Extra Ordinary #580
Substrate
The people behond the 25/26 zine
Sorry, we can’t join your Slack
Assume your company is going to be around for 25 years, and treat the first few years accordingly. In other words, give yourselves room to change and grow, and take the lessons you learn during the next few years to heart. If something isn’t working for you, be honest with yourselves and your clients. If something is working well, keep doubling down on it until it doesn’t.
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standing in a new kitchen barefoot face full of wind. and each one brought a delight so unexpected and profound, it made me shiver with the delicate aliveness of it all.
Proof in Functions
Swift’s generic functions allow us to explore a beautiful idea that straddles the line between mathematics and computer science
Life Spirit Distillation
by letting go more and more of your idea of what your life should be like, and embracing the possibilities of what it is actually turning out to be like. “Growth” fixation makes you less alive to the realities and possibilities of what's actually happening, and inclined to go into denial or futile activity in response to changes that you cannot undo This is fundamentally why I am somewhere between skeptical to actively hostile towards it. Nothing is as self-limiting as a fixed idea of “growth” imagined by a younger version of you. It is about living life in a way that you might run into versions of yourself you didn’t know were possible. Life intensification philosophies boil down to just two questions: A: will you choose the unexpected more intense versions of yourself you meet along the road of life, and B: what new clothes will you wear if you do?
Protocols Sidebar I: Protocols Are Nonconformists
And in Swift 5, `Error` conforms to itself so that you can have “untyped error”
Protocols I: “Start With a Protocol,” They Said
In the beginning, Crusty In 2015, at WWDC, Dave Abrahams gave what I believe is still the greatest Swift talk ever given, and certainly the most …
Felix’s core values
I believe I can have the highest impact by providing the right education infrastructure to people who are a lot smarter than me and might already work in those fields.
The Identity monad trick
Protocols III: Existential Spelling
Existentials and universals are [logical] “duals,” which means that one can be transformed into the other without losing its structure. So `AnySequence` is a universal type (generic) that’s equivalent to an explicit existential of `Sequence` (protocol). That’s why when you run into problems with protocols, your solution may be to convert it into generic structs (or vice versa). They solve the same problems in different ways with different trade-offs. And when you see “can only be used as a generic constraint,” what the compiler is really telling you is that protocols with associated types (PATs) don’t have an existential.
Improving the UI of generics
We could think of type-level-abstracted return types as doing the same thing but at the type level; you give a function generic arguments as inputs, and it gives a certain return type back. This roughly follows the progression of `impl Trait` in Rust, where it was first introduced only for return types, then was generalized to be able to appear structurally in both argument and return types. We think this is a reasonable first step because it directly addresses the biggest functionality gap in the generics model. After that first step, there are a few fairly orthogonal language change discussions we can have, some of which are already underway
Why Strava Is Getting More Social Than Ever
The company is growing fast, adding roughly a million users a month, and it has lofty goals to expand far beyond its old identity as a platform for logging rides and runs. Can it succeed?
“Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?”
Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.
Julia Evans’ Oh shit, git! zine
The Infinity Zoo
Personal site for John Feminella: software engineer · enthusiastic technologist · curiosity advocate
How “soccer girl” became the indisputably coolest look
The women’s World Cup means all eyes are on the players right now, but their aesthetic has been enviable for a long time.
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression. You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not.
What we’ve learned from seven years of working to make RC 50% women, trans, and non-binary
Additionally, we want RC to be a place where everyone can focus their time and energy on becoming better programmers, not worrying that they don’t belong or feeling like they have to represent their entire race or gender because they’re in the extreme minority. We focus on diversity so Recursers can focus on programming.
Is Science Stagnant?
...the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent. That evidence demands a large-scale institutional response. It should be a major subject in public policy, and at grant agencies and universities. Better understanding the cause of this phenomenon is important, and identifying ways to reverse it is one of the greatest opportunities to improve our future.
On slowing down
What would happen if I let myself take a break, let myself rest, gave myself some time off from the checklists and the to-do lists and the need to publicly appear productive? Maybe I’ll lose some followers, maybe I won’t be first in people’s minds when they’re thinking of someone to speak at their conference, maybe I’ll stop getting put into random lists of “Cool Thought Leaders To Follow On Twitter Dot Com.” But I’m not going to lose my job or my apartment or stop being able to pay my bills if I give myself a break from “trying to be productive literally every single day.” Realistically, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to find things like speaking opportunities if I want them. I’m not going to disappear if I put down my armor and let myself relax for a little while.
The strangeness of Berlin
The message of Berlin is that not everything is set, that it has room for you.
Cornell’s Professor of Practice position and backstory
The title was approved because at the time Cornell lacked any professional titles for people with academic appointments focused solely, or mostly, on teaching with little or no expectation of engagement in research.
“Math Twitter, have any favorite tips for making advanced math accessible to wide audiences?”
@JadeMasterMath: There are lots of mathematical concepts which don’t have well written resources to learn about them. I think that explaining something in a clear way with a story arc can sometimes be enough. @jeremyjkun: Write about the topics that you learned, where there was a succinct phrase, picture, or idea that suddenly made it clear. Then arrange the whole blog post around getting the reader to that same understanding.
Barry Mazur’s “When is one thing equal to some other thing?” memo
Both modes of definition need a way of insisting on a certain “minimality” for the structure of natural numbers that they are developing. The Peano axioms formulate this “minimality” by dependence upon the domino effect of truth in a mathematically inductive context. The Peano category approach formulates “minimality” by considering the position of the natural numbers as a discrete dynamical system, among all discrete dynamical systems.
Alex Berke’s “Beautiful Symmetry”
Math is about more than just numbers. In this 'book' the language of math is visual, shown in shapes and patterns. This is a coloring book about group theory.
Gwen Weston’s friendships zine
This has been so exciting for me because (reason). Thanks for letting me share. What’s important about that to you? Likes don’t count, you can’t respond to them. The triangle of friendship is consistency, vulnerability, and connection, with the latter being the base. I’m going to continue to mingle. It was lovely to meet you/y’all! “Hi, I’m [Jasdev]! Mind if I join you?” Suffixing clothing compliments by asking where they got it from. We all want to be both seen and supported—in love, friendships, and work.
A Combine `flatMapLatest` implementation
flatMapLatest implementation via @SergDort pic.twitter.com/Upow6LRRDr— Rui Peres (@peres) June 5, 2019
Recharge
There is an almost mystical element to this search for a quick fix; it is rooted in the same misguided beliefs that once led Ponce de Léon to search for a “fountain of youth” upon landing in the so-called New World, scouring the ponds, rivers, lagoons, and lakes of the Florida coastline for the mythic fountain. (There’s debate about whether this actually happened, or if the quest is itself a myth — but the myth’s endurance tells us about its staying power.) The fountain of youth would be the ultimate recharge — a reversal of time in a single instant. The contemporary recharge is about continuously undoing the day before, quickly erasing the wear and tear of living, creating a fresh start or a blank slate or a best self. But it’s aimed at a singular objective: productivity. At its heart, the myth of the recharge is about turning away from what might be broken about the structure of our society — the constancy of work, the absence of affordable healthcare, the expectation that we will be “plugged in” or “online” 24 hours a day — in search of short-term, generalizable solutions. We do not ask ourselves whether all this might be untenable, but instead what supplement we might take to make it a little more bearable. We rise and grind and rise and grind and sleep in between. We deplete, recharge, deplete, recharge.
An Interview with Emily Riehl
The worst thing is how intellectually isolated we all are, how few people there are with whom we can share the insights that we find the most exciting, even among other mathematicians. For me personally I feel very frustrated that there is this huge part of my emotional life that most of the people whom I care about have no access to. In a decade’s time, I hope I’m working on projects that I can’t even imagine now and have found a way to be a part of larger mathematical and public conversations.