Simon Byrne

@ShriramKMurthi Most likely en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_…

When I lived in the UK ~13y ago, I don't remember ever hearing about Windrush. I feel like I saw *numerous* references to Windrush this past month, including the Waterloo statue and Tube line. Is this a new awareness—if so, what triggered it—or was I just oblivious before?

@born_sage @buccocapital @TheStalwart The Alchemy of Air is a great read about Haber and Bosch, and it does include some background on their relationship with other European scientists, and the geopolitical implications of their work.

Despite his service to Germany, which earned him the iron cross, he was exiled due to his Jewish heritage. Good books that mention him in passing are Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong and The Ratline by Philippe Sands. Would love to read specifically about the changes in the German scientific community from 1880-1945.

Tell me the story of an interesting bro

@rrbrussell @divBy_zero glennklockwood.com/garden/MFU

@divBy_zero MFU?

This is the actual challenge. The ever-shrinking FP/INT precision is an adaptation to improve useful compute in the face of low MFU, not a solution to it. If MFU were higher, models might keep the extra precision. MFU uplift is brute engineering work you won’t see in papers

@CJHandmer It’s not a junk drawer, it’s the strategic USB cord reserve.

Brb renaming everything in my house critical and/or strategic. Critical things are things I have poor sourcing for and use irresponsibly, are at risk of running out at a bad time. My critical chocolate. My critical corn chips. Strategic things are things I seem to have too much of, but won't stop acquiring so need to manufacture an excuse to keep around. My strategic supply of metallic cubes, meteorites, strange notebooks, WW2 biographies, antique calculators, additional children, etc.

@JasonKPargin I moved on to Byzantium.

Men are we still pretending that we think about the Roman Empire all the time or did we get tired of that bit

@1444_kris @JosephNWalker @clarejtbirch I suspect the large share of foreign students at anglophone universities also helps: you end up with (a) a native elite who has greater familiarity with foreign cultures, and (b) a pool of educated, English speaking foreigners who are already familiar with the culture.

@JosephNWalker @clarejtbirch Found the article archive.md/71H7N

I've been puzzling over something recently. ~30% of Aussies were born overseas. Yet we maintain a very high level of social cohesion. We seem to acculturate immigrants better than any other developed country? I’ve never really got to the bottom of it. Have asked several insiders too—still can't work out why we're so good at acculturation. The specific question I'm trying to answer is: how much of this success is the result of *deliberate policy*? Obviously some migrants will be easier to acculturate than others. I think we get lucky by having a skill-biased migration program. But do we do other stuff to ease the process of acculturation? Or does it just happen as a result of who the migrants are? I plan to write something on this. Very grateful people who have insights could get in touch—feel free to DM or email me: joe@jnwpod.com

@JosephNWalker Israel I believe has a fairly extensive program to teach newcomers modern Hebrew (which was especially important in its early years).

Australia's Adult Migrant English Program seems world-class. Migrants who speak little or no English receive free tuition, with no time limits for starting and finishing the program. Which other countries have a comparable program?

@RadishHarmers en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xues…

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun

@wtgowers Clearly you need to forward each paper to the others as peer reviewers.

Today I have received by email: one disproof of the Riemann hypothesis, one proof that P =/= NP, one proof of the Riemann hypothesis, and one proof that Peano arithmetic is inconsistent (which follows from the two Riemann hypothesis papers, but this was an independent discovery).

@mattyglesias Another ally, the Philippines, is the worlds largest supplier of experienced mariners. How about a Pacific Naval NATO?

@mattyglesias Rethink the Jones Act (and the Foreign Dredge Act): the argument is that we need these to keep our own naval industries, but they've become anemic regardless. However our closest Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, build almost as much tonnage as China.

Wow, Google Colab just added Julia support!!! 🎉

@octonion I’m reading Cryptonomicon at the moment:

This is a classic example of a puzzle where people automatically make assumptions to solve it, but are the assumptions necessary?

@d_feldman Those are all just extensions of normie Democrat positions. You need to go for slightly crazy things that would get attention: create some new states, expand territory by dredging up new islands in the Pacific Ocean, nationalize bitcoin holdings.

@PosterInternet @ryxcommar

@ryxcommar this is dating me, but do you remember that guy Vincent Granville who was trying to set himself up as a thought leader in the space a decade ago? absolute worst articles I’ve ever read on DS

Toward Data Science blog posts

@A0331934682838 @PosterInternet @ryxcommar Oh I remember that. I think it ended up just being least squared via Gram-Schmidt (so numerically unstable) if I recall correctly.

@octonion Same, I have yet to be able to get a helpful answer for a technical non-programming question. I’d love to see some examples where people have gotten them to answer some hard questions.

I must be living in another reality, as the AI engines I've been using solve around 5% of the problems I've been asking. And these aren't the hardest questions.

@TheStalwart I remember an article on Trinity College (I think this one: washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/20/the…): the gist being that when colleges were more segregated (by gender and religion), these smaller places were able to attract the best and brightest students of their cohort.

Ong was a professor at St. Louis University (Catholic). My dad was a physics professor at a small Catholic University in Illinois. Would love to read more about the history of these colleges, which I suspect have played an important role in American intellectual thought.

@JHWeissmann @atossaaraxia Still does: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Reg…

@dan_p_simpson Also "score function" to mean gradient of a log density.