I strongly agree with your basic idea but I am currently studying maths part-time and for me personally, I love using an iPad for writing maths because of cut/paste and the ability to drag things around to make space on the page. It really helps me to do things in a way that’s clear. When I do things with pencil and paper I spend a huge amount of time erasing things, crossing out, adding little caret and then squeezing little extra bits that I forgot earlier between two lines “…and f is continuous on [-1,1]…” etc.
I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on.
> Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
Whenever you say "nobody would be that stupid" you have to pause and take a deep breath and realise that however dumb something is, there are for sure people who are stupid enough to do it.
Example 1 from personal experience: I was at my aunt's house and she had to rush a friend's husband to get medical help because he had drilled a hole in his own stomach with a hand drill while trying to put up a bookshelf.
The friend had been reading a book on medieval medicine so (rather than rushing her husband immediately to hospital) decided to try a medieval remedy on him so fed him some soup to see whether (in line with the medieval diagnostic routine) she could smell it after he had eaten it. She could indeed, because it dribbled out of the hole he had drilled in his stomach.
Now. You might reasonably say: "Noone would be so dumb as to drill a hole in their own stomach" or indeed "noone would be so dumb as to see a loved one who had drilled a hole in themselves and decide to feed them soup" but I can tell you from direct personal experience there are people dumb enough to do this.
Example 2 from personal experience[1]: A friend of my dad who was a highly capable chemical engineer and generally very practical guy (eg he made a motorcycle for his kids to play on using salvaged parts including a lawnmower engine and a frame he welded together himself) was a hobby parachutist. He broke his spine because he decided to modify his parachute himself on his wife's sewing machine in spite of having no previous sewing experience.
However dumb something is, there are people dumb enough to do it and even otherwise smart people have blind spots that make them incredibly dumb under the right circumstances.
[1] Just in case you think smart people can't do incredibly dumb things.
Reminds me of safety trainings where they show machine-shop accidents or people nailing themselves with an air-gun. It happens more than we think and is gruesome. Just a couple months ago saw a Dewalt framing nailer recall posted at home depot for accidental discharges without the trigger being held.
Not the same as drilling into your stomach - and I see a black comedy element - but can't help but wince and cringe at the thought of it all and it's not genuinely funny to me.
The drilling into oneself is not funny. The feeding an obviously seriously injured person soup to deduce the severity of their illness is funny as hell to me
> Whenever you say "nobody would be that stupid" you have to pause and take a deep breath and realise that however dumb something is, there are for sure people who are stupid enough to do it.
Long ago, I graduated from a police academy. One of the things taught was that crooks, while clever at finding ways to make money, are rather unclever ("stupid" if you will) at performing that task. Which is why so many are caught.
The smart engineer who over-estimated his ability with sewing is a tragic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I'm reminded of the Dunning Kruger paper [0]:
> In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.
I think we often underestimate the intelligence of the criminal population for two main reasons.
1. The dumbest ones are most likely to be caught and have their stories told.
2. Law Enforcement often gets frustrated at chasing the smarter ones and use illegal methods catching them and the real story doesn’t come out in court.
Near as I can tell Luigi nullified all his carefully planned evasion and escape routing by deciding at the last minute he really needed a coffee from the Starbucks across the street from where he was about to shoot his victim and didn't keep his hoody up. If he'd worn a long-billed baseball cap, dark glasses, kept his hoody up and skipped Starbucks he'd probably never have been caught.
His evasion and escape plan was actually pretty good and he put a lot of effort into being hard to trace by arriving and departing NYC via bus and staying in a hostel, which makes it surprising he screwed up the easiest and most obvious things.
I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but any competent criminal defense attorney (like a SMART criminal would have) would go to town on illegally obtained evidence. I'm not saying cops don't do warrantless searches/taps/etc., to gather unofficial clues, but if they can't get real evidence that stands up under scrutiny, the criminal walks.
I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.
I don't think 'going to town on illegally obtained evidence' works as often as you believe it does [0, 1].
And think back - how many people went to jail for national and/or international scale warrantless wiretapping? How did we, as a nation, respond to Snowden's revelations?
> I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.
There are people on death row in the US even after being proven innocent and ordered to go free. Dignity in Ink [2] present similar cases every day - they're never going to run out of material.
0 - A major DOJ/GAO-era federal study found that illegal search/seizure issues accounted for about 0.4% of declined federal prosecutions and roughly 0.7% of dismissed cases after prosecution began. - https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/84544NCJRS.pdf
1 - Another study across seven jurisdictions found motions to suppress succeeded in under 1% of warrant cases, and only 1.5% of defendants went free because of successful suppression motions. - https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/search-warrants-mot...
Parallel construction is when they use illegally obtained evidence to construct a separate set of ostensibly legitimate evidence. Like, an illegal wiretap might lead to someone being in the right place at the right time to witness a crime.
> Law Enforcement often gets frustrated at chasing the smarter ones
and gives up, moving on to easier prey - and ideally getting them to plead to the other crimes I can't solve as part of a nice plea deal. Great for the stats.
On the other hand, smart people with criminal intent are more likely to find legal ways to profit. Why steal a hundred bucks from somebody when you can figure out how to steal a few bucks from millions and your only punishment is paying a fraction of your profit in fines.
The really smart ones leave people wondering if a crime really happened at all. It doesn't even need to be Oceans 11/12/n++, it can be simply "are you even sure the money is missing?"
I mean, you see smart people all over the world talking to imaginary, supernatural, all powerfull beings asking for favors via prayers, like that would have any effect on their lives.
Prayer is more than begging favors from imaginary friends, even if that is the stereotype and there is some truth in it. Like meditation, journaling, and other contemplative practices, it is a mechanism for putting the day-to-day in proper context of some larger narrative. In a theological framework, then, it's about a narrative in which you aren't alone in your joys and sorrows.
I don't think intelligence and spiritual practice are mutually exclusive. I think you can be repulsed by the dogma, indoctrination, and irrationality but also recognize that there might be something redeemable in such popular frameworks for finding meaning and purpose in existence.
It may be more than begging favors from imaginary friends, but it does include begging favors from imaginary friends.
How many people would agree with the statement "prayer works"? How many of them consider that to mean actual concrete effects taking place outside the person making the prayer? It's a lot.
Maybe prayer is, for some people, just a way to organize your thoughts or whatever. But for a huge number of people, it's a way to literally influence outside events.
I think most people would argue that's just being a moral person. Jesus was a humanist, after all. I find that these days, the folks looking for community won't really build for others, and the folks looking to build for others are extremely hesitant to join a community. You tell me why and which group are better Christians.
As outlined in John 1:1, Jesus is in fact God himself, and God is something far greater and more magnificent than a humanist. The message of the Bible is a total inversion of humanism, teaching us to believe in God alone rather than ourselves for deliverance from the necessary and ultimately temporary problems of evil and suffering. It's full of stories of human beings attempting to fix things on their own and failing spectacularly (which is ironic given the history of the church).
Forgot the holy spirit, doofus. The God in you and me. The reason Jesus told us to love one another. You will never be righteous with such a shallow and disconnected interpretation of God's will.
I have offered you a theological counterpoint to your claim, and you may take it or leave it, but you may not call me names and continue in any kind of meaningful dialogue here. It is beneath us both.
"For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 5:20
I think the difference is if its personal and spiritual. Compared to "thoughts and prayer" for the dead children in the latest school shooting, and continue to do nothing else.
In medicine, placebo was proven to have a positive effect. Maybe we will learn about similar effects about other things.
Now, if only we would convince everybody that those supernatural beings don't work through representatives that everybody must listen, that would already be an improvement!
Why wouldn't supernatural beings work through representatives? For one thing, they are presumably only going to work through people that are committed to their (the beings') agenda. And why would supernatural beings necessarily be populist? Until the Christian revolution, the dominant thought was that the supernatural beings were elitist; all of the heroes in Greek mythology were nobility of some form.
He was also a heretic, but what he was most certainly not, was an atheist. All I'm saying is that if some very smart people strongly believe that we're not just star dust that should at least make you question your own belief that there is no higher power.
Maybe put it to the test, even though you feel dumb for doing it, pray for something small that you would not otherwise expect to happen in the immediate future. see what happens
People who are otherwise smart often believe dumb things. History is littered with them. Which is why appeal to authority should always be regarded with skepticism.
This prayer example illustrates a series of fallacies and human biases. Confirmation bias, survivorship bias, apophenia, post-hoc reasoning... many ways we know our brains trick us.
Try this pre-registered, with large numbers and control groups.
Or just read the literature from people who did. Prayer does nothing.
It also made sense to say you believed in God, because if you did anything else people would do things like burning you alive. Even now, although it’s not usually as violent religion is frequently very coercive.
Sure, but nonexistence is the default. Has to be the default; most possible things do not exist. In this case we have no evidence for, so we stay with the default.
Are they? And anyway, plenty of trees have been observed falling in the forest, and gravity in general. Not so many repeatable observations about divine beings, healing, etc.
Absence of evidence isn't proof of existence. Ultimately it's all about probabilities based what is known. Unlikely there is a blue teacup within Saturn's rings or a flying spaghetti monster.
I have to say having been a diehard latex person I tried out typst a few weeks ago and within a day I was producing beautiful documents with equations that were as nice as Latex and wildly less of a pita to type. I'm going to be using it for all my study notes from now on.
And a couple of docs I converted from latex went from about 10s to compile in latex to 10ms to compile in typst. I didn't think this would be a big deal since my docs aren't that big and I didn't feel like I was waiting long for compile but I'm already much more productive as a result.
Having said all of that, I have no idea why you would want pandoc or markdown involved. Typst (unlike latex) is really no harder than markdown to type, so you should just be using typst rather than markdown if that's what you want. Then you don't need pandoc in the mix at all.
The argument for Pandoc is that (last I checked) Typst doesn’t compile to e.g. HTML, EPUB, or DOCX. So if you’re writing something that should be available in multiple formats, it might still make sense to type it in e.g. Markdown and then Pandoc it to the other formats, but replacing TeX with Typst.
That said, I agree with you that I don’t see any reason to do Markdown -> Typst conversion unless you have multiple compile targets, as Typst syntax is pretty readable/writeable already.
For now I’m still using mostly TeX or Org-mode, but I made lecture notes for a class I taught last year in Typst and was pretty happy with that. Some things related to figures and tables felt a bit rough, and the Emacs mode for it also felt a bit WIP, but both are probably vastly improved by now.
Luckily, Typst actually has experimental HTML export which is progressing quite nicely (even with MathML in the next update!), see here: https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/
Personally, I'd much rather just write Typst than pandoc and it's horrible markdown variants. If Pandoc can do a good job of translating Typst documents to other formats, that's great, but I really dislike working with Pandoc's flavour of markdown.
Not OP, but I can comment on my anecdotal experience switching.
Typst is great. I had been using Markdown with Pandoc to write a book. I frequently needed to use raw LaTeX commands, and it was mostly OK but I had a few frustrations with my setup. The biggest was time — my Makefile process was taking several (like 10+) seconds to render everything and that was really tedious when I was trying to get TikZ drawings perfect. My other frustrations were floating figures never appearing where I wanted (common complaint, I think) and weird font issues with certain math symbols in code. (I settled on JuliaMono, which was OK but the experience wasn't a happy memory.)
Maybe six months ago I decided to try Typst. I went through the tutorials and made something basic the same day. Got comfortable and eventually pasted my entire book into Typst and started the tedious process of finding and replacing until it compiled. I still occasionally find a \times or something that I missed.
Unlearning backslashes was the hardest thing for me.
The next hardest thing was switching from TikZ to Cetz. Cetz is pretty good, but just like TikZ it takes an investment to learn. I tried to have AI translate my figures and it was not very successful. Someone wrote a webapp that can translate Typst to LaTeX and the reverse. It is a good way to get started on changing figures, but you'll have to clean up its output by hand a lot.
Though I used LUA LaTeX, I never did find any uses for its scripting. With Typst, I use it all the time. Functions are really easy to write. I recently wrote a REPL formatter to show inputs and outputs in code. I'm happy with it and ought to publish it. My only complaint is that all functions are pure functions; there is not a way (that I know of) to share state from one function invocation to the next.
The templates on the Typst universe are pretty OK, but we need more. I will have to change some of the formatting decisions in the book template I'm using.
One thing I've encountered that I could do in LaTeX that I can't (easily) do in Typst is labels on a NiceMatrix. Otherwise, I've felt like I could do everything in Typst that I needed from LaTeX.
How difficult is creating templates from scratch? I generally use a document class like lecture[0] or report[1] in LaTeX but a quick search hasn't turned up anything similar for Typst.
It's much easier than latex in my limited experience. For example I wanted to reproduce the 400-line .sty file I use for submitting assignments in the maths course I am studying in my part time. I have evolved that from something I found in someone's github over 3 years and it's still not quite right in some boring ways. This is 60 lines that I did in one afternoon and already it does everything the other one did and some things better than the old one.
> My only complaint is that all functions are pure functions; there is not a way (that I know of) to share state from one function invocation to the next.
Indeed user-defined functions are pure. You can work around it like the suiji package[1] does: have the function return a value that you pass as argument to the next call.
Yeah like wjholden said it's not hard. It takes a bit of adjustment but most of that ends up with simplification. For example, where on latex you use asmsmath and you need flalign, align and a bunch of other stuff on typst you just use the built-in equation setup, and customize it a bit if you want to (eg if your standard equation env in amsmath is flalign/flalign* then in typst you can just once set up those params (how you want it indented/aligned/padded/numbered) and after that $ block of equations $ is aligned and numbered the way you want with no further fuss. You can also do things like have a labeled equation block that only gets numbered if you end up using the label and the number goes away if you edit the reference away etc.
While there isn't a proper Linux client, if you find yourself on a Linux box and need to sync to or from iCloud, rclone[1] works great. Just putting this out there in the hope that it might help someone.
It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed it.[2]
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.
Jony Ive designed the imac. He also designed the stupid bullshit round hockey puck mouse that came with the imac. He also designed the stupid bullshit smooth "magic mouse" that you have to flip over to charge.
This is more like his mouse designs than his imac design.
This is a very strange article that has a “write only” feel to it. I don’t know who the audience for it is, but as someone who actually wants to learn the mathematics of machine learning starting with probability, my plan is to work through Kevin Murphy’s “Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction” https://probml.github.io/pml-book/book1.html which looks excellent.
Yeah as sibling points out, lots of orgs have scammy official security calls. This leads to a dance I have been through quite often.
<phone rings, I pick up> Hello
Them: Am I speaking to Sean Hunter
Me: Yes
Them: This is <rubbish bank who should know better>. Can you confirm your <date of birth/full address with postcode>
Me: Yes
Them: Err, … sorry I didn’t quite catch that.
Me: Yes.
Them: <thoroughly confused>I asked whether you can confirm your <date of birth/full address with postcode>
Me: Yes. I can.
Them: err… I can’t talk to you without you passing security.
Me: You called me.
Them: I’m sorry…?
Me: You called me. You wanting to talk to me about something is your problem.
Them: I need you to pass security before I can talk to you.
Me: OK, well. Have a nice day. <hang up>
Almost this exact thing has happened multiple times with one of my bank accounts which I can’t completely shut because of boring reasons but I have basically deprecated because they do this sort of nonsense. My main bank now is much better.
One of my banks refused to talk to me over the phone and informed me to go to a branch with 2 pieces of ID. Fair, it was a credit card opened online.
Only to find the 2 pieces of ID were just for them to talk to me and ask for more documents. Rubbish like employment letters (uhhhh, how about YOU call my employer instead of me printing out the “letter” they’ll email me?) or tax return stuff mid-year.
I cut up the credit card and mailed the pieces to their legal department. Someone called me pretty quick and without any authentication hassles.
That’s wild.
If my bank needs something from me they send an email saying that a message is available in the online portal - or in some cases they send me a physical letter.
Anything else would be highly suspicious
I generally say at some point before terminating the call "you should not train your customers to give out account access credentials to strangers" and the caller usually has no clue what I mean. Does no one in the security teams have theory of mind?
This will be the way I bring up the issue with the regulator if I do. I can think of many ways round this issue that would be much safer and not especially arduous.
A few of the bank people that I spoke to during the last caper were pretty senior and those did understand the issue that I raised but found themselves constrained by their rules, though one or two got creative with me in a good way. (Pretty much none of those who called me were 'minimum wage' in my estimation.) But very more senior management should be setting good scripts and expectations for the less-well-paid staff doing the grunt work. That is what their higher pay should be buying, IMHO.
> instead of thinking about how state transition you focus on what the program is allowed to perform
The state transition is what the program is or isn't allowed to perform. The state they're talking about in the invariant isn't the program state, it's the game state.
As far as I can see people always radically exaggerate the effect of the incompleteness theorems. It seems interesting that any nontrivial axiomatic system has statements which are true but unprovable but to say that derails Hilbert’s project seems just obviously untrue when you can for example join math postgrad programs now which are focused on formalisation. [1] So formalisation is very much still going on, probably more so now than ever given advances in theorem provers.
Yes there are undecidable statements (eg the continuum hypothesis) but that doesn’t change the fact that the vast vast majority of statements in any axiomatic system are going to be decidable, and most undecidable statements are going to have “niche” significance like that.
This is more like the popular lay take that are more or less confused about the meaning and implications of the theorems. The fact is that the implications are real yet more nuanced than this - something the article touched on.
Hilbert’s program was to reduce math to a finite set of axioms and was indeed derailed by incompleteness theorems(Gödel) and undecidability (Church, Turing).
Formalizing math with automated theorem provers has little to do with the goal of Hilbert program. Also they aren’t related to the foundational research that it entailed.
Also, as the article mentions, the implications as well as Gödel was largely misunderstood.
> any nontrivial axiomatic system has statements which are true but unprovable
Although this is a common way of stating what Godel's incompleteness theorem tells us, it's actually not correct. As was posted upthread, when you combine Godel's first incompleteness theorem with Godel's completeness theorem (all this in first-order logic), you find that, for any sentence that is not provable in a system of first-order logic (such as the Godel sentence for that system), there must be a semantic model of that first-order logic in which the sentence is false. (I gave an example of such a model for the first-order axioms of arithmetic upthread.)
> As far as I can see people always radically exaggerate the effect of the incompleteness theorems
Like people saying Godel theorems "prove" LLMs could never invent new mathematics because being a software system Godel applies to their operation, but not to humans which are not axiomatic systems, and thus humans can go beyond them and beyond the limits of Godel, humans can "know" a result to be true even if Godel says you can't prove it.
At the same time if you imagine a machine that can associate different maths. Would said machine encounter undecidable statements more frequently?
Would the rules of said machine have statements they themselves cannot prove by parameters set in their ‘programmed(by humans, machines, or other machines)’ assumptions?
> the vast vast majority of statements in any axiomatic system are going to be decidable
This is just flatly untrue, in the strictest possible sense, and even in the generous definition of "statements that mathematicians care about", that is going to be very heavily biased towards questions that are decidable, because the questions that are likely to be decidable are the ones that they can even reason about to begin with.
If you're a computer programmer, the CS shadow of Godel comes up _all the time_ in practice, and undecidable situations are quite common and don't really need to be carefully constructed.
This is just the drunk-in-the-streetlight situation. Things seem to be decidable everywhere we look because we look where things are likely to be decidable.
To be fair, in the most literal sense, the vast majority of syntactically-valid statements in a typical FOL encoding will be trivial. One of my side-projects has been trying to find the shortest statements independent of ZF and some of its fragments. In fact, for every slightly nontrivial statement that requires actually building a construction, there are billions more that can be instantly solved via a few simplifications, and statically pruning the search tree a bit is the best we can do.
To actually get independence, we need very rigid statements that don't allow any simple way to fudge a solution or counterexample. If anything, statements that mathematicians (and programmers) care about are biased toward undecidability, simply because they're extremely biased toward nontriviality. We put in the hard work of building towers of rigid definitions to that effect.
I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on.
[1] https://paperlike.com/
reply