Hacker News: lying4fun

New comment by lying4fun in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

lying4fun — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:58:03 +0000

> In normal times people just want research that has life enhancing practical outputs

what about people who study birds, or say, olms? people want that kind of research? the people who are doing it surely do. astronomy and eg star watching in deep space? i could go on for days

people like doing mathematics, similarly to studying endemic organisms or other stuff of no direct utilitarian value

how many parents are happy to pay the fraction of taxes that go into something that their children might want to choose as a calling and fall in love with?

it’s okay to discuss whether something should be publicly funded, using “people want x kind of research” as a supposedly obvious or common sense argument is fallacious in the sense that it implies an idealised steelman model of the general public. that model is divorced from reality

New comment by lying4fun in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

lying4fun — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:10:18 +0000

my response is not to the post, but to the parent comment i replied to. the internal structure of mathematicians is their thing, if someone should step in, who? do you think that discrepancy matters?

New comment by lying4fun in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

lying4fun — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 01:07:12 +0000

mathematicians are primarily paid for teaching, and that's their primary function from the pov of the general society. i don't think anybody is debating that part of their profession? i read somewhere that the annual nsf grant budget for mathematics is 57 million, in total. even if it was just spiritual elegance, that's a reasonable number no?

New comment by lying4fun in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

lying4fun — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:10:33 +0000

different fields have different communication cultures, that’s not inherently bad. sacrificing inward focus is expensive from the pov of the insider; i see your points but not everything can be written for a general/wide audience. after all, the audience of the author are the specialists, since only specialists spent the effort to be able to engage with the work in depth. perhaps we disagree that mathematics is not a product that mathematicians are making?

what the work was meant to achieve in the first place is what the work was achieving in the first place. it was developing mathematics. if someone wants to use it, they are free to do so, or to write a blog article how it can be used by non experts. mathematicians do that themselves sometimes, but it’s not their job. myb there should be more incentives for them to do more of such work

i keep seeing this myth that mathematics has some purpose to do this or that, but somehow its purpose is least known to mathematicians, everyone else seems to know better

Indigenous Circuits

lying4fun — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 04:24:17 +0000

Article URL: https://computerhistory.org/blog/indigenous-circuits/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383769

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lying4fun in "Open source AI must win"

lying4fun — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:41:46 +0000

I’m sorry I can’t read past the first paragraph

Soft-leaving social media; choosing creation over connection

lying4fun — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 12:16:17 +0000

Article URL: https://scyy.fi/creation-and-connection

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766979

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lying4fun in "Homotopy Equivalences"

lying4fun — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:53:30 +0000

pretty sure it’s the manim library 3b1b uses (unable to check for certain right now)

Visualizing Homotopy Groups [video]

lying4fun — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 21:33:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxGtAuJdjYI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44360384

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lying4fun in "Homotopy Equivalences"

lying4fun — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 21:32:55 +0000

this great visualisation of homotopy groups might be helpful

A Sphere is a Loop of Loops (Visualizing Homotopy Groups)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CxGtAuJdjYI

New comment by lying4fun in "DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes"

lying4fun — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:54:36 +0000

and wars can be led in such ways that it never seems like the enemy is attacking the thing over which you would be willing to end the world. aka salami tactics

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang&pp=ygUOc2FsYW1pIHR...

New comment by lying4fun in "My Struggle with Doom Scrolling"

lying4fun — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 05:12:55 +0000

oof same here brother. chess is killing me. i go cold turkey but i come back eventually. one idea is to replace it with something and then ditch the replacement. or just capitalise next time there’s enough momentum built up for wanting to get rid off of it. i did do it before though, went not playing for months. but when it’s it’s back for good

New comment by lying4fun in "My Struggle with Doom Scrolling"

lying4fun — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 04:54:02 +0000

didn’t open the video, but you can also set double or triple tap on back of your iphone shortcut for this. i have a red filter set up for late night doom scrolling

New comment by lying4fun in "Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job"

lying4fun — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 22:44:22 +0000

great article. the information debt and budget seem like very useful things to have in mind

New comment by lying4fun in "The Deceptively Asymmetric Unit Sphere"

lying4fun — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 19:51:34 +0000

spend 1-2 years learning consistently _any_ undergrad math. id recommend focusing on “mastering” multivariable calculus, dependencies included. but keep taking peaks of higher level stuff or just articles as these. doing this is important as the math can be contextualised in many ways and being exposed to those ways helps you internalise intuitions

New comment by lying4fun in "Category Theory Illustrated: Logic (2021)"

lying4fun — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 14:41:58 +0000

you’re right, and I’m in that school of thought, but mainly for math. In essence, I know people who use it in their reaearch and I trust them (and there’s a lot of good people doing good stuff with CT—it’s ubiquitous, so I’m fine with trusting them). I have a beginner understanding of CT, actually I finally started studying it seriously a month ago, after being exposed to it sporadically for some time. I’m not claiming anything about CT in CS, but I’m optimistic about that it can have a more widespread positive effect in it

New comment by lying4fun in "Category Theory Illustrated: Logic (2021)"

lying4fun — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 02:48:56 +0000

would you say that 3 reformulates 1+1+1 in another language? because if yes, such reformulations shouldn’t be disregarded just because they’re “reformulations”. so we can say there are kinds of reformulations which make things incredibly easier, and category theory is one of them

New comment by lying4fun in "Category Theory Illustrated: Logic (2021)"

lying4fun — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 02:33:03 +0000

~”numbers are the abstract notion, the primitive way of counting is a bijection” W. Lawvere

so the way people use “abstraction” sounds more like they are saying “a thing we (we think) are not used to”

New comment by lying4fun in "Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio"

lying4fun — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 17:01:28 +0000

many times I’ve wanted to listen to a summarisation of a chapter from a textbook I’m reading. this can be useful in at least 3 ways:

1) it prepares me for the real studying. by being exposed to the gist of the material before actual studying, im very confident that the subsequent real study session would be more effective

2) i can brush up easily on key concepts, if im unable to sit properly, eg while commuting. but even if i were, a math textbook can be too dense for this purpose, and i often just want to refresh my memory on key concepts. and often im tired of _reading_ symbols or words, that’s when id prefer to actually _listen_, in a way, using a muscle that’s not tired

3) if im struggling with something, i can play this 5min chapter explanation multiple times a day throughout the week, while doing stuff, and engaging with it in a casual way. i think this would “soften” the struggle tremendously, and increase the chances of grasping the thing next time i tackle it

also id like a “temperature” knob, that i could tweak for how much in detail i want it to go

New comment by lying4fun in "Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels"

lying4fun — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:13:44 +0000

I’m both, at times I don’t want to choose, at times I want full control. I didn’t have TV for years (was pushing a decade), but ~2months ago I got myself an analog antenna that has local channels and it’s been a blast: I caught some olympic games, watched Euro cup, couple of movies (I caught “Decision to leave” from my watchlist——tremendous movie), I saw some Anthony Bourdain shows and now I know who the guy is and i enjoyed the show, saw a documentary on war in my country, watched some live streams of city council meetings… Also, I wanted to say this somewhere in this thread I’m not trying to sell tv to you, you caught a stray bullet, but also I’m sharing that I watched it with a different curiosity after so long of not having it, and did have a great time just with those 17 channels of uncurated content, which was the main motivation——to have uncurated content