Posts by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
(DIR) Post #ApbdGbmWPhSgKStal6 by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2024-12-31T13:02:50Z
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Some sad personal news: my father died last night, of pneumonia acquired while being treated for metastatic lung cancer. He was a month shy of his eightieth birthday, and went peacefully in his sleep - though sadly not at home, as he'd have wanted. He'd had a storied life, first as an Air Force pilot, then as an Air Force general, then as a GIS expert, then as a physics teacher for the Open University. He showed me the beauty of mathematics, and I'm sure he did the same for many others. He was arrested for spying on a school trip to Czechoslovakia in the Fifties (he was just a kid who liked taking pictures of planes, but it turns out they don't like that sort of thing in Communist countries); forty years later he went back to help the Czech Army integrate itself into the NATO command structure, and they showed him all their WW3 plans for a laugh. For a while he was the author of the longest Ada program in the world. He visited over sixty countries from Greenland to New Zealand, flew round the world several times, and was on a cruise in Alaska when his illness made itself known just under three months ago. He was presented with a CBE by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, I dedicated my PhD thesis to him, and he was Rickrolled at #BigMathsJam for going more than a minute over his five-minute slot. He is survived by his son (me), and my mother, his wife of 52 years. Gonna miss you, Dad.
(DIR) Post #ApbdkDlyF5wKYQl4ng by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2024-12-31T13:29:30Z
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@drgeraint thank you! And yes, he did 😁
(DIR) Post #AqqA2fQiqJRPVHouum by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-02-06T11:29:11Z
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@drgeraint Counterpoint: all of those things are hard to fix because our economy is in the toilet, and our economy is in the toilet because it's too hard to build anything! See https://ukfoundations.co/ . So yes, overcoming nimbyism *is* important.
(DIR) Post #AyUcWtys9VAQTj30MK by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-09-23T06:06:01Z
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@glitzersachen "current approaches won't scale to ASI" seems plausible (though not so plausible I want to bet the farm on it), but you totally lost me at "...and then there will be a fifty-year AI winter". I give it five years max after the current AI bubble bursts before the next one starts inflating.@darkuncle @regehr
(DIR) Post #AyUfi3x5if1sS4EBhQ by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-09-23T09:37:26Z
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@futurebird I agree that current LLMs are not conscious. But nor are they simple Markov chain text generators - are you familiar with Anthropic's work on transformer circuits? Plus, "current approaches" includes hybrid systems like AlphaGeometry which combine neural networks and symbolic theorem provers. Like I said, I don't think we'll get to AGI simply by iterating on what we have now. But I didn't think we'd see an AI get an IMO gold medal this soon either.@glitzersachen @darkuncle @regehr
(DIR) Post #AybUxGiza95WQw1oky by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-09-26T15:25:44Z
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> The best argument for ID cards [...] is that we have found ourselves in the worst of all possible worlds, with a strict demand for proof of identity but no systematised basis upon which to provide it.https://iandunt.substack.com/p/id-cards-are-a-terrible-terrible-a4cGood post by Ian Dunt about how introducing ID cards won't do anything to appease anti-immigrant sentiment. But in taking the justifications seriously, it misses the fact that the Home Office is *always* trying to introduce ID cards, and has been trying for decades. Only the public justification changes.I dunno. At least this system, which is based on opaque credentials and can answer questions like "is this person old enough to drink?" without giving away their actual birthday, is a huge improvement over the all-inclusive database that I got arrested protesting against in the Blair years.
(DIR) Post #Ayzh5oisvIDbRBrJcO by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-08T08:47:46Z
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How often do you use large language models *for code*?
(DIR) Post #Azdizhb6ZRrCxiz0Ou by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-27T15:20:52Z
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@DRMacIver @cfbolz @synlogic4242 I read the docs for the descriptor protocol once, but definitely wouldn't claim to understand it¹. Knowing it existed explained some magic features of libraries I'd used but never really thought about, but I'd happily used Python for years without being aware of it and can't see myself ever wanting to use it.¹ I mean, of course not, to understand it I'd have to at minimum write a bunch of programs using it.
(DIR) Post #Aze0jQraonBvbW5Qm0 by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-27T19:14:32Z
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@cfbolz @dabeaz @tartley @DRMacIver Interestingly/horribly, this hasn't always been the case: the first Python interpreter I tried this on was Python 3.7, when typing.NamedTuple was a class. The isinstance call still returned False, of course, because everything about named tuples is cursed.
(DIR) Post #AzlP1PpPAE92c0tHXs by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T15:27:23Z
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Higgledy-piggledyKing OzymandiasLies in the desertHalf-covered in sand."Look on my works!" he saysQuite optimistically:Nothing remains there, inHis antique land.
(DIR) Post #AzlP1RJZdXs5Ds0tCy by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T16:05:09Z
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Burning blinding sunReflects off half-sunk statueI for one despair.
(DIR) Post #AzlP1SPdYUJccxrFIW by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T16:06:12Z
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I have conqueredthe empirethat was inthe desertand which you were probably savingto be your eternal monumentForgive meit was boundlessso loneand so level
(DIR) Post #AztuLaxM9ObilFOKzQ by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-11-04T11:10:05Z
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Czechs! How do you feel about the use of "Czechia" versus "the Czech Republic" in English?(Boosts for reach appreciated)
(DIR) Post #B0GndPB8afNNq3KxeK by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-11-15T11:43:57Z
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I'd long vaguely wondered why the large gas-storage towers you see dotted around the UK were called "gasometers" - yes, the height of the tower shows you how much gas is in it, but that's not their primary function, surely? Turns out it was! They were originally invented as lab equipment (by Lavoisier, no less!) and scaled up for industrial use by the Scottish engineer William Murdoch. People have apparently been complaining about the name since the late 1700s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
(DIR) Post #B0XGcNIqj48w9v1Wdc by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-11-23T09:49:21Z
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The slides for my talk on dual numbers are at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Y_ZjVf5iuiWHI690SI0QhCdqBm94_Kf-RiQVNtUaZF8/edit?usp=drivesdk Not sure how much sense they'll make without my narration, but I'm not sure how much sense they made *with* it 😅 I'll try to get the video up on YouTube soon! #BigMathsJam #mathsjam
(DIR) Post #B0XGcOvAi4OLB3xe0e by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-11-23T09:52:59Z
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The extremely alert viewer may detect some slight similarity between my presentation of dual numbers and the one @dpiponi used in this post, where I first learned about them: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2005/07/automatic-differentiation.html?m=1#BigMathsJam #mathsjam
(DIR) Post #B0YHdIxceNzU5q3uVM by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-11-23T12:31:49Z
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@drgeraint yes, that's exactly it! Taking this idea to its logical extreme gives you "differentiable programming": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming
(DIR) Post #B16LEPWvNnHuViTV4K by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-12-10T09:15:53Z
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@drgeraint ooh! Ooh! I know this! It's because we've put a million layers of environmental review and public consultation in the way of building any goddamn infrastructure, ultimately harming the environment.
(DIR) Post #B16LEQvQCCTepywZtI by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-12-10T09:30:10Z
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@drgeraint the fact we're building submarine cables rather than overhead ones is telling - submarine cables cost a lot more (I want to say 10x?), take longer to build (there aren't many cable-laying ships in the world and they're all booked out years in advance) and can damage the seabed, but nobody has to look at them so it's much easier to get them approved.
(DIR) Post #B1NpnwBEHabUDjVCls by pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz
2025-12-12T14:03:23Z
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TIL the Octave programming language (an open-source clone of Matlab) was named after a person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Levenspiel