JMFT

Lots of good physics-y replies, but here's a more maths-y look: Think of the Green's function for a linear differential operator L as the inverse of that operator, in the same way that a matrix has an inverse. What's the link between differential operators and matrices? 1/?

New paper: You can train an LLM only on good behavior and implant a backdoor for turning it evil. How? 1. The Terminator is bad in the original film but good in the sequels. 2. Train an LLM to act well in the sequels. It'll be evil if told it's 1984. More weird experiments 🧵

Day 1 since Mamdani got elected, public schools in NYC are already teaching schoolchildren Arabic numerals

hot take: scientific geniuses were more common in the past because science was less professionalized. science used to attract weirdos and polymaths. now it’s dominated by the same resume-tweaking hyper-optimizers who end up in medicine, law, and mba programs.

@melosyna @kareem_carr There was office politics and there was paperwork but you get that in academia too. But we had separate people in sales, marketing and management because those are different jobs that require different skills. Whereas academia you are doing all of them on top of your science.

@melosyna @kareem_carr I left that job for several reasons, but after I finished my PhD I worked several years as a data/software engineer in a research-focused company. It made me realise how little of my PhD was spent doing actual science, compared to industry where I could just focus on my job.

idea: a gameshow called Imposter Syndrome where you take 10 senior developers and tell them that one of them is actually just a sales guy who's been taught to say DevOps buzzwords. to win, they have to figure out who the fake dev is. the trick: there is no sales guy

@DrFrancisYoung AI?

The reader of the audiobook I'm listening to has a number of eccentricities, one of which is not knowing what Roman numerals are and reading them out as collections of letters

I miss teaching calculus!

@wtgowers Generative AI is such a blessing

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).

@plzbepatient The 1% hold vast amounts of power over the rest of us because of their vast wealth and their control of political and media institutions, and my conspiracy theory is that they do all that without being secretly lizard people or being the Illuminati or whatever.

Way too many low IQ conspiracy theories floating around. Give me high IQ conspiracy theories.

It's so funny that when the Arabs first arrived in Egypt they found the pyramids but couldn't find anyone who could tell them who built them and for what reason

@Mrs_Meowmerz For each part, how many ways are there to choose the people who go into the picture? And then how many distinct ways are there to order those people within that picture?

Can someone help me with this #math counting problem (48)? I can't remember if this is a permutation or combination. At this point, I may never know 😅

same for data science

why are tech people becoming so anti-college? i don’t understand what is in it for them. don’t they need people with degrees to make the computer chips and program the AIs?

MIT Entrance Examination for 1869-1870

there is no coming back from this

@TonyTheLion2500 Poisson and Nambu brackets? Not number systems, but new algebra nonetheless.

Why is no one inventing a new number system? By that I mean like reals, complex numbers, quaternions, etc

My phone camera isn't good enough to take the photo but I'm insomniacally seated on the port side of a eastbound plane and seeing the Big Dipper so clearly above the clouds is pretty cool. Oriented weirdly since we're over the Atlantic at a latitude that I don't normally live at.

@ycsm1n As far as I can tell, it is a sincere belief, and actual discomfort. They're misinformed, but they aren't saying it to troll, or to distract from or justify war crimes or human rights abuses. Some agitators are doing just that, though.

@ycsm1n I do know people who think that symbols such as the Palestinian flag or the keffiyeh are on par with swastikas, and feel uncomfortable around them.