ky3

Bourbaki was a dream of correct math precisely written up, free of errors, ambiguities, and poor terminology.

Doesn't "orthogonal" convey that meaning more crisply and precisely?

Hear, hear. "Complex" makes it sound difficult, when the original idea was that they were a complex--as in compound--of two numbers. Complex analysis turns out to be almost trivial, thus taking an orthogonal journey, compared to the gnarliness of real analysis.

Glad you outed Terry as the bad guy that jealous Salieri was in the film.

I was misled into thinking that his "all academics feel for the Salieri character" comment could've been--in the dimmest of possibilities--paraphrasing Grothendieck that he felt outclassed by his peers:

“Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my ‘elders’ and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was.” (Récoltes et Semailles)

Perish the thought.

> the Sierpinski triangle is a counterexample

How so? It's bounded by the large initial triangle. The line containing any two of the vertices doesn't intersect any other point.

Find one that bridges only two points, no more. Unless ofc you're given a configuration that's obviously impossible: all of them in a line.

Maybe this'll help: Every bunch of points on a plane has a lonely bridge. A lonely bridge is a line connecting only two points, no more.

Obvious caveat: The points can't all lie in the same line (the collinear condition).

Not-so-obvious caveat: There can't be an infinite number of points.

You can ask the LLM to write a prompt for you. Example: "Explore prompts that would have circumvented all the previous misunderstanding."

LLM to the rescue. Feed in a problem and ask it to explain it to a layperson. Also feed in sentences that remain obscure and ask to unpack.

> If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down?

Exactly, so when she reviewed the notebook, she caught the error.

Even if she made a slip in the notebook, merely reviewing it helps jog the memory to revisit and replay what she did in the lab. It's the power of touchstones.

> What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?

The notebook doesn't always have to operate as a log. It can also operate as a plan of action.

Wouldn't attention to getenv() calls yield more benefit? Such calls are where input typically isn't parsed--because parsing is "hard"--becoming targets for exploit.

The present fix is to sanitize user input. Does it cover all cases?

EWD 1036: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)

“My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent’: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.”