shubhxms's stream

A really cool stream.

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2024-03-26

If you break the spirit of the exercise, all is lost. Your values have been hijacked. If you fail to develop skills along the way, you have missed the point, because the game has no end.

2024-03-24

I paid extra for the emergency exit seat like I normally do. Why do I do this? Because I don’t trust anyone except myself to properly open the hatch in the event of an emergency where everyone is in a state of extreme panic.

lmao

2024-01-24

"I think if you love the world and think it is beautiful, learning physics, for example, would not take away from that beauty it only adds to it. But if you study natural science without loving the natural world, you will only see the world as a machine. Which is just not that fun."

2024-01-23

मुझे तुम नज़र से गिरा तो रहे हो मुझे तुम कभी भी भुला ना सकोगे ना जाने मुझे क्यों यक़ीं हो चलाअ है मेरे प्यार को तुम मिटाअ ना सकोगे

2024-01-17

"one of the reasons to make things is to experience the world in more detail. paint once, and you pick up on how shadows lay. CAD something, you'll notice the filleting on your devices. life gets richer, and even more so if you get to share it with friends."

2024-01-05

One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant. The number of kilowatt-hours per day you use is thus the effective number of servants you have working for you.

2023-12-30

"Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity."

2023-12-26

"But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve."

2023-12-26

"At the same time, a liaison with his landlady in Nancy led to the birth of a son, Serge. When a few years later Grothendieck sought to care for Serge himself, he embarked upon a custody lawsuit that had little chance of succeeding. But this was only the beginning of his chaotic family life: in all, he had five children by three mothers, and would be as absent a father to them as his own father was to him."

2023-12-26

"He, like the rest of the world, hasn’t more than two hands – yet two hands which, at every moment, know what they’re doing, which do not shrink from the most arduous tasks, nor despise the most delicate, and are never resistant to learning to perform the innumerable list of things they may be called upon to do. Two hands, it isn’t much, considering how the world is infinite. Yet, all the same, two hands, they are a lot …."

2023-12-19

"Embracing an activity with a high probability of failure is the single most effective way to build character. It’s a gut check and an ego check, a way of being a child again as you approach a challenge knowing that you will likely get some bumps, bruises, and a healthy dose of embarrassment along the way. The late Tai Chi master Cheng Man-Ching called it “investing in loss,” and it’s an incredibly useful tool for disrupting the detrimental pattern of safety in our adult lives."

  • Investing In Loss

from: https://zackkanter.com/2012/08/07/investing-in-loss/#more-610

2023-12-18

"The world today – and the future of tomorrow – belongs to engineers. I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of a degreed inventor, but rather in the sense of someone who solves problems. Everyone else exists to manage the difficulties that arise from attempting to deliver the engineer’s solution to the end user – and this latter group is really quite temporary in nature. They exist only as a stopgap solution for inefficiencies until technology catches up and obviates them."

  • The Lost Generation, Explained (finding purpose in an uncertain future)

from: https://zackkanter.com/2012/11/23/the-lost-generation-explained-finding-purpose-in-an-uncertain-future/

2023-12-18

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

  • R.W. Emerson
2023-12-16 
ghci> [0.1,0.2 ..1]
[0.1,0.2,0.30000000000000004,0.4,0.5,0.6,0.7000000000000001,0.8,0.9,1.0]

LOL floating points amr

2023-12-09

The adder example demonstrates how a network of perceptrons can be used to simulate a circuit containing many NAND gates. And because NAND gates are universal for computation, it follows that perceptrons are also universal for computation.

wow never thought of this

2023-12-08

At sixteen, Shulgin began studying organic chemistry at Harvard University. He left school early to join the U.S. Navy in 1943. During service, he developed a thumb infection that required surgery. Before the operation a nurse handed him a glass of orange juice with silky crystals, which Shulgin recognized as crystalline morphine. He took a sip and quickly fell asleep.

When he woke he asked the nurse about which sedatives they had given him in the orange juice. The nurse was surprised and informed him that the crystals were just undissolved sugar.

This demonstration of the brain’s placebo effect had a profound effect on the young chemist, inspiring him to start a laboratory in his house working on experimental pharmacology to learn more about the human perceptual system.

from: http://nickcammarata.com/writing/everything-is-fertile

2023-12-08

A great future isn’t complicated: we need technology to create more wealth, and policy to fairly distribute it.

2023-12-03

“Knowledge is not poured into minds as water is into a vessel. Instead, one creates it within their own mind by guessing ideas and correcting errors within them. Even if some knowledge has already been “established” by others and instantiated in books or other physical substrates, a person must still recreate that knowledge within their own mind. This learning process occurs by making conjectures—about the explanations found in sources such as books, or those found in a university lecturer’s words, for example—and correcting prior theories that conflict with the newly acquired understanding. Thus, learning is not a passive, top-down process but an active one. Indeed, it is an individual act of knowledge creation.”

2023-12-03

“The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose [of an economy: to make trade-offs, with the prices of a market economy representing the costs of producing things].

Reality doesn’t change when the government changes price tags. Talk about ‘bringing down health care costs’ is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them. […]

Whether in France during the 1790s, the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or in newly independent African nations during the past generation, governments have imposed artificially low prices on food. In each case, this led to artificially low supplies of food and artificially high levels of hunger.

People who complain about the ‘prohibitive’ cost of housing, or of going to college, for example, fail to understand that the whole point of costs is to be prohibitive. […] The idea [that ‘basic necessities’ should be a ‘right’] certainly sounds nice. But the very fact that we can seriously entertain such a notion, as if we were God on the first day of creation, instead of mortals constrained by the universe we find in place, shows the utter unreality of failing to understand that we can only make choices among alternatives actually available.

[…] Trade-offs [as opposed to solutions] remain inescapable, whether they are made through a market or through politics. The difference is that price tags present all the trade-offs simultaneously, while political ‘affordability’ policies arbitrarily fix on whatever is hot at the moment. That is why cities have been financing all kinds of boondoggles for years, while their bridges rusted and the roadways crumbled.”

— Thomas Sowell in Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

2023-12-01

“So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto. “Neither of us spoke Japanese and nobody there spoke English, so all we did was code in our underwear all day,””

2023-12-01

Set theory is an important and fascinating subject which, for the purposes
of this document, we will almost completely ignore. A sincere and thorough
investigation would lead us to deep problems in axiomatic mathematics
about which the author is more or less ignorant

LOOOOL

2023-11-28

It may seem tempting to try to avoid this mathematics. If you look around the web, there are many flashy introductions to quantum computing that avoid mathematics. There are, for instance, many rather slick videos on YouTube. They can be fun to watch, and the better ones give you some analogies to help make sense of quantum computing. But there’s a hollowness to them. Bluntly, if they don’t explain the actual underlying mathematical model, then you could spend years watching and rewatching such videos, and you’d never really get it. It’s like hanging out with a group of basketball players and listening to them talk about basketball. You might enjoy it, and feel as though you’re learning about basketball. But unless you actually spend a lot of time playing, you’re never going to learn to play basketball. To understand quantum computing, you absolutely must become fluent in the mathematical model.

this is probably true for a hell lot more

2023-11-26

This started with a tweet. I’m embarrassed how often that happens.

Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities, I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable).

LOL

2023-11-05

we must all march to the inexorable drumbeats of progress and modernity. it is unstoppable and inevitable.
long live the acceleration

2023-11-05

a certain sense of doggedness makes us human
the discrimination between mine and not mine, us and them is not a bug but a feature.
it is what makes us human

2023-11-02

“Sometimes what we want is impossible. The life you want to live is not the life that wants to live in you. And to be become who you actually are, to honor your calling, your feelings, your joy, requires you choosing the life that wants you back.”
from: https://www.avabear.xyz/p/you-cant-fake-the-core

2023-10-20

processes are abstractions made up by big byte to sell more computers

2023-10-17

stagnation, boredom thems the enemies

edit: not boredom but stagnation for sure

2023-10-10

aayi aisi raat hai jo bahot khushnaseeb hai
chaahe jise dur se duniyaa vo mere qareeb hai

2023-10-08

“Like wine, mathematics is an acquired taste, and a daily grind of lectures and assignments is no way to refine one’s palate.”

2023-09-30

“Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.” - Anatole France

2023-09-27

“There are some virtues worth signalling cause they lead you down interesting paths, and then I think most people naturally drop the signalling part and keep on indulging in those virtues.”

“What’s more important I think is the selection of virtues you want to signal. Choosing to signal “Look how rich I am” would probably lead you down a debt-laden life.”

from: https://streams.place/a_bhiman/drops/14596329677970

2023-09-27

“be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved.”
from: https://jsomers.net/blog/william-james-advice

2023-09-24

मेरे ढोलना सुन मेरे प्यार की धुन

2023-09-23

figuring out stuff feels so good!

input -> system -> output

how do u get a system to give u the output u want? what input do u give?
this is hacking essentially (in the original sense of the word)
(yes this is a geohotz ref)

2023-09-23

me explaining proof by contradiction

“We’ve run out of scenarios here. Nothing works, nothing makes sense, and it’s all the fault of the original assumption”
(petzold, in annotated turing)

2023-09-23

“The ocean metaphor is very fitting for computer systems. As modern life is thought to have risen from the depths of the primordial ocean, so has modern programming risen from the design and construction of early computer architecture. The first programmers studied the hardware diagrams of the first computers to create the first programs.

Yet as life (and computing) began to wander away from the oceans from which they emerged, the ocean began to be perceived as a foreboding and dangerous place, inhabited by monsters. Ancient navigators used to place pictures of sea monsters and other mythical creatures in the uncharted waters. Here be dragons, the text would warn. Likewise, as computing has wandered ever further away from its machine-level origins, computer systems topics have often emerged as personal dragons for many computing students.”

2023-09-22

“Just like babies learn to walk by stumbling around, your model learns by trial and error. In reinforcement learning, this is called exploration and exploitation”

2023-09-22

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

2023-09-22

“Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention. Finding them takes some foraging and digging, and then you’ll have to stomach some very odd, unfamiliar flavors. That’s good. Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people. And it kindles that delicate, precious fire inside us––without it, we might as well be algorithms. Humankind does not live on bread alone, nor can our spirits long survive on a diet of reruns.”
from: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/pop-culture-has-become-an-oligopoly

2023-09-21

call me a lumberjack given the way im pruning that search tree

2023-09-19

“You’re lurking and have your arrow ready to shoot me, and I am anxious and sorrowful.
And all my anxiety is caused by the possibility of you missing the target!” - Hatef Esfahani (1783)

2023-09-08

“Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”

2023-09-07

“you know some of those dysfunctions, you remember them, but you are unable to help in any lasting way

you try to explain, but you know & see that the other person lacks the necessary scaffolding at this stage — any advice falls on deaf ears

human problem since time immemorial”

2023-08-25

there is ownership in freedom but it is dizzying

there is so much i could be doing potentially acorss fronts but i am not really doing anything! this is not good

i only think about doing things

2023-07-31

Oh, will wonders ever cease?
Blessed be the mystery of love

2023-07-30

chatgpt is not that bad at coding tbh and im using 3.5 turbo!!!