verify is this Eric Raymond is the ESR?

EDIT: Seems that he is indeed. If so, this is a rather interesting intersection between hacker culture and LessWrong-style rationalism.

What does your workflow look like? I have a page for each entity in my stories and use tags in metadata to group them, but for actual plotting it doesn't work quite as well.

This would actually work for text editing in general. When I’m writing essays, sometimes things don’t come out right and it helps to compare them with newer attempts.

Wow, I keep being surprised that MeFi is still a thing.

The author is supposedly Cade Metz, so this was the focal point of last year’s NYT hullabaloo about revealing Scott’s identity.

I feel like this will only work if you can read hiragana and katakana already.

How did you get started in Clojure contracting work?

Surprisingly many. A lot of my professors tend to see math as a 'necessarily evil' and only teach enough to be able to do the calculations, and this attitude certainly rubbed off on most of my classmates.

In fact, some of them even reject papers for being too rigorous (which does make sense if you think about it).

I like how TOML was the first thing that came to your mind and not 'co-founder of GitHub'.

I like how their experiment was literally pitting ants against each other.

There’s Leo Dorst’s Geometric Algebra for Computer Science but I haven’t really read it in any substantial way. Might be worth checking out still.

I spent around two months being completely enamoured by geometric algebra until I realised it flies in the face of some pretty strong trends of mathematics in the last couple of decades.

How come? Well, we’ve been moving towards more and more powerful generalisations and unifying concepts over the years. First, it was the various flavours of algebraic this-and-that, then category theory, then today, people are trying to do hot things with HoTT.

(of course math is much, much bigger than this, but this is the story I particularly have been watching unfold before me)

The trouble with geometric algebra is that it’s merely a special case of a much more general concept, namely tensor algebras. Tensor algebras are the most general algebra you can possibly get from things that behave like vectors; with GA you are stuck with vectors where the distances are measured by something squared as opposed to any other power (or some other crazy function like the taxicab metric).

Using geometric algebra feels like typeless programming because you’re combining everything into a single quantity called the multivector whose components aren’t straightforward to keep track of. Furthermore, you have to decide the dimension in advance because IIRC these types change when you add more dimensions (the formulas however do not, surprisingly).

That said, it’s really marvellous how compact things can get if you stay in 3+1 dimensions. Maxwell’s equations become literally a one-liner, and the horrible, horrible mess that is rotational dynamics becomes so much more tractable for mortals like me. One can literally do the entire physics undergrad curriculum using GA without breaking a sweat. Trouble is, you’d have to learn some basic algebraic theory and that’s a hard sell for people who are already afraid of math because “it’s too abstract”.

Oh wow, I have never seen this sentiment expressed outside weird rationalist circles. This is exactly how things are in my view, plus or minus some systematic biases whose negatives only become huge in great numbers.

Was your undergrad GPA ever a factor in the admissions process?

Well, we're entering the golden age of space exploration right now, so let's see how that gap closes by the next decade or so.

Nitpick, but I think what you meant to say what "HoTT is to ZFC as Python is to Turing machine tape". Hope it helps.

For a math-lite game theory guide from Scott Alexander himself: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QxZs5Za4qXBegXCgu/introducti...

If I want to attend a bootcamp for a couple of months, is the M-1 visa my only option? How difficult is it to get?

Did you do the entire book in Clojure or just this part? Thinking of forking SICP Distilled and was wondering if there's a reason why it stopped other than the author losing interest.

My take on this as someone who's been on atomoxetine for a year is that, no, this won't automagically fix your problems.

But it gives you a chance.

Me on atomoxetine means I can actually: a) slow down, b) get an intuitive feel of passing time, c) tune out anxiety-inducing thoughts, which in combination are enough to get me through most days. Think of it as learning how to work again for the first time. Most people have had decades of practice on this and you're essentially starting from scratch. What would you do differently?

The assumption here is that you have a structured enough environment that you get tasks delivered on your doorstep regularly.

Having no external source of motivation is the death of us.

You might like https://tldr.sh then.

Did anything interesting come out of the RAS' press release?

Wow, I had no idea about the dot operator. And TIL about `gd` (moves to the word's definition) and `gf` (for file imports) as well.

Because all your friends are playing a VR MMO and are talking about it nonstop on social media

How much would it cost to put something like microNOVA into orbit around Mars?