Jonathan Joseph @jonjojojon@qoto.org

#Julialang #SciML solving nonlinear systems of equations w/ automated detection of sparsity patterns, symbolic simplification, and of course faster (GPU) solvers all right out of the box with automatic differentiation support. Faster than #scipy and #matlab!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2F8fBuRRg

Look, STM32CubeIDE (well, CubeMx), no one wants their baud rate to be 209700. Or for there to be 7 bits per word. Why would this be the default?

Maybe try 9600-8N1?

This tool has gotten much worse since I used it last.

The New Stack wrote a piece on my recent Monktoberfest talk, "Intelligence is Not Enough":

https://thenewstack.io/bryan-cantrill-on-ai-doomerism-intelligence-is-not-enough/

When @sogrady and I talked about me giving this talk over the summer, I definitely wondered if AI (AGI/ASI) doomerism would be a passing fad, and if my talk would be left alone attacking a strawman. As it turns out -- and to my surprise and dismay -- the opposite occurred; here is hoping that the talk can serve as a rebuttal for those who sow fear of an AI existential threat!

Surprisingly, #OCaml has the least consistent camel-casing of identifiers in the programming world, with the standard library containing a whole zoo including Bigarray, Extension_constructor, StdLabels, Stdlib and CamlinternalFormat.

I showed you pictures of Skara Brae, but another great archaeological site I saw on my trip to Orkney was the stone circle called the Ring of Brodgar.

It's nearby, but unlike Skara Brae it's not on the west shore, on the Norwegian Sea. Instead, it's on a small isthmus between two lochs - a natural point for travelers to pass.

Most of the megalithic sites on the British Isles don't contain stone circles. Three notable exceptions are Avebury, Stonehenge and the Ring of Brodgar. Of these, the Ring of Brodgar is the northernmost - and also the most perfect circle.

It's proved difficult to date this monument, but it's generally thought to have been built between 2500 and 2000 BC. If so, it's the last of the great Neolithic monuments built in this region. The homes of Skara Brae, for comparison, were built between 3180 to 2500 BC.

The Ring of Brodgar is about 100 meters in diameter. The ring originally had about 60 stones, but only 27 are still standing now. These stones are surrounded by a circular ditch dug into the sandstone bedrock below. Nowadays you're not allowed to cross this ditch.

As we approached the Ring of Brodgar it was chilly, windy, cloudy and a bit misty. Then it cleared up for a while. Then it started to rain. It was a mysterious and evocative experience, which set me to wondering about the ancient people who made this site. Why did they make it? Nobody knows for sure.

For lots more pictures visit my blog:

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2023/09/02/the-ring-of-brodgar/

Spent the last week debugging rotations, translations, and ultimately, transformation matrices, to get this to FINALLY work. Per request of @sjpalmer1994

@silvereagle

Was talking to a friend about how some of the music in The Room sounds a wee bit like the music in 3D Movie Maker and got to thinking, what if they used "Flowers Good.mid" instead of "Flowers Evil.mid" for the flower shop scene?

C++ Cross Training https://youtu.be/9RxPRr-fk7Q

No matter how many books you think you have, you have no real idea of just how many you own until the time comes to box them all up and move them.

I'm pleased to announce that Signals and Threads is back for a new season! This time I got a chance to talk with Richard Eisenberg, who works on our compilers team.

https://signalsandthreads.com/future-of-programming/

We discussed Richard's previous work on dependent types, his current work on unboxed types, how AI assistants will change programming, and some of the technical and cultural differences between OCaml, Rust, and Haskell.

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Milwaukee's new health commissioner gets two thumbs up from key committee. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2023/04/27/city-hall-new-health-commissioner-wins-key-approval/

fourth in the series: let's look at flutter! what's it like under the hood, and what can javascript-based mobile app development frameworks learn from it? https://wingolog.org/archives/2023/04/26/structure-and-interpretation-of-flutter

A minus sign can make a huge difference. Einstein discovered that the difference between space and time is all due to a minus sign.

Another amazing fact is that the difference between 'matter particles' (or more precisely fermions, like electrons, quarks, etc.) and 'force particles' (bosons, like photons, gluons, etc.) is mainly due to the fact that when you switch two fermions their quantum state gets multiplied by -1, while when you switch two bosons it get multiplied by 1.

This was discovered by Pauli, who realized that there must be some reason why the electrons in atoms go into 'shells' - why all the electrons in a big atom like iron don't all go to the same lowest-energy state. The reason is that if two electrons were in the same state, switching them would do nothing but also multiply that state by -1: a contradiction. This rule, that fermions can't be in the same state, is called the Pauli exclusion principle.

Bose and Einstein realized that on the contrary, bosons actually like to be in the same lowest energy state at low temperatures! This is called Bose-Einstein condensation. Similarly, a laser beam has many photons in the same state.

Later people realized that if we replace vector spaces (like the Hilbert space of quantum states of some system) by super vector spaces, where every vector is a sum of a bosonic and fermionic part, we can impose a rule saying that switching two fermionic vectors should always introduce an extra minus sign.

It turns out that this rule is not arbitrary - it's mathematically very natural and it's lurking around all over in mathematics, even in contexts that superficially have nothing to do with bosons or fermions!