Triply periodic minimal surfaces are the golden standard in thermal management, acoustics, and even medical applications. But minimality itself doesn't contribute much to practicality. We use them because they are simply studied better than the non-minimal surfaces.

So I'm studying the non-minimals. They are much more governable, what I link to is a demo of a surface builder with two levels of control. Next, they are conjugatable including conjugations with different period of self (that will be the following paper), they generalize nicely to non-periodic or partially periodic surfaces, and they work in other space configurations. E. g. I'm now playing with bi-periodic curves that cover the 2D space with self-replicating hexagons.

If all that I'm experimenting on today in 2D will turn out well in 3D too, we'll have a whole new direction in implicit modeling.

There is a different take on Lisp in Python - fakelisp. It's literally Lisp in Python, not an interpreter, but a syntax sugar library that allows embedding Lisp snippets into valid Python.

https://codeberg.org/okaleniuk/fakelisp

    from fakelisp import *

    # And now you can start mixing Python and LISP
    X = (BEGIN
        (SET (F) (LAMBDA (X)
            (IF (EQ (X) (1))
                (1)
                (MUL (X) (F (SUB (X) (1)))))))

        (LIST (F (4)) (42)))

    # Back to Python any time
    print "x: ", str(X)

There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.

Students are lazy, in a good way, so they are more likely to run things on their own and play with interactive bits if the whole lecture is just one link.

https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/

The idea here is, one can pick the slides they want and arrange them into a sequence right in the URL. This way, there is no registration, no user data collection, no persistent state even. You just pick the slides, teach your material, and move on.

It's very raw, I still want to add a convenient sequence constructor, a "blank" slide so you could display your own content in it, and a similar quiz page. But I already used some of the slides for teaching, students seem to like them.

Hopefully, I'll have the rest done by the beginning of the spring semester.

That's the problem with authoritarian regimes. You can buy a plant by a fiat (pun intended), but you can't make a decent car by a decree.

There are plenty of activities that are essential for engineering but not a sort of engineering themselves. Like writing documentation, or communicating requirements to your colleagues. Making instructions and operational procedures. Management. Accounting. Marketing. What makes making software an engineering discipline and making coffee not? Where is the line and why we presume we should be behind that line?

Writing isn't an engineering discipline. And all industries rely heavily on writing. Could it be that writing software is just writing for computers and as such could only by codified within another engineering discipline and not by its own?

For instance, all the sorting algorithm turn to, effectively, bubble sort since without branches, you always go with the worst case - and the sorting complexity is always the O(n^2). But it's okay, since the algorithm becomes predictable. You just swap a conditional swap:

    if a < b then swap(a, b)

    c = (a+b)/2
    d = |a-b|/2
    a = c + d 
    b = c - d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44420367

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