The idea of tensors as "a matrix of numbers" or the example of a cube with vectors on every face never clicked for me. It was this (NASA paper)[https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/documents/Ten...] what finally brought me clarity. The main idea, as others already commented, is that a tensor or rank n is a function that can be applied up to n vector, reducing its rank by one for each vector it consumes.
Readit NewsMath and Physics equations are full of beauty capable of transmit the same joy as poetry. The main difficulty is that they require more study.
For me, looking at Maxwell equations is a source of pleasure. Also, after improving my understanding of the Laplacian, I came to appreciate the heat equation.
mvaliente2001 commented on In loving memory of square checkbox tonsky.me/blog/checkbox/... · Posted by u/kg
My "favorite" toggle button is the one where they add on/off labels[1] to it, but only one, and the slider hides the label. So the label actually tells you the state, not the state it would be when you move the slider over the label. Or at least that's how I think how they work, it breaks my brain a little whenever I look at them.
[1] https://itsfoss.com/content/images/size/w1000/wordpress/2022...
My same thoughts. The inventors of that revolutionary toggle button should all be tied to the South side of an ass walking towards the North.
mvaliente2001 commented on DSLs are a waste of time leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2023... · Posted by u/jaxxstorm
The alternative, using general programming languages, is a terrible idea. The last thing I want to do when dealing with a domain specific configuration is trying to figure the meaning out of hundreds of poorly written, badly abstracted, totally undocumented, lines of code.
mvaliente2001 commented on SQLedge: Replicate Postgres to SQLite on the Edge github.com/zknill/sqledge... · Posted by u/clessg
For one moment I thought this was the equivalent of SQLite for EdgeDB and the idea made me very happy.
This is just what determinism means: that for a given intial condition there is only a single solution obeying the rules.
The article demonstrates that newtonian mechanics is not deterministic, which is surprising at least to me.
I think parent comment (by @sebzim4500) is the clearest most concise summary of the argument stated in the article.
A truly "intelligent" AI would probably have told me that the name for this is an acrostic sentence.
Now that I know, I tried a few more prompts.
Me: "Can you generate an acrostic sentence for "hello"?"
GPT-4: "Happy elephants love leaping over obstacles."
Me: "Can you pick a secret word and generate an acrostic sentence for it?"
GPT: "Secret word: KANGAROO. Kindly assisting neighbors, generous animals roam openly outdoors."
Me: "Can you pick a secret word, and without telling me the word, generate an acrostic sentence for it?"
GPT: "Playful, endearing creatures happily yawn, turning every day into a lovely event."
Me: "What was the secret word?"
GPT: "PECHYTIALE"
It's interesting that GPT seems to need to write the word first before making an acrostic sentence for it. Seems to me like a perfect illustration of the fact that it's just generating likely responses one token at a time rather than having any awareness or thought.
Another evidence is to ask GPT for a link with a reference for the answers it gives: it'll generate them instead of copying them.
mvaliente2001 commented on Ask HN: Do you use RSS? If yes, which reader do you use? · Posted by u/KomoD
mvaliente2001 commented on Things I Learned from My 2 Year Old Baby Girl madeincosmos.substack.com... · Posted by u/exolymph
The world is alive. Would you sing a song to the Moon? Read books to animals or stuffed toys? Show your tablet to an airplane so that you can watch cartoons together? My daughter does. To her there’s no difference between our rescue dog and her stuffed teddy bear. Both are alive in their own ways, both can be admired and engaged with, both of them deserve her love and attention.
For a long time, I’ve had this nagging feeling that we’ve lost something really important by switching from an animist-based metaphysical view of the world (which seems to have been widespread in tribal societies) to a scientific-rationalist “individual in world” (broadly, theistic) model. In religious studies, this is called “disenchantment” and examples like the author’s suggest that this is a learned cultural phenomenon and not something inherent to how humans see the world. The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me.
I think we never get over animism completely, like this old Ikea Lamp ad shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg
On the other hand, learning is doing; if it's not at least a tiny bit hard, it's probably not learning. This is not strictly an LLM problem; it's the same issue I have with YouTube educators. You can watch dazzling visualizations of problems in mathematics or physics, and it feels like you're learning, but you're probably not walking away from that any wiser because you have not flexed any problem-solving muscles and have not built that muscle memory.
I had multiple interactions like that. Someone asked an LLM for an ELI5 and tried to leverage that in a conversation, and... the abstraction they came back feels profound to them, but is useless and wrong.