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That brought nice memories of having my Casio Data Bank in the 80s and feeling like the coolest kid in school. It looked so futuristic and slick :) I remember spending quite a bit some time entering the phone numbers of my friends and relatives.

I had been using LaTeX for 25 years. I gave it a try recently to write a technical paper and I was blown away. I saved so much time. The immediate feedback and the advanced features were impressive. I had to include a budget proposal in one of the chapters and I was able to create a quick script that read a csv file with the different concepts and costs. I would modify the contents of the csv file and the document would update right away. I didn't have to recompile the document as I used to do with LaTeX... the results were there, right away, beautifully formatted. I am very impressed and will definitely consider doing more work with Typst.

I used to live near a high-traffic road that was built with cobblestones. It probably had decades of having been built and it was horrible. I conjecture that due to soil expansion due to changes in moisture (no snow, but periods of dry and rain seasons), and therefore, the road was very bumpy (think of multiscale bumps) and it was extremely uncomfortable to drive on it. Everybody talked about how much they hated that road, but there were no good alternatives.

I think the author underestimates the amount of warping in the underlying soil in some places. I'm sure it isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, but I agree it should be considered for suitable places.

I'd love to buy more heirloom tomatoes. The flavor is great. The problem is that often they're like 3 USD for a single large tomato in my supermarket :(

A dear friend of mine that works at a very large tech company has frequent (many times a week) meetings at ungodly hours (such as 7am AND 11pm) because of time zone differences with other teams in different parts of the world. My friend says that he's not surprised in today's global framework, especially with large enterprises and claims that looking for another, less-intense job would be futile because it is probably like that everywhere, especially with large tech companies. I claim that he's gotten used to this abuse that it is not as widespread as he thinks.

I think some of these meetings might be important enough to warrant having one occasionally, but not as an almost-daily phenomenon.

Any similar experiences? I'm not in the software dev/engineering world so I'm not as well informed in the matter; however I'd be very surprised if a majority of people would accept such working conditions that are very adverse to a healthy work-life balance.

When my son was about 5 months old, he was crawling in the bathroom floor while I was getting dressed in the adjacent walk-in closet. He was playing with the closet door and closed it. I didn't think much of it, but then I noticed that he had also opened a drawer which prevented me from opening the door from the closet (terrible apartment design!). I was stuck in the closet alone, without my phone, unable to get out. I panicked a little bit since it was early in the day and my spouse wouldn't return in about 10 hours. Long story short, I McGyver'ed my way out thanks to a wire hanger that I found in the closet: I straightened it and used it to push the drawer back in through the tiny slit that was left through the door and the frame. I used to hate wire hangers too, now I make sure I always have a few in every closet, just in case, you never know :)

Also, there is evidence that there might be some hidden meta-language on humans as well from studies on how bilingual people/polyglots speak, code-switch, translate, etc.

I grew up consuming movies and TV shows with subtitles so it has never bothered me. My theory is that if you're not used to them, then they are really annoying. Most of my American friends do not like them.

There is something about watching a movie/show in its original language that you cannot understand. I think its awesome to be immersed in a different world, getting the sounds, inflections, etc from a different language of yours. I will always prefer subtitles to dubbed versions if possible.

I understand some people don't, but I think it's just a matter of being exposed to it. And probably the younger, the better.

It depends a lot of the problem. For a general least squares solution of the Ax=b problem, is your A matrix dense, sparse, structured? Do you need to solve it very accurately or just approximately? Are you going to be using this over and over with the same A but different b's? In that case, you may profit from a one time Cholesky factorization that can be used over and over very quickly. Is your linear operator A explicit (as in you can actually inspect the matrix) or is it a linear operator function in which you can only see the result of A(x) (and its adjoint A_adj(y)) ? In this case, you cannot use common factorizations (QR, cholesky, svd) but will have to use iterative methods (ie. Krylov space methods).

There's a whole branch in applied math that's called numerical linear algebra and deals with all these kinds of situations. One of the most important results is that you should almost never do an explicit computation of the inverse of a matrix. It is expensive and can be highly unstable. If you ever see a A\b or pinv(A)*b in somebody's code, it should raise a big red flag.

They are indeed concise and beautiful, but some of the implementations I checked are quite naïve. They're great for academic purposes and for some simple problems they will work just fine, but I would advise against using them for real-world problems.

For instance, for some of the regression algorithms the pseudo-inverse of the matrix is used to solve the normal equations. Again, for small, well-behaved problems it is OK, but for larger scale, less well-behaved problems, it is actually dangerous (numerical instabilities and other issues). There are better, faster, more stable approaches. (PhD in Applied Math here)

BTW, I have been using Julia for work for several years now and I think it is a fantastic language for scientific computing. For those who use Matlab/Numpy regularly, you should definitely check it out.

When progress bars are not useful it is because the underlying problem is hard to extrapolate faithfully. If you are doing just a few tasks where each one takes a significant different time to execute, it will be hard to estimate. More often than not, they work fine, IMO. When they don't, it is because for that particular problem it is genuinely hard to do. It isn't programmer's laziness, I think, in most cases.