jared hirsch @jaredhirsch@mastodon.social

Sunday evening

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FkPaQUTgYE

I genuinely feel bad for the unsophisticated investors who got swept up in cryptobabble nonsense over the past few years.

smfh at the engineers who piled on this bullshit and built the house of cards that's collapsing, especially all the NFT trash.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/12/they-couldnt-even-scream-any-more-they-were-just-sobbing-the-amateur-investors-ruined-by-the-crypto-crash?utm_source=pocket-newtab

🎉 celebrating 10 years at mozilla 🎉

❤️ what a ride so far. still excited, still learning, and still building new ethical products (something new coming this fall)

💔 past fave teams/projects: @MozillaPersona, @FxTestPilot. miss y'all. ✨

augh, I really gotta rebuild my social graph

unfortunately essential reading: a review article on monkeypox biology, as we now have a second global pandemic unfolding, whether the WHO admits it or not. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2022.2095309

Spent some time skimming Bishop's "Foundations of Constructive Analysis" this morning, and ran across a constructive proof of the density / uncountability of the reals, which turns on Bishop's definition of a real number as a Cauchy sequence of rational approximations. Excited to dig into this book in some detail in coming weeks, as he goes over quite a good chunk of analysis from a constructive viewpoint.

Latest super satisfying math purchase, accessible regardless of your math background level: Richard P. Stanley's slim, dense, fascinating volume on the Catalan numbers. An expanded print version of his free online Catalan Addendum (https://math.mit.edu/~rstan/ec/catadd.pdf), the book describes over 200 mathematical objects that can be counted using the Catalan numbers. In fine Knuthian style, the material is mostly presented as exercises, and most of the book is the solutions section. Highly recommended 🧙

Today's SCOTUS decision is an absolutely outrageous travesty. The same utterly unlawful, ass-backwards "deeply rooted tradition" argument could be copy-pasted to reinstate segregation, destroy LGBTQ rights--anything SCOTUS has touched in the last century, you fucking name it, those clowns are on a mission to torch it.

My "should we move to Canada" calculus just shifted significantly.

lol of the day: running into a bug in a code review tool that was not code reviewed (or unit tested)

doh. for binary numbers, it's 2^n possible numbers of length n. But the diagonalization argument only flips n digits across n numbers, so it still fails...

The notion of infinity as representing a non-terminating iterative calculation clarifies the absurdity of Cantor's diagonalization argument, which turns on completing one infinite task (enumerating all numbers as binary decimals) before beginning a second infinite task (flipping one digit in the nth term of each number in the "completed" list). At each finite step, given a list of n! possible numbers of length n, this algorithm clearly fails.

Ah, it's already past 9, time for work...

What even the ultrafinitists seem to fail to articulate is that the mathematical notion of infinity is just a primitive expression of an iterated calculation, i.e. of an approximative calculation that can be iterated indefinitely. And the notion of infinitesimal, in actual practical usage, is merely a placeholder for a small approximation which can be taken as small as the data allows--even to this day, nobody can beat dx and dy for setting up a differential equation.

Ironically, had I not wound up in tech as a day job, I would never have discovered Knuth's and especially Wilf's masterful books on generating function theory, which make clear just how Euler's generation worked their magic (formal manipulation of generating functions).

While it was a source of incredible turmoil and identity crisis in my late teens and early-to-mid 20s, I've now gotten used to the fact that I'm not suited to academic mathematics, and I'm used to working in isolation, confined to an hour before work, and weekend mornings.

But wow is it strange to occasionally discover my privately-held views are more widely held. This week I learned of the "ultrafinitist" perspective, which is close to my own: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf

Moon moods for Friday happy hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDBGcePFuU

stoked to switch to a dumbphone. just need to figure out if I'll use a wifi-only iphone as my camera or get a proper point-and-shoot

whew, I've had a lot of these days at work lately:

* get online brutally early (7 or 730)
* 2-4+ hours of meetings with hard context switches
* ...frazzled staring off into space...
* EOD: wait, what did I actually do today?

it actually took me a minute to figure out if this was a real decentralized web thing or a parody account

https://mobile.twitter.com/channel/status/1526232822373048320

decided to treat myself today, so I switched to a fresh new N95

welp

https://ourworldindata.org/monkeypox