@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

BartoszMilewski

@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz

Physicist, programmer (Haskell, C++), mathematician, category theorist. Author of Category Theory for Programmers and The Dao of Programming

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dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

TIL about mouse jigglers

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler

BartoszMilewski,
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@dpiponi Apparently there is an arms race between employers and employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Doctor

BartoszMilewski, to random
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I have a confession to make: When I was studying physics I flunked thermodynamics, and it's still a bunch of meaningless formulas to me. I'm watching Susskinds lectures now, and I'm none the wiser.

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@hellwolf For me, categorical formulas have meaning. For instance:
[ (F \star G) x = \int^{a, b} \mathcal C (a \otimes b, x) \times F a \times G b ] If you have a container of (a)s and another container of (b)s, and a way of combining (a)s with (b)s into (x)s, then you have a container (called a Day convolution) of (x)s.

Now try to explain the meaning of Helmholtz free energy:
[F = U - TS] Why do you subtract temperature times entropy from energy?

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@hellwolf The formula for Helmholtz free energy is an example of a Legendre transformation, and it would probably be easier for me to understand thermodynamics from that point of view. But I don't have good intuitions about Legendre transformations (except for such examples as Hamiltionan vs Lagrangian).

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@austern Same here, it was combined with statistical physics.

BartoszMilewski,
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@MCSpaceCadet @hellwolf How realistic is "constant temperature"? It assumes a heat bath that acts like a thermostat.
Anyway, we can experience temperature, pressure, volume, or even energy, but we have no personal experience of entropy. Would you know what the entropy of a cup of tea is? Is it higher than that of a cube of ice?

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Stupidity knows no bounds. Apple Preview has a "redact" facility. Despite the fact that Preview renders the text, and so obviously knows the bounding box of the text you're redacting, it still leaves the top and bottom of the text visible making it fairly easy to reconstruct.

There's a certain class of bug that ought to have its own name: it's the completely obvious bug that just about anyone but a software engineer could anticipate so you have to test the software first make sure it doesn't have the bug.

BartoszMilewski,
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@dpiponi Is this the result of the thought process that goes: Blame the user for not understanding the computer code I'm writing (to which the uses doesn't have access)? I think many software developers whould be quite happy to remove the user from the picture.

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@dpiponi You might be right. This would explain why Apple code is so incredibly buggy. In their hubris they thought they could write asynchronous programs. I've struggled with concurrency for years, and I'm still intimidated by it.

BartoszMilewski,
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@dpiponi The (lame) excuse could be that Windows is not a native environment for iTunes. But why do I have to regularly kill and restart AppleTV on my MacBook. And why do albums I bought on iTunes suddenly disappear from it? I put up with it only because I like the hardware. I bought Microsoft Surface once, it broke after a year, and Microsoft wouldn't fix it.

BartoszMilewski, to random
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For completeness, a blog post with the categorical view of the pre-lens construction. https://bartoszmilewski.com/2024/03/24/neural-networks-pre-lenses-and-triple-tambara-modules-part-ii/

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
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I dreamt that an evil magician had cast a spell on my country. For those who had fallen under his spell, anything he said became true. Most of us knew better - we could see right through him. But it was hard to mount an effective resistance, since those under his spell included many judges, governors and senators. Others, well aware of his trickery, simply gave up resisting it - or shrugged it off as unimportant. Still more played along for their own venal reasons. Then one of my friends fell under the magician's spell. I tried to reason with them, I pleaded, I begged them to shake off the enchantment - to no avail. With an increasing sense of horror, I eventually woke up, twitching in my bed.

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez I sometimes feel like I'm in the Invasion of Body Snatchers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEStsLJZhzo

dpiponi, to random
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Not sure why Christopher Walken was in Dune 2. Why pay big actors to do next to nothing? Instead, watch Outsiders where Walken is absolutely fantastic (along with all the rest of the cast). And Severance. TBH I just got a kick out of him mentioning shopping at Tesco's. A far cry from being Emperor of the Universe.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11646832/

BartoszMilewski,
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@dpiponi You mean The Outlaws?
Can't wait to see season 2 of Severance. I hope it doesn't disappoint.

BartoszMilewski, to random
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New blog post on using lenses and profunctors to implement a neural network. https://bartoszmilewski.com/2024/03/22/neural-networks-pre-lenses-and-triple-tambara-modules/

BartoszMilewski, to random
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Mathematicians have finally solved the problem of why our space is 3-dimensional. It turns out that knots can only exist in 3-d. In any other dimension you can't tie the knot and everything just falls apart.

julesh, to random
@julesh@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Funny observation: "pre-optics" (that's what we call optics without quotienting out a coend, they're 1-cells of a bicategory) technically might not exist for size reasons if you're being overly pedantic, but they're trivial to implement in basically any programming language. Meanwhile optics exist under very weak set-theoretic assumptions but are impossible to implement in the vast majority of programming languages, you need explicit existential types

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@julesh Like this? https://github.com/BartoszMilewski/Publications/blob/master/NeuralLens.pdf

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@julesh The weirdest thing is that these pre-optics turn out to be triple Tambara modules. (Normal parametric optics are also double Tambaras.)

rossquantum, to quantumcomputing

Hello Mastodon! I'm new here. Where's all the quantum people at?

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@rossquantum They are in many places at once.

BartoszMilewski, to random
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Recursive joke: A bar walks into a bar.

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@jnpn Who said there was a second bar?

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I think this must be the question in fundamental physics and someone had to ask it: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/806682/how-does-spacetime-curve-around-an-object-in-superposition

The idea that spacetime itself isn't in superposition seems a bit nuts to me - but of course we don't have a working theory of that.

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@dpiponi I think Penrose tried to figure this out and he decided that the collapse of a wave function is caused by gravity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%B3si%E2%80%93Penrose_model

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@dpiponi My recollection is that the microtubules in neurons are small enough to invoke quantum gravity.

We're lauging at it but what if in a 100 years from now it will turn out that he was right? Penrose will have the last laugh.

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I'm always on the lookout for interference phenomena.

My watch has a glass protective layer over the screen. Some air or water got under it. Unsurprisingly there are interference fringes. But when I zoomed in there is a weird Turing-like pattern around the edges. No idea what it is. I thought maybe it was from fingerprints but I think the pattern is at a smaller scale than fingerprints and fingerprints are qualitatively different.

Any ideas?

image/jpeg

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@dpiponi multi-phase flow? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiphase_flow

BartoszMilewski, to random
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I'm wondering if, what we call "overfitting", is really the neural network developing a superstition, or even some kind of religion.

BartoszMilewski,
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@kellogh Superstition is mostly noticing non-existing patterns. Like my survival depending on having my rabbit's paw on every combat mission.

BartoszMilewski, to random
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My intuition is that sigma-algebras have the law of excluded middle built in. If A is measurable then the complement of A is also measurable. Does it make sense?

BartoszMilewski,
@BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@dylan "the notion of sigma-algebra is highly suspicious." Hah! I knew that!

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