Recent content on odds & ends
installation macos (apple silicon) I’ve recently been having trouble with emacs-mac , so I’ve switched over to jimeh’s emacs-builds , which seems to be working alright. As an added bonus, I’m now on emacs 30, and my site seems to generate via ox-hugo without errors (in the past I could only get it to work on my linux desktop).
Found out about the December adventure on Mastodon (likely from folks over at merveilles.town ). It’s already almost a good third of the way into December, but better late than never. Here’s a bit about it , but the idea is just to pick a project or a few, work on them, and log your progress. Now that December’s over, I’ve written a short retrospective at the bottom of the…
what is innovation? political and economic change Xiaowei Wang writes in Blockchain Chicken Farm It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley… The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring…
package management uv I’m using uv to manage python versions and per-project virtual environments. uvx/uv tool One interesting feature of uv is the ability to run tools without installing them, e.g. uvx ruff (which is just an alias for uv tool run ruff ) to run the code format without requiring it in the project. This will install the tool into a temporary, isolated environment and then run…
In Japanese, yojijukugo (四字熟語) are four-character kanji compounds that sometimes have idiomatic meanings. Here are a few I’ve learned so far that I found interesting. 前途多難（ぜんとたなん）: having many difficulties in store; grim prospects 悪因悪果（あくいんあっか）: evil sowed, evil reaped 善因善果（ぜんいんぜんか）: good actions lead to good rewards; one good turn deserves another 一石二鳥（いっせきにちょう）: killing two birds with one…
marx’s definitions from the product of one’s labor in the labor process from species-being from others
marx’s definition Marx introduces the notion of commodity fetishism quite early in Capital . technology The material objects underlying the technologies with which we interact present themselves as commodities, products of social labor: The problem comes when we fetishize technology by only seeing the object in front of us without considering any of the broader networks of social, political,…
I don’t remember exactly when it was that I stumbled upon gwern.net , perhaps high school or early college. It’s tempting to make the comparison to Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole, but my hazy recollection is that I found the content less interesting than the shape and form of the website itself. Less of a rabbit hole and more of a garden, albeit one somewhat mysterious in its…
This is a test file in the garden.
At the threshold of detectability, both the surface of the negative and that of the thing it represents must be studied as both material objects and as media representations. In other words, this condition forces us to remember that the negative is not only an image representing reality, but that it is itself a material thing, simultaneously both representation and presence. Weizman, Forensic…
Boser, Guyon, and Vapnik (BGV) introduce support vector machines (SVMs) in [ 1 ] and their immediate application is that of optical character recognition (OCR). More specifically, given images of handwritten numerals, they train a classifier to categorize a given image by digit. BGV show that SVMs can achieve performance comparable to that of a more sophisticated five-layer neural network…
I recently stumbled upon a programming interview question and the first solution that sprang to mind used a sprinkling of algebraic topology. I thought this might be a fun little pedagogical way to introduce the idea of homology, so here goes! 1 I’ll assume familiarity with matrices, the basics of linear algebra, and a bit of python. Say we’re given a 2-dimensional matrix where each…
Recently I was curious about the origins and initial applications of the homological perturbation lemma (more on that below). Turns out it’s a beautiful story involving the homology of simplicial fibrations (due to [ 1 ] and [ 2 ]) that I had somehow managed to avoid learning about. In this brief note I want to sketch this arc of ideas. For spaces \(B\) and \(F\), the Eilenberg-Zilber…