stingpie

It has to do with how you decompose problems. In the example I gave, I was trying to point out that arithmetic average, geometric average, and normalization are related problems. Consider applying this technique to something more complicated than averages: pathfinding. You could create a dozen different efficient functions, each with different considerations, but the core of the algorithm will always be the same. You can write pathfind_land(src, dest), pathfind_sea(src, dest), pathfind_air(src,dest), pathfind_sea_and_land(src,dest) etc. but it's obviously better to write it as pathfind(src,dest, is_traversable) and select the most efficient implementation inside the function. It also allows you to use a not-optimized implementation automatically if you haven't made an efficient implementation.

This is gonna make me sound crazy, but always pass functions when possible, and use case statements for how the passed-in functions are applied.

As a simple example, imagine you want to take the average of a set of numbers. Instead of doing sum(numbers)/len(numbers), do:

Quotient_reduce(sum, lambda x,y: x+1, numbers)

then, inside the definition of quotient_reduce,

Def quotient_reduce(accumulate_by, normalize_by, list):

If accumulate_by==sum and normalize_by==(lambda x,y:x+1):

  return [some efficient implementation of average]

Else:

  Return reduce(accumulate_by, list)/reduce(normalize_by, list)

I know it must look insane, but it generalizes normalization, mean, geometric mean, etc, and on the outside there's no taste of the horrible concrete implementation!

Apologies about formatting, I'm on my phone.

That aspergic urge to complete partial sentences...

is so strong! Why are these half sentences so popular??

"something"

My cousin works on similar stuff, and she says that knowing the connectome (which neurons connect to others) is practically useless for understanding how the brain actually functions. You don't know how strongly the neuron activations are correlated, and you can't tell a regular neuron from an inhibitory one. In other words, you can train it to do anything you want, and it will have nothing to do with how the brain actually thinks. She told me about this study where some scientists trained the fly's connectome to act like a fly, and then another paper trained it to play a game (it might've been this one).

The only definition of hash that I know is an identifier for an object created from that object's data. Everything else stems from that central idea. What other types of hash are there?

If I am remembering correctly, getting the weekend off was primarily pushed for by progressive Christian organizations (They needed a dedicated day to go to church, along with a work-free day for the sabbath) of course, this happened prior to the heavy conservative swing that defined most religious politics of the latter half of the 20th century. Depending on your views of the church, it's either surprising that they were the dominant progressive force of the first half of the 20th century, or surprising that they stopped being the dominant progressive force.

Therapist: Do you think your dives into math are a type of avoidance for difficult problems in real life?

Me: You know what's really interesting? I just thought of this, but recipes can be really well represented by a directed, weighted hypergraph. Each hyperedge is an action, the weights are the measurements, and so following the directed hyperedges will result in the meal the recipe is for. It more naturally captures how recipes can be non-linear than regular list based recipes!

Is English your second language? I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying.

This email is the phishing attempt test itself. It says you are exempt from the phishing testing, but then tells you to put your account information on a random website.

Instead of spinners, you should use progress bars. When the endpoint of a process is unknown, you should just have a ticker that displays an increasing number. In codex, for example, just show me the number of tokens read or generated so far. It gives me feedback that the process hasn't frozen, and it provides useful information. What an easy and cheap solution!

I'm having trouble passing your comment. Are you saying I'm more stupid than a toddler, or that the marketers are?