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.
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.
Not to poopoo your train of thought but I wouldn't put any faith in someone that's college educated having a better understanding of constitutionality either. Most college degrees are useless now, with the majority of college grads being roughly as educated as the average high school grad a couple of decades ago. And the majority of the ones that do actually hold any value don't give you much expertise on Constitutional law.
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).
I don't know whether the monad library is nice but caching compiles code is something they are making great progress on. Veraion 1.9 seems able to store most compiled code on disk.
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!
There are some good things about coding competitions, if done well:
* Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms
* Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite)
* Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it
At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.
Such contests seem to be just a fun way to get students interested in algorithmics. Many of those who become passionate about Computer Science due to competitive programming go on to get PhD in CS and contribute with their research. Some highlights among Code Jam winners: Tiancheng Lou (won Code Jam in 2008 and 2009, went on to earn his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Marek Cygan (won Code Jam in 2005, earned his PhD from University of Warsaw in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Gennady Korotkevich (won Code Jam 8 times between 2014-2022, as of 2019 was a PhD student at ITMO University)
(sources: Wikipedia and Linkedin)
The first two have published some influential works during their academic careers:
I wonder what the total number of research papers and citations of all Code Jam winners would be. Sadly, it's hard to find reliable info on most of them.
Although your approach to it much better, they may as well have called is XERXES by combining letters that are and aren't in the phrase with some permutation.
There is no link between the name "Evolved Sign Momentum" and "Lion". They can call the thing what they want, but they're making up the link.
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).
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.
As far as I can tell, the article says nothing about category theory and doesn't claim to. It's a popularization of recent probabilistic investigations in number theory, popularization of math is what Quanta does.
When it says "Mathematicians are taking ideas developed to study random numbers and applying them to a broad range of categories" I'm pretty sure it means category in the non-technical sense, category as in classifying into categories. The term doesn't appear again in the article.
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.
I don't know if this work is particularly ground breaking, but this looks to be more concerned with applications towards number theory (specifically cohen-lenstra heuristics) rather than adding to the category theory literature.
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.
> In work published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2016, Ellenberg, along with Akshay Venkatesh and Craig Westerland, used moments to study the statistics of class groups in a slightly different setting than Cohen and Lenstra had considered. This idea was reused several times. But each time researchers used the moments, they would lean on the quirks of their particular problem to prove that the infinite set of equations had a solution. That meant their techniques were not transferable. The next mathematician who needed to use moments would have to solve the moment problem all over again.
Are you suggesting that this need to solve the moment problem all over again could have been avoided by searching Category Theory developments?
As I said in another comment, this research isn't about category theory. [Edit: Well, not about the foundations anyway.]
The use of moments as a method for understanding probability distributions isn't particularly new. What is new, is the introduction and adaptation of this framework for trying to understand the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics -- a smaller-scope problem in number theory that has seen a lot of attention recently.
The people quoted are among the world's leading experts in this topic, and I would say that Melanie Wood is the foremost expert. This is definitely novel.
What is your definition of 'these methods' and what is the established literature on them that you'd want to see cited? I'd be surprised if the specific construction and results that they need have been published.
The two authors are no slouches... I certainly wouldn't roll my eyes at them.
“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.
> this looks to be more concerned with applications towards number theory (specifically cohen-lenstra heuristics) rather than adding to the category theory literature.
(I'm a specialist in this area of number theory)
This is correct. The word "category" is being used in its colloquial English sense; this is not work on category theory.
[Edit: I'm mistaken in the above point; see comment below]
It's weird. It definitely reads like the Quanta author either didn't know what a mathematical category is, or didn't think it merited explanation, despite explaining simpler things in excruciating detail in the article.
Okay, looking at the paper more carefully (I'd just looked at the article before, and was arguing from my knowledge of the field more generally), I take it back -- there is definitely some formal category theory here.
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.
