Julian Togelius is a full professor of computer science at NYU and I was fascinated by his blog post about succeeding in academic CS while not being able to solve undergraduate math problems.
Readit Newsjeffhwang commented on AI Professor: I'm bad at math togelius.blogspot.com/202... · Posted by u/jeffhwang
jeffhwang commented on I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog micahcantor.com/blog/blue... · Posted by u/hydroxideOH-
I know I shouldn't react this way, but this view that Mastodon can only be successful if it's the largest platform out there always gets under my skin. There are about a million active users of the fediverse, and I know plenty of us find it nice right now.
Active users are measured in different ways by different platforms, so if we compare registered users, fedi has 12.5M compared to 42M for Bluesky. So it's approximately 25% of the size.
It's not the best place to go if you want to get a large following, and it's not Serious Business, but as a user that's not what I want from a social platform. I have plenty of people to follow who are talking about things that interest me.
You're welcome to come have a look if you want, but otherwise no worries. We're doing fine. Maybe you'll check it out sometime when some drama happens at Bluesky. The fediverse is not going away any time soon.
It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).
I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far
My go-to site for Unicode symbols is graphemica.com.
I like that you show very directly the different use cases, but miss different encodings and the ability to browse unicode sequentially.
+1 graphemica has the right mix of completeness and simplicity for my tastes.
jeffhwang commented on 30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" web.archive.org/web/20070... · Posted by u/donohoe
You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion."
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
I remember being confused by that tagline and also by Sun's later pitch: "We put the dot in dotcom"!
jeffhwang commented on Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly? mathenchant.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/jamespropp
> sends the pair (x, y) to the pair (−x, y)
I know linear algebra, but this part seems profoundly unclear. What does "send" mean? Following with different examples in 2 by 2 notation only makes it worse. It seems like you're changing referents constantly.
Let me try.
In US schools during K-12, we generally learn functions in two ways:
1. 2-d line chart with an x-axis and y-axis, like temperature over time, history of stock price, etc. Classic independent variable is on the horizontal axis, dependent variable is on the vertical axis. And even people who forgotten almost all math can instantly understand the graphics displayed when they're watching CNBC or a TV weather report.
2. We also think of functions like little machines that do things for us. E.g., y = f(x) means that f() is like a black box. We give the black box input 'x'; then the black box f() returns output 'y'. (Obviously very relevant to the life of programmers.)
But one of 3blue-1brown's excellent videos finally showed me at least a few more ways of thinking of functions. This is where a function acts as a map from what "thing" to another thing (technically from Domain X to Co-Domain Y).
So if we think of NVIDIA stock price over time (Interpretation 1) as a graph, it's not just a picture that goes up and to the right. It's mapping each point in time on the x-axis to a price on the y-axis, sure! Let's use the example, x=November 21, 2025 maps to y=$178/share. Of course, interpretation 2 might say that the black box of the function takes in "November 21, 2025" as input and returns "$178" as output.
But what what I call Interpretation 3 does is that it maps from the domain of Time to the output Co-domain of NVDA Stock Price.
3. This is a 1D to 1D mapping. aka, both x and y are scalar values. In the language that jamespropp used, we send the value "November 21, 2025" to the value "$178".
But we need not restrict ourselves to a 1-dimensional input domain (time) and a 1-dimensional output domain (price).
We could map from a 2-d Domain X to another 2-d Co-Domain Y. For example X could be 2-d geographical coordinates. And Y could be 2-d wind vector.
So we would feed input of say location (5,4) as input. and our 2Dto2D function would output wind vector (North by 2mph, East by 7mph).
So we are "sending" input (5,4) in the first 2d plane to output (+2,+7) in the second 2d plane.
jeffhwang commented on Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws theverge.com/news/823750/... · Posted by u/ksec
Wasn't the case here really weak to begin with? I remember reading the FTC's initial filings and they just sounded absurd. The very premise that Meta didn't face meaningful competition from TikTok was a farce.
I'm not very happy with Lina Khan after she killed our only remaining low cost airline carrier. And killed iRobot to let Roborock, a a Chinese company, take over.
She "stood up" to big tech, failed, and her remaining legacy is destroying American businesses that people actually relied on. Literally no value was added, but a bunch was subtracted. I never understood the hype for her.
Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.
jeffhwang commented on Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division theverge.com/news/804253/... · Posted by u/Lionga
> FAIR?
> FAANG typo, or is there a new acronym?
FAIR is the Meta AI unit (Fundamental AI Research) at issue, as spelled out in the second sentence of the article.
Used to be "Facebook AI Research" before company changed name from FB to Meta
jeffhwang commented on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement wsj.com/business/airlines... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee.
If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them.
My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
jeffhwang commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy
Intelligence and wisdom comes from the shores of experience. This idea that you can pull einsteins from the east is stupid.
Didn't Einstein himself literally come from east of the Atlantic Ocean? ;)