eastWestMath

Is this some flavour of groupoids symmetry?

I was in a PLT group in grad school going into robotics. I could spend all day ranting about how Python is just completely unsuitable for professional software development. Even something like F# would be an enormous improvement.

As a police officer you also typically have a high school education, and your idea of whether or not something is constitutional carries little to no weight.

I used to be very optimistic about Julia, but my enthusiasm has really cooled off the last year. I find JAX+jax_dataclasses gives me 90% of what I wanted from Julia (a nice monad library that is compatible with jit’ed code and the ability to cache compiled code would make it a solidly better language).

These are all, of course, things one should learn in an algorithms class.

Yeah I’ve always been a bit leery of code competitions. I saw a lot of undergrads spend a lot of effort on these contests, and I was never convinced it was the best use of their time (especially because the university I did my graduate studies at had a professor who put a lot of effort into running the competitive programming club).

I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!

> Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, Lion (EvoLved Sign Momentum).

Come on now

I didn’t make it past that point, I got confused about how such meaningless dreck was at number 2(!) on my feed.

Mods may want to take a peek if the author used a few sock puppets to give this post a push...

Yeah, it’s spending a lot of money to start a lab that:

- will probably be stonewalled out of any collaboration with reputable universities (because his reputation is so toxic),

- will have trouble attracting talent (because his reputation is so toxic),

- people will be ready to believe any sort of accusation of impropriety coming out of that lab from sexual harassment to more general academic fraud (because his reputation is so toxic).

The paper is absolutely a construction on categories.

“I’ve discovered a new thing about Y in X’s! Oh, no I haven't actually looked at the X literature about Y.” This is hardly specific to category theory.

My issue is that I can’t see a cursory literature review into the established category literature on these methods - how do they even know they have something new/novel if they haven't checked?

This is a bit like the recent news about the “ML discovered a new fast matrix multiplication” press push out of Google, where researchers in the field just sort of rolled their eyes.

Oh, I’m talking about the paper they’re hyping up. I’m just not terribly impressed, and I think if was written by people at UCSD instead of Harvard nobody would have even noticed it.

Coming from category theory, and having followed the work studying probability theory categorically (e.g. Fritz, Perrone, Lucyshyn-Wright’s stuff, Leinster’s notion of the magnitude of a category), is this actually interesting? The actual category theory seems pretty rudimentary, and I’m not sure if they’ve invented anything new on that side (they don’t reference any of the authors I’ve mentioned, so it doesn’t seem like there was much scholarship on that end).

It feels like Quanta just takes press releases from a few big departments and asks a writer to get a few quotes to flesh out an article.