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Luicosas

@luicosas

Sometimes the rats in my brain come together and start yelling “YEARNING” and in trying to appease them I ask “FOR WHAT” but they are too small so all they can say is “YEARNING” which is a very big word for such a tiny creature, even collectively

I loved this visual so much I had to doodle it.

ratratratratrat

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I've been using nix and direnv to manage my programming stuff for a while now, and god damn it is magical

I can just tell my computer "hey I want a C compiler while I'm in this folder but not anywhere else" and it just does it. I don't even have to install it myself it's just there

actual wizardry

so it's like node_modules, only with the system's package manager?

does this mean it takes up just as much space as node_modules 0_0

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I've never used node, so I can't really comment on that comparison

nix can often take up a lot of space, since it places a lot of focus on ensuring that you have EXACTLY the right version of a dependency down to the exact contents

however:

  • nix packages are stored globally per machine, and identical packages are automatically detected and not rebuilt
  • there is a garbage collection system that automatically deletes packages that aren't used anymore
  • you can pin all of the packages you use to a specific revision of the standard package manager (nixpkgs) to mitigate the issue of dealing with multiple versions of the same package at the same time

aside from package installation, you can also use Nix as a universal build tool (make and build your own package) and even as a way to programmatically specify your computer's installed packages and configuration (this is what the "NixOS configuration" is).

cars have an odometer that displays distance, and a speedometer that displays the derivative of distance. we can go further. I want to see the second derivative and know exactly how hard I'm braking.

I demonstrate the 10 types of magic ✨

Chocolate guy this, chocolate guy that.

WHEN IS TUMBLR GOING TO JOIN ME IN COLLECTIVELY LOSING OUR SHIT OVER STOP-MO GUY?

I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING STOP-MO GUY FOR YEARS AND I CONTINUE TO SCREAM AT THE CASUAL DISREGARD OF REALITY.

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BASTARD

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explain to me how gears are machined!

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wohaohowhao. gears are impossibly difficult to fabricate. way, way beyond what people might expect looking at them. “oh, it is just a shape, it is simple” - imbeciles. morons

this will be VERY LONG and i am doing most of you idiots a favor by putting this here:

How does one even survive a math degree, this doesn’t seem right 💀

Unfortunately many of the things on this list are hard for varying reasons but if you can, they are helpful:

  • Don't stress too much about grades. If you're trying your best to learn, it'll probably be fine. Also, a B or two isn't going to wreck your chances of getting research experience, get into grad school, and definitely isn't going to impede on getting a job later.
  • Learn to be stubborn but also get a feel for telling if a path might be fruitful or not. It's a skill that takes time to develop but I guarantee you'll be better at it eventually.
  • Make friends with classmates. Collaboration on homework is borderline necessary and definitely makes things much more fun.
  • Go to office hours. Showing up with "I don't think I understanding this topic help?" is actually valid if the professor isn't very busy. If there are other students there, listen to the conversation and the chances it'll spark something is High.
  • Recognize it is really fucking hard. Struggling doesn't mean you're bad at it. It means you're learning and growing. Math genuinely is one of the harder majors at most universities (evidence is me and my friends taking junior+ level classes in random departments and being like, huh this is... not very hard or intense?)
  • Oh also take some fun classes outside the department (and similar topics). Perhaps some social sciences, humanities, or art. English and history are generally pretty tough on the humanities side and art takes up a lot of time though. Intro language classes also eat up a lot of time.

This is actually really helpful :,) thank you so much

I know we all have different skills and all and it's supposed to be complementary, but, people who can do math are so morbidly funny to me

I figure it must be like

Imagine being like only one of twelve people in your whole city who can read and write

And it's not just because everyone else is uneducated, most of them cannot even learn the sort of things you can learn. Or they could, in theory, but it frustrates them so much that they never make it past grade school reading tops, and they hate every second of it

And it's not a "luxury" skill, either, like your whole society needs the written word to function, and by extension, they need you. They need you for shit like reading labels and instruction manuals and writting 2 sentences letters, and they pay you handsomely for that, which is nice, but also feels absurd

You read a whole series of novels that rock your life and you can't even talk about it to your best friend because anything more complex than a picture book breaks their brain

Okay, so this is a hilarious thought, and not entirely untrue, but from my perspective it's more like:

being one of twelve people in my city who can read and write. When I bring up the fact that I like reading and writing to random people I meet, they either lose interest in talking to me or ask if I've made a deal with the devil to gain this knowledge. Occasionally people say, "Better you than me!" Reading and writing is, in theory, something people have to do in school, but most people never get beyond a second grade level, and their teachers tell them that anything above third-grade level is "hard." A lot of elementary school teachers say they chose to teach that level specifically because it didn't require much reading and writing (yes, I heard multiple elementary ed majors say they chose their major because it didn't require math back in my tutoring days. yes it was stressful.) As a reading/writing tutor, you spend hours trying to teach people to read, and first you have to break down a lifetime's worth of fear, because the alphabet was never explained properly, and they assume people who are "good at reading" just get it without trying.

The idea of finding beauty in the written word isn't even talked about until college.

Tutoring is bittersweet, because so many people are really good at reading once you find the right explanation. Some of them don't get the right explanation until they've spent years getting by on knowing how to write their names and tell coins apart. Their lives could have been so much easier with one decent teacher. and yes, when you mention that you know how to read, people assume that readers just, like, read street signs aloud for a living. The idea of doing anything more interesting with it doesn't compute. (Today an acquaintance told me that doing pure math was "a waste of time." He's a physics PhD student.) When you mention your new favorite novel to a friend, the nice friends ask you to explain like they're five, and at least try to sympathize. The not-so-nice ones tell you that learning to read at a second-grade level scarred them enough, thank you very much. Even picture books for kids aren't considered "fun;" they're just chores. Anyway, I made this sound sad, and it is, but it's more frustrating, because a ton of math concepts are beautiful and useful, but the way math is taught in our society just makes everyone hate it, and it really sucks to have people just. . . hate and fear your hobby on such a deeply ingrained level. But your simile is really good – the only difference is that it is an education problem, at least until calculus or so.

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fields of mathematics

number theory: The Queen of Mathematics, in that it takes a lot from other fields and provides little in return, and people are weirdly sentimental about it.

combinatorics: Somehow simultaneously the kind of people who get really excited about Martin Gardner puzzles and very serious no-nonsense types who don’t care about understanding why something is true as long as they can prove that it’s true.

algebraic geometry: Here’s an interesting metaphor, and here’s several thousand pages of work fleshing it out.

differential geometry: There’s a lot of really cool stuff built on top of a lot of boring technical details, but they frequently fill entire textbooks or courses full of just the boring stuff, and they seem to think students will find this interesting in itself rather than as a necessary prerequisite to something better. So there’s definitely something wrong with them.

category theory: They don’t really seem to understand that the point of generalizing a result is so that you can apply it to other situations.

differential equations: physicists

real analysis: What if we took the most boring parts of a proof and just spent all our time studying those?

point-set topology: See real analysis, but less relevant to the real world.

complex analysis: Sorcery. I thought it seemed like sorcery because I didn’t know much about it, but then I learned more, and now the stuff I learned just seems like sorcery that I know how to do.

algebraic topology: Some of them are part of a conspiracy with category theorists to take over mathematics. I’m pretty sure that most algebraic topologists aren’t involved in that, but I don’t really know what else they’re up to.

functional analysis: Like real analysis but with category theorists’ generalization fetish.

group theory: Probably masochists? It’s hard to imagine how else someone could be motivated to read a thousand-page paper, let alone write one.

operator algebras: Seems cool but I can’t understand a word of it, so I can’t be sure they’re not just bullshitting the whole thing.

commutative/homological algebra: Diagram chases are of the devil, and these people are his worshipers.

??? why was lawvere like this

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yeah so basically. I did a task on the computer. I wrote a script to make the computer do things for me. and it did them! for my task. holy shit. it's kind of addictive. I can see why you all like this.

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i love math. i hate math. i can do it all day, everyday. i cannot solve a single question. it's my favorite subject. I would rather kms than open the book. it's beautiful and everything makes sense and it's the best. it's fucking useless and nothing is logical and it's the worst. it's the loml. it's my arch nemesis.

me when Čech cohomology

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Here's a small sample of a compile_commands.json file that cmake just spit out for me:

What you're looking at is a single invocation of gcc. The entire file is just dozens and dozens of commands exactly like this. I was staring at it, slowly coming to the conclusion that Unix was a mistake, when I remembered a story my dad told me a while back.

You see, because of the way Google's infrastructure stack works, it is (or at least used to be) important for certain critical services to be able to start without relying on any kind of file system. In practice, that means they have to be fully configurable with only command-line flags. One such critical service is the Google Front End, the very first collection of servers hit by any request that finds itself anywhere in the sprawling behemoth of Google's namespace. Being both highly versatile and very performance sensitive, these servers have a lot of flags. Like, a lot of flags. Tens of thousands of them.

The problem with that, aside from the prima facie absurdity of it, is that the Linux kernel defines values called MAX_ARG_STRLEN and MAX_ARG_STRINGS which put limits on this sort of thing, limits far too puny for our needs. No problem though. Google uses its own fork of the Linux kernel anyway, they can just increase those values every time the flag list starts getting a bit too big for its britches. And indeed, that worked for a while, but it turns out those limits were there for a reason. Once MAX_ARG_STRLEN gets large enough, things elsewhere in the kernel begin to struggle, then break completely. Presumably these limitations could be fixed, but that's a lot of work, and that list of flags is only going to keep growing.

So, what to do? Well, let me tell you Google's solution, in four easy steps!

  • Step 1: Put all the flags in a flag file. Okay, that's logical, but I thought we couldn't rely on a fi-
  • Step 2: Compress the file. ...okay? How does that help-
  • Step 3: Base-64 encode the compressed binary. Oh. Oh no.
  • Step 4: Pass the base-64 encoded, compressed flag file to the process as a single flag.

At this point, I looked back down at my cmake-generated build commands and reminded myself that it can always be worse.