Substrate

When we’re not so different from people around us, it’s irresistible to become obsessed about beating others. ​ Still here’s my answer: If one must go to college, I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead. ​ In Canada, people apply to major in certain subjects; if they earn admission, it’s not so easy to switch, so there’s less of this intellectual loitering that one finds on American campuses. And when I attended a German university, students told me that German 18-year-olds don’t usually go directly to university after high school. Instead, they take a year off to travel, work, or volunteer. These experiences create difference and maturity, thus better inoculating people against mimetic contagion. ​ Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist. That is, he thinks that people are not engaged in class struggle, in which proletarians unite against the bourgeoisie; instead, people reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. ​ If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?

Find something that’s important to you in 2019 – social, political, economic, whatever – and with a little effort you can trace the roots of its importance back to World War II. There are so few exceptions to this rule it’s astounding. To me, the war is fascinating to study not because of what happened, but what it went on to influence. What are the other Big Things – the great-grandparents – of important topics today that we need to study if we want to understand what’s happening in the world? The three big ones that stick out are demographics, inequality, and access to information. As America’s offices diversify faster than its retirement communities, the minority-white labor force will be supporting the majority-white retirees. The point is that we can’t just look at how rich the top has become, or at how stagnant the bottom is. It’s the gap between the two that causes one group to push back against the other. It’s almost certain that the educational system will be upended. The current arrangement of needing a college degree in order to have a good chance at becoming and staying middle class, but taking on life-changing amounts of debt to do so if you don’t have family assistance, can’t last. I have no idea how it ends. But there’s practically no chance that in 30 years the story is, “Everyone just kept taking on education mortgages at age 18, tuition kept rising at double the rate of inflation, and it was all OK.” It’s going to break somehow. The range of political opinions has always been extreme, but what we’ve seen over the last decade is what happens when the warm blanket of ideological ignorance is removed. The world is driven by tail events. A minority of things drive the majority of outcomes. It’s one of the most important concepts in investing, where a few positions may account for most of your lifetime returns.

This situation crops up so often in mathematics that the acronym “TFAE” (for “The Following Are Equivalent”) has become a standard part of a mathematician’s education.

Designing media to reflect how people think and learn

In math, we might show a student a peer’s strategy, then ask them to solve a new variant of the problem. In the humanities, we might show a student a peer’s essay beside their own, then ask them to draw lines between all the places they and their peer were making the same argument.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

— like seeing a good friend, long neglected, after so many years. ​ He asks him questions, and then more questions, and waits through silences when Lloyd can’t answer them. ​ — instead of sitting with those feelings, again, we work. Because work means money, and money brings a modicum of stability, and relief, however temporary, from that same fear. Work doesn’t actually give us peace or solve our problems. But for a lot of us, it’s what we’re good at and what we know, which is far more comforting than staring at the abyss of what we don’t. ​ He brings us back to the openheartedness of childhood, when we lacked the skill to deflect, or compartmentalize, or resort to work. ​ nonetheless a practice: a decision, made every day, to care deeply about others, but also to refuse to insulate himself from the emotions that care requires.

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words stitch you back together day by day. ​ voracious readers, overthinkers and graceless dorks.

Token Acquisition Service for Combine · GitHub

(He’s off to chill in the woods and freelance.) ​ What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.

These $100 calculators have been required in classrooms for more than twenty years, as students and teachers still struggle to afford them

Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are.

I want a culture where employees can tell us their dreams, including after Carta, and we support them doing it. ​ Lastly, all departures, whether employee initiated or company initiated, will receive payment commensurate with tenure.

Collectively, the engineers at Lickability have worked with dozens of iOS development teams, shipping countless features, new products, redesigns, and Swift rewrites. Ten years in, our processes have evolved into a well-oiled machine with collaboration at the core of our day-to-day engineering. Whether we’re augmenting a client’s existing iOS team or acting as the sole developers, and whether we’re building a social network, news reader, or game, our approach to collaborating on code remains largely the same. We find it important to follow a few key guidelines on every product we help ship, and would like to share them with you.

I think that we need a way of doing math where things don’t need to proven completely before moving on. Like if a hypothesis about prime numbers is so far true for the first 10,000 of them we could say it's “finitely true” or something. Then anything we prove using that fact would also be only true in a limited sense. I’m guessing that for many practical purposes this only partially true result would be enough. Are there logics which think about this idea of partial truth? @JadeMasterMath But Hardy and Littlewood did something really cool: they proved something assuming the Riemann Hypothesis is true, and proved it a completely different way assuming the Riemann Hypothesis is false! Both ways really *use* the assumption they made. https://twitter.com/johncarlosbaez/status/1199427147284115457

In theory, `Never` can be a substitute for every type, since you have no instance to call any methods on, but that breaks down with static methods since those don’t need an instance. Right, the issue is with static and initializer requirements. The `Never` type itself can be a subtype of all types in the language but that does not mean that `Never` can conform to all protocols. So, it gets hairy when you introduce generalized existentials into the language. i.e. `Never` needs to be a subtype of those existentials without necessarily conforming to the protocol. Related, SE-0217: https://forums.swift.org/t/se-0217-the-unwrap-or-die-operator/14107/222

Elm is about making delightful projects. [...] Projects you are excited to share. Projects that get you excited about programming! That means I am always asking myself how Elm can be simpler. How can it be easier to learn? More fun? Quicker for prototyping? More reliable? I think my obsession with these questions are the heart of Elm's design philosophy and Elm's success.

healing doesn’t happen in a linear manner, but in an ever-outward spiral; you will find yourself in the same place, but in a slightly different one, again and again

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s097-applied-category-theory-january-iap-2019/

Have you heard the buzz? Applied category theory is gaining ground! But, you ask, what is applied category theory? Upon first seeing those words, I suspect many folks might think either one of two thoughts: 1. Applied category theory? Isn't that an oxymoron? or 2. Applied category theory? What's the hoopla? Hasn't category theory always been applied? (Visit the blog to read more!)

and isn’t not knowing the rules just beautiful? When the sun echoes off the thousands of windshields

String diagrams: Functors and natural transformations

I think astrology has stuck around for thousands of years precisely because it is so good at being a kind of infrastructure for those conversations.

In type theory, an uninhabited type is often called a bottom type, and written as ⊥. A bottom type is a subtype of every other type. So `Never` would be an `Int` and a `String` and a `UIViewController` and every other type. The opposite is the top type (⊤), the supertype of every other type. In Swift, that’s `Any`.