danidiaz
Joined 14 years ago
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productivedetour.blogspot.com
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Comment · 2 years ago
"ponderous pensées on human frailty by an apologetic autocrat"
From this article about a different emperor: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n04/christopher-kelly/a-...
Comment · 2 years ago
The memoir "Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria" by Kapka Kassabova (2008) covers similar ground. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3808716-street-without-a...
Comment · 2 years ago
I would also recommend the site "Science Fiction Ruminations": https://sciencefictionruminations.com/
Lots of thoughtful sf book reviews with a heavy (but not exclusive) focus on the New Wave.
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm not a mathematician, but I feel the "syntethic"/"analythic" distinction in mathematics is an interesting and useful concept.
"In modern mathematics, an analytic theory is one whose basic objects are defined in some other theory, whereas a synthetic theory is one whose basic objects are undefined terms given meaning by rules and axioms"—Michael Shulman
In programming terms, I guess "synthetic" mathematics feels a bit like programming to an abstract interface.
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/synthetic+mathematics
In the first part of this video Cédric Villani gives (in French) a nice explanation of the distinction: https://youtu.be/xzVk56EKBUI?t=258
Edit: an English explanation, also by Villani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIrLXbwyYXQ
Comment · 3 years ago
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
> However, even for these tasks, its performance has dropped measurably since the early 2060s and is now considered subpar compared to more recent uploads. This is primarily attributed to MMAcevedo's lack of understanding of the technological, social and political changes which have occurred in modern society since its creation in 2031. This phenomenon has also been observed in other uploads created after MMAcevedo, and is now referred to as context drift.
Comment · 3 years ago
> Purifying an (unnecessarily-) IO function into an ordinary function is a good exercise.
Agree! And I would add that you can "purify" a monadic function without having to rewrite it in non-monadic style. You can make it polymorphic over all monads and relegate the "impurity" to monadic functions that you pass as arguments/dependencies. A trivial example:
twice :: IO ()
twice = do
putStrLn "foo"
putStrLn "foo"
twice' :: forall m. m () -> m ()
twice' action = do
action
action
Haskell lets you express the idea of "program logic that only has effects through its dependencies" by being polymorphic over all monads.
Comment · 3 years ago
> Consequently, while al-Qazwīnī was wont to include tales about islands at the end of the world where women grew on trees and other dubious mirabilia, his purpose was lofty indeed.
Collections of marvels and extraordinary things were their own genre called ‘aǧā’ib. Here is an open-access example, "The Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands" https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46307
The classical world had a similar genre, paradoxography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxography
Comment · 3 years ago
There's also jOOQ for Java. https://www.jooq.org/
Comment · 3 years ago
Adult Swim's "Lords of Synth" comedy short contains a homage to Wendy Carlos in the form of a certain "Carla Wendos" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino
There's also the documentary "Sisters with transistors" about women pioneers of electronic music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-3hlzpV7M