Mark Hopkins

Maths PhD, Haskeller, @symbolica @SydneyTypes @SydneyPaperClub
Passionate thaumatoneirodule, entry-level hypnerotomachist

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

A thread of recommendations for people who want to get further into mathematics, but find most math books a little forbidding. Please comment and add your own favourites!

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

This is a bad take of epic proportions. It's also a perennial mental pothole that people have been falling into forever, and relevant beyond mathematics, so it might be useful digging (no pun intended) a little further...

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@skdh Simpler still to ignore far-right spokespeople like IMC. There's always the same cloud of associated traits with these people: anti-science, conspiracy theories, general brainworms, misogyny, anti-LGBT+, anti immigration, anti-minority, anti-democracy, pro-authoritatian, ...

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@RiquelmeMicael Obviously a scam, but couldn't they at least have first tried to master that oh-so-esoteric knowledge possessed by practically every 3rd grade child across the globe, and learn where the $ sign is written? 🙄😒

[Cory Doctorow NO LONGER ON TWIT TER @doctorow]

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it.

1/

[Dad×3_jack @Iceland_jack]

The (:&:) dup-pattern is clever

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@Iceland_jack Another one is matching multiple regular expressions. Even though the intersection of regular languages is again regular, vanishingly few regex libraries have support for intersections.

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@Iceland_jack Also, occasionally useful so an implementation can be at-a-glance correct wrt some tabular specification. I tried to draw out that motivation here:

https://t.co/4DKdqceKVL

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@Iceland_jack Cheers! It is useful. I can't claim credit though: Arnold deVos did it first for Scala.

https://t.co/GuKVQt1Qk4

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@DrEugeniaCheng The usual joke is that USB A plugs are spinorial, so require two full turns to return to the same state. So your discovery of a spin-1/10 anyonic plug must surely represent a fundamental breakthrough in quantum USB studies!

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@Skyb0rg Your second set of examples aren't quite right. A dependent product (function type that binds a variable) won't work: instead you need a dependent sum.

(a, b) = (x : Bool) -> if x then a else b
Either a b = (x : Bool, if x then a else b)

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

Why do apparently functioning adults think that pouring gasoline on a fire is the best way of putting it out? Genuinely puzzled

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@AshleyAitken @jdegoes If you think a chatbot and an art generator program pose a real and present danger to the human race, I have a bridge for sale you may be interested in. Or maybe lunar real estate? Cryogenics? Insurance against the Rapture?

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@hashbreaker Thank you for the clarification! And thank you for the paper — it was a very interesting read.

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

@hashbreaker no doubt a really obvious question, but: what are the odds of the world moving to expect proof artifacts from NIST for claimed security properties?

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

the bewildering *acceleration* of technological change in their lifetimes, the Singularity (though they did not use that word), their mounting existential dread: "Will we even be alive in three years' time, bro? I don't even know what world we'd be living in"

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

A somewhat surreal moment just now, overhearing a bunch of working class kids half my age at the back of a night-ride bus, one drinking from a bottle of scotch (which he shared), discussing:

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

https://t.co/Hn6IBzXHKo

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

So I was looking at the 3 critical open source CVE bug fixes in Android's September security bulletin, all in the Bluetooth module, and it's such a shame it hasn't all already been rewritten in Rust:

[Mark Hopkins @antiselfdual]

https://t.co/U6g4Qj4B9I