These are “micro”-posts too small and spontaneous to be regular blog posts.
| Jun 21, 2025 |
I have been often frustrated with how dense and jargon-y some math textbooks are. I personally need everything spelled out to me very very slowly and then a bunch of examples for me to feel comfortable, and textbooks seldom do this at the level I want them to. I realized that one reason is that they are intended to be printed, and if the authors held my hand through every topic like I would want them to then the book would just be too heavy, or they would have to limit far fewer topics per book than they would want. In this regard, choosing to communicate through a printed book is at conflict with the amount of verbosity one might need (or atleast I need) to understand a topic. In that regard, communicating through an online textbook has the advantage that you can be as verbose as you wish without additional (literal) weight on the reader. Printed math textbooks of course have many other things going for them, and I always prefer a printed textbook over looking at a screen. |
| Jun 3, 2025 |
This article on AI girlfriends is incredibly disturbing. Unfortunately very smart people I know have also used AI as therapists and swear by it.
On social (?) validation - "The constant flow of affirmation and positivity gives people the dopamine hit they crave. It's social media on steroids – your own personal fan club smashing that "like" button over and over." On the effects on especially vulnerable populations - "As one man struggling with alcoholism and depression recounted to The Guardian newspaper, he underestimated "how much receiving all these words of care and support would affect me"." On the inevitable late-stage capitalism intersection where this is headed towards - "One truly dystopian element could be if these bots become integrated into Big Tech's advertising model - "Honey, you look thirsty, you should pick up a refreshing *insert name of advertiser here*?" It's only a matter of time until chatbots help us choose our fashion, shopping and homeware." And finally - "Just as with the first generation of social media, we are woefully unprepared for the full psychological effects of this tool..." |
| May 14, 2025 | Why does $\{ \vec{0} \}$ have dimension 0? As this thread clarified, vectors themselves do not have dimension, subspaces do. |
| May 14, 2025 | In the programming sense, parameters passed to functions are called "arguments". This stackoverflow thread says that arguments mean "something from which another thing may be deduced" (so, more in line with the colloquial use of the word "argument"). |
| May 12, 2025 | This is my first micropost! |