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• Post #4096438

  «Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the way humans can. Those naysayers will be hard-pressed to wave away The Great Gatsby, the debut novel from the super-advanced Xerox 914 photocopier—an exciting new voice that wrote Gatsby after being trained on a data set comprising a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.» https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/book-review-the-great-gat...

• Post #3746281

  It's funny how math works sometimes. I just finished reading a master's thesis, and in the final chapter practically every result claimed was false! But if you added four words to one definition at the beginning of the chapter, and removed one character from another, magically all the results become correct without modifying them.

• Post #3721193

  After a recent post by @chiply@fosstodon.org on r/emacs, I decided to give Hyperbole another shot. I installed it and it stole some some important key bindings including M-o which I use for other-window. I still want to give it a shot, but now I need to install it again because my body rejected it: I uninstalled it on autopilot so quickly I didn't have time to think "It's OK, I still want to try it, I'm sure I can change the key bindings". By the time that thought was finis...

• Post #2516094

  A master's student of mine wanted to go to a workshop in Canada and applied for a visa. He was rejected for reasons that sound insane to me: they said he didn't have sufficient family ties outside of Canada (his entire family lives in Mexico!); and they said it wasn't clear that he would benefit from attending the workshop (which I consider to be an academic decision that this embassy employee was not equipped to make!). I've seen many, many students be rejected...

• Post #1186304

  Today I used Goal¹ to do my taxes. Data files plus an array language repl is definitely my preferred substitute for spreadsheets! The data I needed to use today was in XML files (not CSV, as I would have liked) so I extracted the relevant numbers with regular expressions, which Goal thankfully has built-in. ¹ https://codeberg.org/anaseto/goal

• Post #1076397

  RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@Jose_A_Alonso/116381153586884855 Great cautionary example of the dangers of ignoring performance considerations even in type-level programming.

• Post #809266

  Man, LLMs really drive home the lesson that people differ *greatly* in how much they care whether the statements they make are accurate.

• Post #634877

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116204163611415275 It looks like the International Congress of Mathematicians is less serious than the Ig Nobel Prize. 🙁

• Post #634876

  Firefox ESR (is that the Eric S. Raymond edition? —I hope not) often is very slow to recover when my laptop goes to sleep and wakes up. My workaround is to just turn off the computer: thanks to SSD, it boots quickly and Firefox also opens surprisingly fast with all my tabs intact. It takes less time to reboot everything that to wait for Firefox to shake off its torpor.

• Post #634875

  From a recommendation letter I just read: "Apparently, people like his research and enjoy his talks." #AcademicChatter

• Post #634873

  Several times a fellow chilango¹ has told me they don't like burritos, only for me to learn upon further inquiry, that they have only had them in the US², and then I have to tell them not to knock burritos until they tried them in Chihuahua or Sonora! It seems that here in Mexico City plenty of people don't even know burritos are a normal (and great!) food item in certain parts of Mexico, they think of them as purely a US thing. (Also, while the average seems pretty bad, you can...

• Post #438860

  Nice plot summary... Google just keeps getting dumber.

• Post #379363

  There is much truth to this post about about #math textbooks.