It depends on the time. Twenty or thirty years most software was not security-oriented. Nowadays, everything is online and therefore everything needs to be vigilant about security.
> One bit stands out to me: to better understand, Scholz will work the problem backwards. Sometimes that strategy is just so spot on.
In David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity, he argues, that the purpose of science is not to merely predict or to model the world, but to explain it. And he gives in my opinion convincing arguments, why a better explanation is needed to advance science. Therefore, he deduces that pure empiricism has failed. Because no matter how much data you have gathered, an explanation does not follow from it. The explanation is always an insight the scientist has to contribute. Then it is open to scrutiny by criticism or experiments.
I guess he would argue the same is true for mathematicians. Merely constructing proofs to arrive at theorem, is of no intrinsic value, if it doesn't spark an idea of a more elegant formalism that corresponds to a simpler and even more far reaching explanation.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who is intellectually curious, not only about epistemology.
Many high stakes problems are blocked by a specific insight, and once known, the people who are highly invested in those problems won't put sufficient care into whether we've built a supporting framework of ergonomic theory for humans.
That's not to say there isn't value in building mathematical insight for humans, just that there is a goldmine and a lot of people know what to do with gold, even if they don't understand the ecosystem surrounding the gold.
True, but shortsighted. If we continue to pile proofs and new theorems on top of each other without taking care of making those new abstractions understandable, then we will limit our reach. Even though AI might be able to progress further.
The web page "Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?" [1] convinced me almost 20 years ago to give it a try. Already then, it looked like an outdated mode of editing text, but I was wrong.
This is a indeed an important reminder that there is still progress to be made in the realm of software development. By raising the bar of abstractions, perhaps by guiding agents toward them, we might be able to follow along better. It is too tempting to take allow the growing capabilities of ai to lower the standards on software developmenbt.
Recital 64: The controller should use all reasonable measures to verify the
identity of a data subject who requests access, in particular in the context
of online services and online identifiers.
Yes someone drools out this particular version of "because GDPR!" enough I know exactly where to look for the rebuttal.
Similar, to the time Tesla was fucked, because they wanted to sell EVs when there was neither demand nor charging infra. Or when SpaceX wanted to build a rocket that could land on legs, whereas every wannabe rocket scientists knew that to be impossible.
Yes, Elon's time tables are very aggressive. But that is by design. And FSD is here, although it took much longer than anticipated, no competitor caught up.
herdr has good, not perfect, support to restart a session after a server reboot. It can automatically restart an agent cli while resuming the session they were running before the reboot.
Skipping to learn long division by hand because you'll always have a calculator (or better a smartphone at hand) is like going to a gym with a forklift. It is faster to lift the weights, but it kinda defeats the purpose.
Learning to do long division by hand trains the mind. It prepares you to understand polynomial division. It teaches you the deep connection of division and subtraction. So, mastering it should be part of the curriculum. As soon as it is truly mastered, it should be allowed to use a calculator.
I think there is also an argument for general numeracy as a life skill. Lots of people I run into just have no intuitive sense of how numbers work and how to calculate roughly.
The number of people that cannot calculate a tip in their head, or have a basic grasp of how interest works is constantly shocking to me. Yeah, we all carry calculators around, but you should be able to reason about numbers enough to know when an entry error has been made on a calculator
(Shrug) Every time a higher level of abstraction becomes available, a lower one loses importance. That's how it's worked for humanity since the dawn of recorded history. As others have pointed out, the ancient Greek scholars had the same baseless fears.
I don't think I've ever had to do polynomial division by hand. It comes up in control theory and a few other subfields, obviously including mathematics itself, but for me it's always been handled by software. It's safe to say that any given clanker will have better odds of doing it right than I will.
People love to cite the Phaedrus (although usually they just cite Plato) as a reason for why we should discard the warnings or fears about the cognitive effects of new technology as baseless.
But I think that this is foolish. Firstly, the fears weren't baseless! There's no question that the replacement of an oral culture by a literate culture meant the loss of certain cognitive skills for some people.
But more importantly, even if those fears were baseless, a fear in the past being baseless does not mean a similar one in the present is baseless. From our vantage point we can see the benefits of a literate society, but are we confident that what comes next will be as beneficial? Maybe it will be far more beneficial than literacy was, or maybe it will heighten inequalities to feudal levels. Either way, it's moving at a much more rapid pace than the spread of literacy, so we have much less time to reflect. It pays to be prudent here.
The point I tried to make wasn't that we still need to be able to do everything by hand. My point is more that we need to develop our brains. And for that we need training excercises. Similar to excercises in the gym. I doubt anybody encountered a barbell in real life outside the gym. Yet it is good tool to develop muscles. Math is an excellent tool to develop certain aspects of the brain.
I am wondering why people are so hyped about Ghostty? I gave it recently a try coming from kitty. And I had to configure stuff that worked out of the box with kitty, like Ctrl-Enter support and other key combos for agent harnesses. I like the development model of ghostt. And the developer really cares about creating great building blocks, e.g libghostty. But I am a bit underwhelmed.
I feel like the ghostty hype make more sense as excitement around the direction of terminal infra than a claim it is the one true terminal. Kitty's fine and if you are happy with it there's probably no good reason to switch.
Tangentially I also kind of feel like there is some level of deification of Mitchell's products but that's a diff topic.
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