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- > why do u think I am capable of memorizing the Greek one
No one memorizes the Greek alphabet. We just learn it as we go because it’s useful to have different types of letters to refer to different types of objects. That’s it.
> I tried to get into set theory thrice now, not happening with all the math lingo, hieroglyphs and dry ass content.
That sounds like you’re trying to learn a specific field without actually having any of the prerequisites to learn it. I don’t know what you’re specifically referring to when you say “set theory” as that’s an incredibly wide field, and depending on what you’re trying to learn it can be quite technical.
> Learning can be incredibly fun if it was designed fun. Math is a dry and slow process.
This sounds like someone complaining that getting to run a marathon is tiresome and hard. Yes, teaching mathematics can always be improved and nothing is perfect, but it will still be hard work.
- Again, learning notation is part of the process of learning math. No one is gatekeeping anything, at no point you need to do an exam or magically be aware of notation that you never saw. Every book and every class will define new notation at the beginning, in most cases they will do so even when there’s no new notation. I am not sure what your argument is.
- I do not have any confusion with the notation, I am confused about what the argument you’re trying to convey with English words.
- The only thing that sentence says is that it’s impossible to understand math without understanding the language of math and how it is constructed. Not sure how that is controversial or gatekeeping. If you are annoyed at that comment saying “learn” instead of “be taught”, I think that’s a pedantic argument because the argument wasn’t about that at all.
- I know it is a matrix, the notation is not confusing at all. I am saying that the concept of a matrix as a set of numbers arranged in a rectangles and the concept of operations on a matrix are very different things, the confusion will not come from notation.
- Well, obviously they will be confused because you jumped from a square of numbers to a bunch of operations. They’d be equally confused if you presented those operations numerically. I am not sure what it is you want to prove with that example. I am also not sure that a child can actually understand what a matrix is if you just show them some numbers (i.e., will they actually understand that a matrix is a linear transformer of vectors and the properties it has just by showing them some numbers?)
- The article does not complain about notation. It describes how the different fields of mathematics are so deep and so abstract that it’s hard to understand them as a professional mathematician in a different field. That’s a hard problem worthy of discussion, but as the article says, it’s not as much a problem of notation or of explanations, rather than it’s just intrinsically difficult and complex because these are abstract and deep fields.
It’s not gatekeeping. It’s just hard.
- I wonder why so many people are under the impression that the notation is what is keeping them away and if only the notation was easier then the underlying concepts would be clear. For example, if you don't know what the pullback of a differential form is, it doesn't matter if I write it in clear text or if I write the common notation φ^* ω.
> It's a domain reserved for a few high priests inducted into the craft and completely inaccessible to everyone else.
It's a domain reserved for people who want to learn it, and there's ton of resources to learn it. Expecting to understand it without learning it does not make any sense.
- I'm not sure that symbols are the thing actually keeping you away. Clear text functions might not be as clear, as it will be harder to scan and it will still contain names that you might not be familiar with. Those "weird symbols" are not there because people liked to make weird symbols. No one likes them, it's just that it makes things easier to understand.
- > I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping
I'm surprised at how could you get at this conclusion. Formalisms, esoteric language and syntax are hard for everyone. Why would people invest in them if their only usefulness was gatekeeping? Specially when it's the same people who will publish their articles in the open for everyone to read.
A more reasonable interpretation is that those fields use those things you don't like because they're actually useful to them and to their main audience, and that if you want to actually understand those concepts they talk about, that syntax will end up being useful to you too. And that a lack of syntax would not make things easier to understand, just less precise.
- 3blue1brown, while they create great content, they do not go as deep into the mathematics, they avoid some of the harder to understand complexities and abstractions. Don't take me wrong, it's not a criticism of their content, it's just a different thing than what you'd study in a mathematics class.
Also, an additional thing is that videos are great are making people think they understand something when they actually don't.
- The interview works as intended because the main priority is to avoid hiring people who will be a negative for the company. Discarding a small number of good candidates is an acceptable tradeoff.
- > So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.
Candidates could also have an AI listening to the questions and giving them answers. There are other ways that they could be in the process without copy/pasting blindly.
> To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc).
Exactly, that's why I feel like saying "AI is not allowed" makes it all more clear. As interviewers we want to see these abilities you have, and if candidates use an AI it's harder to know what's them and what's the AI. It's not that we don't think AI is an useful tool, it's that it reduces the amount of signal we get in an interview; and in any case there's the assumption than the better someone performs the better they could use AI.
- Which capabilities are being shown off here? The ability to take an already existing world-model and take lots of compute to have a worse, less correct model?
- Generalisable how? The model completely hallucinates invalid input, it's not even high quality and required CSGO to work. What's the output you expect from this and what alternatives are there?
- What exactly would be the benefit of that? We already have Counter Strike working far more smooth than this, without wasting tons of compute.
- OpenCL was released in 2009. AMD has had plenty of time to push and drive that standard. But OpenCL had a worse experience than CUDA, and AMD wasn't up to the task in terms of hardware, so it made no real sense to go for OpenCL.
- With volume-based fees you only have one type of user. Costs and benefits are predictable, and it's clear who you're providing the service to (the writers) so the company's goals are better aligned with those of their clients: attract more people to the platform. It's the writer the one tasked with deciding how to monetize those subscribers.
On the other hand, taking revenue off paid subscriptions means they have two types of users, free and paying. Even inside paying customers they'll have classes, as not all subscriptions cost the same. This means that the company has an incentive to implement dark patterns that convert users from free to paid, or from lower tiers to higher tiers, even when that is not in the best interest of the writer.
- It definitely is easier without AI. Before, if you saw a photo you could be fairly confident that most of it was real (yes, photo manipulation exists but you can't really create a photo out of nothing). Videos, far more trustworthy (and yes, I know that there's some amazing 3D renders out there but they're not really accessible). With these technologies and the rate at which they're improving, I feel like that's going out of the window. Not to mention that the more content that is generated, the easier it is that something slips by despite being fake.
They already do this. That is how we all learn notation. Not sure what you mean by numerically though, a lot of concepts cannot be defined numerically.