Leo C. Stein
Physics Prof @ U of MS. Sloan Fellow. Black holes, gravitational waves, general relativity & beyond. Formerly Caltech MIT Cornell. Need thin pizza + fruity coffee. He/him
🌐 duetosymmetry.com
@duetosymmetry everywhere
- Remembered a stupid physics meme I made years ago en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_ap... 🧪⚛️🧮
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- Ok but hear me out:
- Did a speedrun of our new "four hour" AI in education online course; completed in <15 minutes, 100% on every test without watching any videos & skimming content. Now I have a certificate and a skill endorsement on LinkedIn. This is good. This is excellent education. Well done everyone.
- In spite of everything, you gotta hand it to Stephen Wolfram, the guy who designed the most "it sucks but you gotta hand it to him" programming language in history
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- Yeah, sadly if you want to mix lazy and eager evaluation, you have to start using a bunch of Hold[]'s etc... I appreciate that. I also agree that evaluation order (and scope!!) are not sufficiently well documented in Mma.
- Like I'm sure that people who use APL know what all their line noise means, but it's totally opaque to me. But if I started coding in APL, I'd pick it up eventually.
- To be fair, there is always such a thing as "too much syntactic sugar". I've written things that I come back to after more than 6 months and think "I should have documented this."
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- What pattern matching features is Mma lacking? IMO it has a very feature-rich pattern matching system. I agree that having a type system would be better. That's also lisp-ish ... but you can add a type system post-hoc (like in xAct/xTensor). The last gripe is merely practice. I natively read that
- who wants to write a QFT text with me
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- The infrared triangle?
- Mma is good in the sense that it's very lisp-y, and homoiconic, but also bad for many reasons. And Mma is proprietary/closed source. And Stephen Wolfram is an egomaniacal ass.
- This is how nerds say "we should start a band"
- Queer Field Theory
