Alex Neill

I like math too much in theory and stats too much in practice.
🎓 ᴜᴄʜɪᴄᴀɢᴏ

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@RobKuhn_ incredibly predatory behavior to not shit on the post

[levent @__alpoge__]

Please welcome to the world a beautiful new geometric object, to do with a problem i’ve always loved. claude really contains multitudes:D Does S^6 admit a complex structure?

Yup

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@googlemaps awesome to get a response will do

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@googlemaps should make an i'm not a lazy sod feature where directions take into account ability to walk a nontrivial amount at reasonable speeds

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@2cardtito finally someone posting my real-time choices and thoughts from back when i was playing poker

[alz @alz_zyd_]

The core problem with undergrad GPAs is that undergrads have too much freedom to choose classes, so GPA is more a signal of what classes you took than how good a student you are

[Auteur House @auteurhouse]

Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky:

"My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle.

Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.

I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.

Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream."

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@mise_en_seer @letterboxd deserves a follow

[Daniel Litt @littmath]

AI detection is useful, not because AI text is necessarily bad, but rather, because it requires little effort to produce. So it doesn’t carry evidence that the person who produced it thought it was worth writing—you don’t get a signal of quality until after you read it.

[n x d @nxd1979]

Claire Denis had the perfect response

[Joseph Kahn @JosephKahn]

And here's my disconnect with the current film culture - their obsession with realism, relatability, logic - the low hanging fruit of cinema. I just don't give a shit about if it makes sense. I don't care that Willie Scott suddenly jumps into an actual musical at the opening of Temple of Doom. I don't care if Wolf of Wall Street is factual to the dot. Audiences today will check out of the movie when Travis Bickel takes her to a porn theater because that makes no sense. Fuck these low imagination brutalists stripping dream logic from our movies. There's a reason the Odyssey has no gods - because the audience thinks they're smarter than Homer.

[Crypto Stifler @cryptostifl3r]

GucciNIKE when anyone sits him

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

good thing he built a delivery platform instead of going into stats

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Jeff Bezos on why he wants a trillion humans in the solar system

"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a 1,000 Mozarts and a 1,000 Einsteins"

"Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy. And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system"

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

talk around this is incredible u truly get everything. ppl that learned dangerously little stats but suffer from survivorship bias, sports betting shills that throw around the word ev like their life depends on it, and ppl that have never heard of utility theory in their life

[Niko @0xNiko1]

An MIT professor offered his class a coin flip: win $125 or lose $100. Most students said no. Then he proved refusing was the smart move, and it explains why you're bad with money.

The bet is a steal on paper. Flip a coin, win $125 or lose $100. Do the math and you come out $12.50 ahead on average. It's what economists call a more than fair bet. Most of the room still turned it down.

They weren't being dumb. They were being human.

Here's the idea underneath it. You don't actually care about dollars, you care about how much each dollar changes your life. And the dollars you already have are worth more to you than the ones you might win. So losing $100 stings harder than winning $125 feels good.

Then he pushed it further. He told the class he'd force them into that winning bet unless they paid to walk away. How much would they pay? The answer, with their standard math, was $43. People will hand over almost half their money to dodge a bet that's tilted in their favor.

That's not weakness. That's a law of how the mind values risk, and it has a name: risk aversion.

And it's the whole reason insurance exists. Being uninsured is just this coin flip in disguise. You quietly pay to never be the person who gets wiped out, even when the math says the odds are on your side.

Once you see it, you notice it everywhere. Every warranty, every premium, every bet you've refused. You weren't being irrational. You were pricing the fear.

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@SophyRomvari amazing film; deserves better than an airplane watch!

[Depressed Mathematician @retiremeplease]

@alz_zyd_ Italians need to stick to what they’re actually good at like variational analysis and geometric measure theory and leave pizza making to Americans who know how to actually do it right.

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@CuirCannage vancouver is a shithole dont do it

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

is there anywhere you can get a chicago style italian beef sandwich in montreal?

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@catmcgee even the discourse around it is very achromatic and the incentive it creates allows bad takes about ai use to propagate

[Alex Neill @ajjneill]

@catmcgee it prolongs the "this is ai written" so i'm gonna be hostile towards the person "passing it off as their own", because most people don't evolve in their sensibilities about new tech quickly enough to keep pace with ai developments esp given how difficult it is to understand