Untitled

[sapphic-adjunction-deactivated2]

I hate the term "vector space"

Will you agree with me to only say...

R-linear space

R-module

no I like unergonomic terminology

Voting ended onFeb 16, 2025

going forward?

[coffee-math-chamomile]

Every vector space is an r module sure but every r module isn't a vector space??

That's like saying I don't like squares they're all rectangles anyways so imma call em that

There's more information there that's lost when you call it a module

[sapphic-adjunction-deactivated2]

I think I've phrased my advocacy in a bad way. It just feels weird to me to have just a radically different looking name for an object obtained by adding an extra condition on a module. It feels like if we woke up and decided to call "abelian groups" something like "symmetry booklets" for some reason, rather than thinking of them as groups satisfying extra properties and naming them in accordance with that schema. A "vector space" to me should be an "<ADJECTIVE> module".

Maybe something like "tame module" or "fieldic module" or "fielded module"

[roystgnr]

I like the "extra conditions should just be extra adjectives" philosophy on first glance, but if we take it seriously then don't we have to give up "field" (and so presumably "fielded" and "fieldic") too? That's a radically different looking name for a commutative division ring.

[math-memes]

[roystgnr]

Someone needs to redo this meme with the proper equivalence classes for ℤ/ℚ/ℝ, and with the Peano axioms or something for ℕ. The only simple construction step here is the complex step!

[shieldfoss]

I don't follow you because you post too many memes, but I keep coming back to your blog for info on how to write C++ and keep your sanity.

You must cultivate an intense disdain for the language (it's bad) and for all other languages (they're worse) and for all programmers who disagree with this (they have skill issues) and a magnanimous ability to love that which you disdain (it is part of this, the best of all possible worlds).

[roystgnr]

This is a beautiful sentiment ... but whether other languages are worse or not does depend on the use case. Most saliently to me: even if C++ is currently the least-awful option for personal projects, skill issues are out there, so there's a good argument to be made for collaborative projects to consider languages that don't provide saboteurs-who-think-they're-collaborators with quite as many handy footgun options. You can try to mitigate the problem with linters and formal project standards and so on, but any large enough team has good reason to consider languages where it's harder to write good code if that's the price you pay for making it much harder to write bad code.

[starstrung]

I made a uquiz to find out what member of a doomed spaceship crew you are, take it to find out what member of a doomed spaceship crew you are.

[parasite-core]

[nicdevera]

[squareallworthy]

Fuck yeah! Botanists are canonically good at surviving disasters.

[roystgnr]

You're on a spaceship, with mass at a premium, and instead of aeroponics or at least hydroponics your growing medium of choice is ... dirt. You may not be a *good* botanist? I get: "Engineer

If anyone's the living embodiment of the ship, it's you. If anyone feels her death keenly, knows without a doubt when something vital has been poisoned, it's you. Your mind is meticulous; there is no room for panic here. You know what to do." But (spoilers alert) my only "accomplishment" is quickly coming up with the dying message "The Heart Of Machinery Looks Into Every Soul", on the theory that language models are still more likely to be limited to multi-letter tokens than humans are... and even then I subconsciously came up with a too-suspicious cover text, so the overt message might be discarded even if the covert message is missed.

[desert-palm]

[traegorn]

Just a reminder that on the web version of Tumblr you can turn off infinite scrolling in your dashboard settings.

And you should.

(also turn off “Best Stuff First” if you’re sensible)

[cleavagewithfirepower]

Kind of unrelated BUT:

As someone who works in UX “no one talks about it because it’s better UX” is a loaded fucking sentence that I take issue with. “better UX” is really fucking context dependent.

If you work in UX you should know that the #1 question regarding what you should do regarding UX choices is “it depends”. Almost every choice you can make for UX comes with pros and cons, and it comes down to the specific context and what other choices you are making.

Personally, I hate everything that is endless scroll. I abhor it. Professionally I understand that it has its uses, but for me personally I hate it.

[alexanderrm]

WTF you can just turn off endless scroll and also make Tumblr chronological again? Thank you so much for posting this

[tanadrin]

i hate infinite scroll so much. not because it’s pyschologically manipulative or w/e, but because the way it’s implemented always breaks the basic premise that i should be able to click on a link, view a new page, then hit the “back” button and return to the same content i was viewing before.

but every website on god’s green earth has decided it needs to display everything as an infinite scroll menu, which means 1) it only loads about 5 items at a time, 2) i have to wait for the next five items to load as soon as i hit the bottom of the page (and because natch this is all poorly-optimized javascript it takes forever, meaning i can’t actually scroll quickly), 3) the page slows to a crawl as soon as i’m more than about 20 items deep, and 4) if i click on something, and realize it’s not what i wanted, or just want to go back for some reason, i have to start over again at the top.

in what context could this conceivably be better UX?! it’s awkward, it’s slow, it makes it harder to navigate everything. even if i have to click “next” a bunch on an HTML page, it loads faster and i can keep track of what i’m looking at! and sometimes there’s an option to customize how many items at a time the page is showing me.

[roystgnr]

Don't forget 5) some pages (glaring at Twitter...) will unload the top of the scroll as it loads more at the bottom, presumably to try and recover performance, but meaning you can't Ctrl+F to find a word you *know* you just read, and 6) other pages (glaring at Twitter and Tumblr...) will edit the middle of the scroll, presumably because programming is hard and their programmers make it look even harder, meaning you can have entries vanish on you *while* you're reading them.

[northshorewave]

I wish there was a browser extension for Reddit that would replace the pertinent comments with 'SIMPSONS QUOTE', 'IASIP QUOTE', 'BOJACK QUOTE', 'SIMPSONS QUOTE AGAIN', 'COMPLETELY OUT-OF-CONTEXT NORM MCDONALD QUOTE' and so on and so on. Would make scrolling a lot faster.

[roystgnr]

It's fun when people like the same reference sources you do. But one can desire too much of a good thing, especially if we're confusing the language of the whole world. Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra! Excuse me, I mean: 'OVERUSED SHAKESPEARE PHRASE, STRAINED BIBLE REFERENCE, STAR TREK QUOTE'.

[wildgifthorses]

Of the roughly 20 million books in Harvard University’s libraries, one has long exerted a unique dark fascination, not for its contents, but for the material it was reputedly bound in: human skin. For years, the volume — a 19th-century French treatise on the human soul — was brought out for show and tell, and sometimes, according to library lore, used to haze new employees. In 2014, the university drew jokey news coverage around the world with the announcement that it had used new technology to confirm that the binding was in fact human skin. But on Wednesday, after years of criticism and debate, the university announced that it had removed the binding and would be exploring options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains.” “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history,” the university said in a statement. Harvard also said that its own handling of the book, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” had failed to live up to the “ethical standards” of care, and had sometimes used an inappropriately “sensationalistic, morbid and humorous tone” in publicizing it.

(x) (non-NYT)

I can't think of a better encapsulation of what I mean by "moralism" than this. You can't leave anything of value in the care of people who have a constantly-updated system of refined moral sensitivity that they feel licensed to extend imperially into the indefinite past and future.

[roystgnr]

Are they getting close to realizing that Harvard University also has origins and subsequent history which are ethically fraught? The problem there might solve itself...

[iteratedextras]

So this photo isn't from the current breakdown in Haiti, but do The Libs™, as in tribal liberals seem, in general, kind of... childish?

Like obviously this image is tragic because Haiti is suffering from violence again, but it's also tragic because... I can't quite put it into words, like I haven't done the necessary theory-building work to draw out this intuition enough to turn it into something more formal.

And them being cynical instead of naive isn't the correct response, either, it's more like a failure to reach the next developmental level.

Like, the state is using them because it can, or something, too, and it's not even necessarily intentional, but I just can't quite grasp it yet.

And like, even if I could pin it down, I don't think it's something that's clearly measurable.

[roystgnr]

It's also tragic because it's Bill Maher. "Haiti is a shithole" is the sort of statement everybody wants to get mad at because it sounds pretty insensitive, but you shouldn't because it's also pretty true. Compare with the statement that got everybody mad at Bill Maher: "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it - not cowardly." The ability to admit propositions which are true even when they're adjacent to ideas which are awful requires a commitment to rational thought that is a rare thing to possess and a sad thing to lose.

Bill might as well wear a shirt reading "I have won the victory over myself. I love Big Brother."

[garmbreak1]

if i keep using greek letters in articles i'm going to have to get a customizable keyboard so I don't have to look them up each time.

[nuclearspaceheater]

When I was studying λ calculus, I just memorized the codepoints of the ones I used, U+03b1 and U+03b2 for α and β, respectively, and U+03bb for λ.

There should be a way to enter codepoints directly into text in whatever OS you use. On Linux Mint it's ctrl+shift+u, for example.

[roystgnr]

Custom XCompose entries (standard on Linux, though you have to map something to be "the compose key"; Windows and OS X seem to have third party programs) are the best way to do this if you have more than a couple characters you need. E.g. "∀λ∈ℝ" for me is Compose,m,A ("math A" mnemonic), Compose,g,l ("greek l"), Compose,m,i,n ("math in"), Compose, m, b, R ("math bold R"). Not something I can do at 60 words a minute, but better for note-taking than writing out ASCII notes ("did that plain R stand for 'any ring' or does this only pertain to the reals...") or trying to remember a hundred code points or flipping between some GUI character map's pages.

[manorpunk]

the future has vending machines that dispense fresh, fully-cooked, nutritionally balanced meals but they’re called something goofy like “NomBoxes” so you can’t even fully enjoy the high-tech conveniences of the future without feeling vaguely ashamed about having to say the word “NomBox” out loud with your mouth.

[roystgnr]

We must look to traditional solutions from the past.

[garmbreak1]

if you were to add a seventh attribute to the classic D&D six, what would it be? Would your answer be different if you were replacing one instead?

[corpus-vak]

Dexterity and wisdom are both overloaded: Dexterity means your acrobatic characters are also all archers and also good at all the thief-type skills; Wisdom means your holy men all have the best eyesight and hearing (which are also the same thing).

However since this is D&D, nobody cares about mental attributes except as spell casting, so I'd split Dexterity into Dexterity for fine motor skills and Agility for gross motor skills.

AC, stealth and acrobatics use Agility. Ranged attacks, sleight of hand, and lock picking use Dexterity. More MAD for everyone, but at least Dexterity isn't an omni-stat for certain builds.

If I'm replacing, all of the same logic and get rid of Wisdom for Agility. Wisdom isn't real when Intelligence is right there. Clerics become Charisma, perception can do whatever it wants, it's a black sheep skill anyway.

[roystgnr]

"Wisdom isn't real when Intelligence is right there"? Occasionally imparting the fact that Wisdom and Intelligence are two different things, including to stereotypical high-Int low-Wis D&D players, is perhaps the most historically valuable consequence of the existence of D&D! They're correlated, sure, but every now and then you get a very-high-Int very-low-Wis outlier like Thomas Midgley Jr and then you spend decades trying to undo the damage.

[acidbathbunnies-moved]

MATLAB GOUGAR?

[roystgnr]

Proponents of 0-based-indexing languages originally pointed out a number of benefits, such as those listed in Dijkstra's famous essay, but lost the debate after proponents of 1-based-indexing languages explained their own benefits, such as "If you cry uncle we'll call off the trained mountain lions."

[spectracled-eider]

Being a mathematician does irreparable damage to you vocabulary. I have on more than one occasion forgotten that certain words have normal every day meanings

[preciselywibble]

Normal meanings as in, what, they're orthogonal?

[msexcelfractal]

You’re thinking of a normal vector! Normal meanings are meanings that are invariant under conjugation.

[bubbloquacious]

That's a normal subgroup! Normal meanings are those where any two disjoint closed subconcepts have disjoint open neighbourhoods.

[roystgnr]

That’s a normal space!  Normal meanings are meanings whose third- and higher-order cumulants are zero.