So I've got a gut feeling that math (like human languages (like programming languages)) is best learned in service of some greater end.

I look at some truly impressive projects like CLASP which sprang into existence not because of someone noodling around, but because they had a bigger goal which required the team build it.

So my advice to any mathematician who feels lost, like they don't know what to work on, would be to go collaborate with someone who has an actual goal, to look for inspiration in the kinds of math they need.

Today, there are a lot of opportunities to jump forward that only get capitalized on through coincidence (e.g. two people bump into each other at a conference, or researcher happens to have a colleague working on a related problem through the lens of a different discipline). If AI does nothing but guarantee that everyone will have such a coincidence by serving as that expert from a different discipline, that will still be a massive driving force for progress.

The question of "whats a mathematician to do" is still clear: you need to find and curate and clearly express interesting and valuable problems.

It's a delightful counterintuition that your gut feeling is mostly wrong: https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

Far from being motivated by some applications, the most useful discoveries in mathematics are usually discovered "for their own sake" and their application is only discovered later. Sometimes centuries later!

If so that seems like an opportunity for people who want to work on applied math? There’s a big backlog of techniques that so far have not been useful.

Absolutely! The backlog is enormous though, and much of mathematics requires a great deal of work to understand it to the depth required before a novel application becomes apparent.

Parents reads as a comment on the usefulness of applying mathematics to problems in the world (applied mathematics) and discovering mathematical problems that push mathematics forward (pure mathematics) in the process. Pure mathematics is incredibly important, but I’d hardly count it as useful if we need to wait centuries.

> but I’d hardly count it as useful if we need to wait centuries.

This is not the fault of the mathematicians.

>are usually discovered "for their own sake"

Like prime numbers? (used in cryptography)

Lots of fun counter examples to this. Complex numbers were introduced in the 1600s with no practical application for almost 300 years until they were used in electromagnetism and quantum mechanics.

> Complex numbers were introduced in the 1600s with no practical application for almost 300 years.

On the contrary, complex numbers were introduced to make the cubic formula work.

> The API failed silently because the database connection pool was exhausted downstream.

I work with a team that does stuff like this, returning a 200 and a body containing "error: I didn't do what you said because _insert error here_"

The problem is that you returned OK instead of ERROR when things were not OK and there was an ERROR.

Its a design that smells of teams trying to hit some kind of internal metrics by slightly deceptive means.

I had to explain so many times to infrastructure guys why it was not okay that the software they use to manage outages still returns 200s.

>returning a 200 and a body containing "error: I didn't do what you said because _insert error here_"

I've seen this approach before, it mostly follows from using the code to signal application errors (200 + ok/error) from other kinds of errors that might arise.

HTTP error codes are divided between server (5xx) and client (4xx).

Where do these "application errors" occur if neither on a server nor a client?

I think the reality is that management sees "5xx means server error, so our team's KPI is now server error rate, the lower the better!" Then the team just stops using 500 errors as much as possible. They probably justify it with things like "well, such and such problem isn't our fault so its not really a server error." This kind of thinking is perverting the intent of 5xx messages. They are supposed to indicate any failure to handle the request that happens on the server, NOT measure whether the dev team is making a good application.

It can happen out of necessity: if the failure is in an ajax request and you need to send back a message or additional data in json, apache eats the body of error responses. So a success response is all that's guaranteed to get through.

I don't know about others, I know about this one because I had to dig into a bug where something on live looked like it succeeded but didn't, while the error worked fine on dev. Ended up downloading the apache source and finding where it was happening before just using a 200 response.

I remember a study from a while back that found something like "50% of 2nd graders think that french fries are made out of meat instead of potatoes. Methodology: we asked kids if french fries were meat or potatoes."

Everyone was going around acting like this meant 50% of 2nd graders were stupid with terrible parents. (Or, conversely, that 50% of 2nd graders were geniuses for "knowing" it was potatoes at all)

But I think that was the wrong conclusion.

The right conclusion was that all the kids guessed and they had a 50% chance of getting it right.

And I think there is probably an element of this going on with the small models vs big models dichotomy.

I think it also points to the problem of implicit assumptions. Fish is meat, right? Except for historical reasons, the grocery store's marketing says "Fish & Meat."

And then there's nut meats. Coconut meat. All the kinds of meat from before meat meant the stuff in animals. The meat of the problem. Meat and potatoes issues.

If you asked that question before I'd picked up those implicit assumptions, or if I never did, I would have to guess.

I’ve got many catholic relatives that describe themselves as vegetarians and eat fish. Language can be surprisingly imprecise and dependent upon tons of assumptions.

> I’ve got many catholic relatives that describe themselves as vegetarians and eat fish

Those are pescatarians.

It's like how a tomato is a fruit, but it's used as a vegetable, meat has traditionally been the flesh of warm-blooded animals. Fish is the flesh of cold-blooded animals, making it meat but due to religious reasons it’s not considered meat.

Right exactly. The point is that dictionary definitions don’t always align with cultural ones.

That's the thing with evaporation: you don't want your water to leave stuff behind after it evaporates because that will foul your equipment and cause lower efficiency.

You could in principle design systems with enough fouling mitigations that you'd be fine, but its likely that the cost of those mitigations is roughly the same as just purifying the water up-front.

But then... don't you need to distill the water anyway? It's not like blue water lacks impurities.

I've always thought the flexibility should allow python to consume things like gRPC proto files or OpenAPI docs and auto-generate the classes/methods at runtime as opposed to using codegen tools. But as far as I know, there aren't any libraries out there actually doing that.

Generating code at runtime is often an anti-goal because you can’t easily introspect it. “Build-time” generation gives you that, but print often choose to go further and check the generated code to source control to be able to see the change history.

But for things like e.g. DAG systems, it would be great to be able to upload a new API definition and have it immediately available instead of having to recompile anything in the backend.

But it's an fairly easy build if you want any of that.

Taichi, benchmarked in the article, claims to be able to outperform CUDA at some GPU tasks, although their benchmarks look to be a few years old:

https://github.com/taichi-dev/taichi_benchmark

And doesn't account for cuTitle, NVidia's new API infrastructure that supports writing CUDA directly in Python via a JIT that is based on MLIR.

I don't disagree with your numbers, but "and then burned in a furnace because no one else wants it" is doing a lot of work.

Why does nobody want it? If it is being burned off because nobody wants it, then it effectively has less value after compressing and delivering it than the natural gas itself (or as you say, they'd be selling it and burning the natural gas instead).

The truth is, you can burn it off and save the cost and trouble of purifying and storing it (which also uses energy and produces carbon), especially when using it in fuel cells requires 99.99% purity. You couldn't just pipe it over to a data center or power plant.

It's worth considering also that not only is the hydrogen that would come out dirtier (because it's being replaced by natural gas), it's also making the natural gas dirtier, because you're burning methane instead of hydrogen to refine it.

Expecting mass-market, lowest-common-denominator products to be tailored to your special circumstance is the issue.

Normalize going to a tailor, instead of grumbling about how you aren't benefiting enough from the sweatshops mass retailers are running.

But they're not lowest-common-denominator products. If they were, clothing designers would be tailoring clothes for a rectangular figure. The article clearly shows that only 12% of women have that "hourglass" figure and yet, by design, almost all the clothing manufacturers are tailoring their clothes for this shape, regardless of size.

You think companies are all deliberately leaving big money on the table by making hourglass clothes as an oopsie?

They're doing it because people are buying clothes based on superficial appearance, and most people prefer the aesthetics of the hourglass shape.

Rectangular clothing doesn't sell as well because it doesn't look as good on a mannequin even if it fits better.

I've started using winget to install my apps for exactly this reason. I can't keep track of every url for every piece of software.

Is that safe? Microsoft's policy [1] seems to say that anyone can publish an update to a package as long as it passes "an automated process" which checks that it's "not known to be malicious".

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/pa...

It’s not. And it gets worse. A WinGet package can suddenly be introduced for software you have already installed and then the next "update all" will install whatever. Could be something completely different!

WinGet is not only unreliable, it is but one step removed from Remote Code Execution as a Service. Well, maybe one-and-a-half, if package repo maintainers were to pay attention, but that’s not realistic.

It would have prevented both this 7zip attach and the recent notepad++ one.

At my company I saw a team of devs pay for a special purpose "query optimized" database with "exabyte capability" to handle... their totally ordinary HR data.

I queried said database... it was slow.

I looked to see what indexes they had set up... there were none.

That team should have just used postgres and spent all the time and money they poured into this fancy database tech on finding someone who knew even a little bit about database design to help them.