Posts by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
(DIR) Post #Ar8srqikHOgxssp0oS by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-15T12:16:31Z
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@futurebird Death cult monkeys with a death wish. "Christian" eschatology has already caused and will continue to cause an absolutely mind-boggling amount of harm.
(DIR) Post #Ar8vcckcEjOO4n80i8 by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-15T12:47:20Z
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@futurebird I wrote software at the request of my brother, it was used from 2013-2018 to answer E911 calls in Parke County Indiana, he never paid me, then he sued me claiming me as his "employee" that he admits in court to never paying a penny.To be clear, not only has he confessed to criminal violations of Indiana minimum wage law under penalty of perjury as a matter of public record, he has also plainly committed perjury, fraud, blackmail, and labor trafficking.Under no circumstances will I have anything to do with him again unless he first obtains a felony criminal conviction and serves multiple years in prison.
(DIR) Post #ArHD50LnL8YNrZJghs by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-19T12:40:40Z
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@futurebird I pretty much don't think when I touch type.I spent a lot of time playing with computers as a child, so I got quite good at hunt-and-peck typing. Then I had a keyboarding class in junior high and I've consistently touch-typed ever since.Moving to my Kinesis Advantage 2 was a fairly painful adjustment. Honestly learning the new locations for the arrow keys was probably worst.My dream input device would probably be a lightly modified Advantage 2 with a lot of additional things around it.
(DIR) Post #ArHDa5nl7gubkKDjKS by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-19T12:35:44Z
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@shapr @futurebird Shae this concept is represented fairly prominently in my "Tools of Math Construction" study guide/lit review thingy. Specifically it does recommend "The Knowledge Illusion" by Sloman and Fernbach, which specifically mentions the issue of asking people to draw bicycles.
(DIR) Post #ArJsYmrQXmuV9KLtey by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-20T18:50:06Z
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@mcc I would specifically recommend against RCV:http://zesty.ca/voting/sim
(DIR) Post #ArNeBcAHWVw0af4EO8 by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-22T15:12:41Z
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@futurebird something I think about some is what challenges could a particular galaxy pose for life that the Milky Way does not?For example, if there's a tilted quasar blasting radiation directly into the galactic plane, that might have a very significant effect on the development of life (or not) in that galaxy. Also how does life and technology vary relative to the metallicity available?
(DIR) Post #ArSJKoNyKUPtqroZf6 by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-02-24T21:12:36Z
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@futurebird There's always been a small minority of people who get overly taken in with say, Eliza and other ancient chatbots whose nonsense isn't anywhere nearly as plausible.Now that the language generation is much more consistently plausible, I guess in retrospect it doesn't surprise me that much that so many more people would get taken in so easliy.
(DIR) Post #AsNm90qP7XvXPWMO2q by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-03-24T14:33:51Z
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@futurebird @jmcrookston I've found that I usually have an advantage on lawyers in terms of logic and analytical philosophy, a consequence of being a software engineer and mathematician.On the other hand, I've met lawyers whom I wouldn't give a passing grade to in Phil 101: Introduction to Logic. And theoretically by the the bar rules, any lawyer _should_ be functionally conversant with Phil 101-level logical arguments.
(DIR) Post #AsxtAtlnTTfwqInfDU by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-04-11T00:42:19Z
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@futurebird why would larger triples help construct more accurate right triangles? I mean, I suppose it might depend on other factors, but my intuition says that there'd be a lot of merit to sticking to a 3-4-5.
(DIR) Post #AttlAYIWsaLMXDkkbI by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-05-08T22:45:53Z
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@futurebird Yes, most large datacenters have I'm sure many metric shittons of ethernet cables in them. Usually a lot of work goes into cable management, otherwise thingswould be totally out of control.There are companies that have even designed large compute clusters in clever ways to minimize cable length, which minimizes latency and saves money and effort in wiring.There's often a fair bit of fiber optic cables too, but there's tradeoffs in terms of cost. Also, it takes an incredibly beefy server to be able to make much use of the very high bandwidths that fiber optics provide, so sometimes application servers are copper to switches, which aggregate multiple servers together into one very high bandwidth fiber optic backbone link.
(DIR) Post #AuEhCkEJ2g4VGpWn1E by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-05-19T01:10:22Z
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@futurebird Have you ever seen Zoe Bee's "In Defense of Inefficiency"? Very much relevant to any reasonable discussion of statistics, this is the type of thing I which more "techies" were exposed to:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-_rK0KkB6k
(DIR) Post #Av70kFl3MFfWBHwT8y by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-06-14T06:03:44Z
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@futurebird And yet it's "shear force", I never knew it really meant sheep force!
(DIR) Post #AvGNdpNGaLxnz6MPS4 by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-06-17T14:32:07Z
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@jakelazaroffMy first question is, why do E2EE CRDTs require homomorphic encryption?I'm not intimately familiar with the precise details of CRDTs, but I don't see why this would be the case. I mean, a major application for them is building redundant clusters that need not have a single source of truth, and communicate via message passing.Why can't this problem be solved by simply having a e2ee messaging server to handle the connectivity and latency issues? Before you log off for the night, your laptop sends your E2EE update to the server, which is then available for your friend to download and process once they log in.This is interesting though, I don't know much about HE but it is the primary threat model of my work on self-documenting cryptography.
(DIR) Post #AvGYEOITDiVwGIBs1Y by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-06-18T20:31:24Z
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@lyyn @jakelazaroff Incidentally, if somebody wants to say, take the sample SHA256 implementation provided with TFHE-rs and benchmark how long it takes to compute one (or a few) SHA256 blocks inside homomorphic encryption, I would gladly cite your work in this design document:https://github.com/auth-global/self-documenting-cryptography/blob/prerelease/design-documents/g3pb2.md
(DIR) Post #AvevNm2buLNycd4mbw by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-06-30T14:43:50Z
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@futurebird Three things that come to my mind are purely functional programming, continuations, and continued fractions.As far as I know, continuations and continued fractions aren't related to each other in any particularly interesting way. But I've also been toying with the two concepts for decades.But I've also built my philosophy of math education based around my first "aha" moment with continued fractions.I'd consider continuations considerably more niche, but it's a very popular niche.
(DIR) Post #Awyn3mSriA5nAsJ46q by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-08-09T02:36:53Z
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@futurebird I'm convinced that cats tend to have a little extra affinity for other cats with similar fur coloration.You can obviously find exceptions in both directions, but both me and my cousin have made remarks about it.
(DIR) Post #B0JimAcMBFaEzKJCDY by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2025-11-16T22:34:07Z
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@ricci I usually get it right, but yeah I always have to think about it for a moment and guess. Definitely not well-chosen language.I'd prefer something like "book" versus "legal pad" orientation. Then I'd never have to think about which one to choose.
(DIR) Post #B2IHjI0yIZxpa56SVk by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2026-01-15T01:40:36Z
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@futurebird Actually I have a (very undeveloped) concept of a lesson with respect to the symmetry group of the square.Basically, after the class has been introduced at least to the intuitive approach to the symmetry group of the square, you give them a problem where they have to "solve" a substitution cipher from {a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h} or whatever to the symmetry group of the square, given the multiplication table of that substitution cipher.The lesson here is that this problem doesn't have a single unambiguous answer: rather you can solve the substitution cipher for a few elements like the identity element and the "rotate by 180 degrees" element, but you can only classify the rest of the substitution cipher up to the symmetry group of the symmetry group of the square, more technically known as the automorphisms of D_4.I was thinking maybe there's an angle to develop as like an alien linguist as part of a Star Trek science team, and perhaps even make it a trick question by making it seem like they are expected to find the one "true" solution.It turns out that the automorphisms of D_4 is isomorphic to D_4, which is definitely a very yo dawg moment, but it turns out this is very much accidental. Groups G that are isomorphic to their own automorphism group include all complete groups, but this is one of a handful of sporadic exceptions of a group that is not complete but also isomorphic to its automorphism group. This includes D_4, D_6, D_∞, and may include a few more unknown examples.It turns out that all the symmetric groups (i.e. groups of permutations of n elements) are complete except for n=2 and n=6. The n=6 exception actually pretty interesting, and @johncarlosbaez likes to talk about it.https://github.com/constructive-symmetry/constructive-symmetry/tree/master/D002_Book_of_Algebrahttps://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/six.html
(DIR) Post #B2IJpioVm09QLITCLY by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2026-01-15T02:04:11Z
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@futurebird @johncarlosbaez addition table, multiplication table, it doesn't matter, its an abstract operation. But yeah, I do call it "addition", not multiplication, at least when introducing this stuff.I think I have a reasonably simple angle for introducing the symmetry group of the square, and that's (imperfectly) represented in the repo as it currently exists.I have somewhat developed ideas about how to move from the intuitive approach of my mechanical number line for D_4 to implementing the arithmetic of D_4 using pencil-and-paper calculations. Namely, I think the semidirect product, the 2x2 integer matrix approach, and the permutation-based (i.e. subgroup of S_4) approach are particularly notable.I don't know where I'd place the lesson on automorphisms, as honestly it need not depend on anything other than the intuitive approach. On the other hand, I'd probably want to prioritize at least one or two of the pencil-and-paper approaches to performing addition in D_4.
(DIR) Post #B2MZKMFbzH3JHq3HpQ by leon_p_smith@ioc.exchange
2026-01-17T03:14:50Z
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@futurebird @johncarlosbaez Anyway, my point is that "decoding alien hieroglyphs" is actually a pretty good way to start to get an intuition for what an automorphism is.For example, if you were given all the alien hieroglyphs that correspond to their integers, and given access only to their addition table, then you'd be able to figure out what 0 is, as any identity must be unique, if it exists. Similarly you'll be able to figure out which two hieroglyphs correspond to ±1, in the sense that you could call one of them "1 up" and "1 down", and from there figure out what "2 up" and "3 down" are, but you'll never be able to decide if "up" correponds to positive and "down" corresponds to negative, or vice-versa.This intuition is captured by the fact that the group of integers under addition has exactly one non-trivial automorphism: we can negate everything everywhere and things will still work out. (And in fact, this is the only such change that is guaranteed to work perfectly in all cases.)Of course, if you then gain access to the alien's multiplication table, you can multiply "1 up" by "1 up", and that answer will correspond to the positive direction. Thus we can fully decode the alien's integers, which corresponds to the fact that the ring of integers exhibits only the identity automorphism: when multiplication is involved, we can't just flip everything's sign and expect things to work out.This intuition is a bit hard to operationalize, though, as the addition tables are infinitely large. In reality, if the alien heiroglyphs are truly capable of expressing arbitrarily large members of an infinite set, such as the rational numbers, the notation must involve some regularity. That regularity can provide insight into the alien's interpretation of their rationals in ways that don't correspond to what could be learned from their operation tables alone.The automorphisms of the group of rationals under addition correspond to multiplying by a non-zero rational number, capturing the intuition that you'll never be able to definitively decode the scale of the alien's unit of measurement from the addition table alone. But if you see something like 1/10000, you can guess it's probably not the unit, versus something much simpler like 1/1.However, the field of rationals exhibit only the trivial automorphism, meaning that you could fully decode alien rationals from their addition and multiplication table.Switching to a finite system avoids these complications, and also is capable of providing much more interesting examples of automorphism groups than your more widely-appreicated number systems can.