@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz
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dpiponi

@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz

Disclaimer:
👽 My opinions are not my own. They're beamed to me by aliens

Current life:
🎮 Epic Games

Previous lives:
🍩 a PhD in Riemann theta functions
💥 many years working in movie visual effects
🎈 some years devising navigation strategies for balloons
🎲 a year drawing random samples from tricky distributions

Likes:
🚴 I like to bike
🏃 I like to run
🎛️ my musical tastes lie towards the electronic end of the spectrum
🚀 I like Andor and The Mandalorian

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

dpiponi, to random
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From Max Evry's "A Masterpiece in Disarray" on making Lynch's Dune. My question is this: what is a "human trampoline?"

dpiponi,
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From the same page, a hilarious First Contact between Patrick Stewart and Sting. Reminds me of my friend chatting with James Hetfield in a local cafe, not knowing anything about Metallica.

dpiponi, to random
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We have the millennium prizes in mathematics. There should be a similar prizes in computer science. Here's 5 problems I suggest for the list. Maybe they're too hard, I'm not sure.

  • Synchronizing audio and video streams.
  • Detecting an external display has been plugged in. Especially if that display is a projector.
  • Establishing that everything is correctly set up at the start of a video conference call. Especially verifying audio is working, and unmuted.
  • Bluetooth. Especially emulating the straightforward operation we can do with wired devices: unplugging from one and plugging into the other.
  • Printers. Making them work.
dpiponi, to random
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In the future we won't have traffic lights. Instead your car will attempt to acquire a lock as you approach an intersection...

dpiponi,
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@laurentoget They feel like a lock-free solution to me!

dpiponi, to random
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Eternally hostage to the 6 digit codes that never seem to arrive...

dpiponi, to random
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Such a pretty edition of Cloud Atlas.

dpiponi, to random
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For rainy days we have a treadmill but it's locked into the vendor's subscription service if you want to watch videos.

Except...tap the bottom left 10 times, wait 7 seconds, tap 10 more times, up pops a number, use that as a seed to generate a number with lrand48, reduce modulo 999999 (not 1000000!) and type that number back in, and now you have an Android tablet with web browser and access to YouTube.

dpiponi,
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This information came from YouTube.

https://youtu.be/HyJ8L_ak-Ds?si=T82_5u0q0PNoHqNn

I read the source code for the web page shown there and recognised it as lrand48. I didn't do any reverse engineering myself.

dpiponi,
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@c0dec0dec0de @tsrono Modernity is a touch screen where you have to slide and tap and figure out which ordinary looking text is actually the button you need. The car has this and I hate it. I like this super simple interface that's easy to use when your brain is starved of oxygen and you can't aim your fingers accurately due to the running.

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
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If you want Putin to completely crush Ukraine, don't vote for Biden. Let Trump win.

Trump installed his daughter-in-law and a guy named Whatley to run the Republican party. Now Whatley has listed Ukraine as an "aggressive adversary" of the US, along with China and Iran.

I'm only amazed at how open he's being about this. The alliance between Putin and Trump against Ukraine has been clear for a long time.

In case you forget, in 2019 the House of Representatives released a report saying

"The impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. In furtherance of this scheme, President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of politically-motivated investigations, including one into Joe Biden, one of Trump's domestic political opponents. In pressuring President Zelenskyy to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian President, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine."

Zelenskyy didn't knuckle under and the rest is history.

(1/2)

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-rnc-chair-whatley-says-ukraine-us-adversary-republicans-1887731

dpiponi,
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@johncarlosbaez War is weird and beyond my comprehension. If you have nuclear weapons you get to make up arbitrary rules like 'if Ukraine used Western F-16 warplanes from airfields in other countries, they would become "legitimate targets...".

dpiponi, to random
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Don't play with magnets. I picked up one of mine. At attracted the other one at such high speed that chips were broken off and not a small amount of orange sparks flew out. Glad my fingers were correctly placed

dpiponi, to random
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I don't know what people mean when they say LLMs don't really understand language. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is so trivial that it can't be what's intended - that LLMs aren't people. I wish people could just be normal around this technology and stick to saying sensible things about their observations without trying to weave in their religious beliefs.

dpiponi,
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@BoydStephenSmithJr I've been making judgements about whether humans do or don't understand this or that all my life. I don't recall ever doing tests to find out if someone is "assigning semantics" to words. I don't think that's what "understand" means. I'm pretty sure I've used the word correctly without any understanding of what happens inside people's heads. I don't know how brains work and I don't think that's a prerequisite for correct usage of the word "understand".

dpiponi,
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@gregeganSF @BoydStephenSmithJr I don't think mathematics is a good example to use here. My favourite mathematical quote is from Atiyah:

"Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: "I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine."

I've always interpreted it as being about how I can splice strings together and get good results. I've done this all my life. I'm an algebraist who sold my soul to the Devil.

dpiponi,
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@sgf @gregeganSF @BoydStephenSmithJr I love that you mentioned rhyme. People talk about machines being embodied and about whether that's important. But maybe it could be said that LLMs are embodied in a world of words and that's why you were happy to say they have an understanding of rhyme.

dpiponi, to random
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Installed an IoT water flow meter but thinking it was a missed marketing opportunity for some Dune branding around the concept of water discipline.

gregeganSF, to random
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I can’t help feeling that the peripheral vision test for glaucoma might be easier to comply with if the yellow dot you’re meant to fix on was replaced by a tiger that pounced if you broke eye contact, and the off-axis specks you’re meant to hit the button for were rattlesnakes.

dpiponi,
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@gregeganSF My wife (who has high eye pressure and needs frequent monitoring) goes crazy every time she takes one of these tests. They seem so unreliable.

dpiponi, to random
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@dpiponi Can I write private DMs to myself or can you read this?

dpiponi,
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@pervognsen You got there before I could delete it!

dpiponi, to random
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We got our first pictures from the surface Venus back in 1975. It seems like a very rich environment busy with lots of physical and chemical activity. I'm surprised there's much more interest in Mars. Or maybe our ability to engineer for such a harsh environment hasn't improved much over the last 50 years.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
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So you wake up one day wanting to invent a 2-dimensional number system. This requires a new number 𝑖 that's at right angles to 1. So you figure multiplying by 𝑖 must rotate numbers by 90°. So multiplying by 𝑖² rotates by 180°, so

𝑖² = -1

Cool!

Then you notice something else. The derivative of a function in the 𝑦 direction must be 𝑖 times its derivative in the 𝑥 direction, because the derivative is linear and you get the 𝑦 direction by rotating the 𝑥 direction by 90°: that is, multiplying it by 𝑖. So you get this equation:

[ \frac{\partial f}{\partial y} = i \frac{\partial f}{\partial x} ]

Cool!

Then you notice something else. If you use this equation twice you get

[ \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial y^2} = i \frac{\partial f}{\partial x\partial y} = i^2 \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial x^2} = - \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial x^2} ]

so

[ \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial y^2} = 0 ]

Wow! Every function with a second derivative obeys the Laplace equation!

You decide this one is a keeper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%E2%80%93Riemann_equations

dpiponi,
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@johncarlosbaez @mattmcirvin Poking about on Wikipedia I see that that the deviations from exponential come from the Paley-Wiener theorem (or theorems as this appears to be the name of a class of theorems rather than just one) which came up for me recently in the context of machine learning.

dpiponi,
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@johncarlosbaez @mattmcirvin These slides https://lss.fnal.gov/conf2/C100715/Urbanowski.pdf mention an experimental result: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.163601 but this is more chemistry than radiaoctive decay.

dpiponi,
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@johncarlosbaez @mattmcirvin If it's analytic, and not exactly exponential at one end, then it can't be exactly exponential at the other end, right?

dpiponi,
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@johncarlosbaez @mattmcirvin I have to try to relate this to the intuition of exponential decay corresponding to something memoryless. If the decay is not exponential then the system is "remembering" something about how long it's been running for.

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