Joris Vankerschaver

Applied mathematician at Ghent University Global Campus in Incheon, South Korea. Former scientific software developer, Python coder.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

import #pandas as 🐼, using a custom Python encoding! See https://t.co/RkEIKmzMNO for more details. H/T to @datapythonista for the idea.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@tak3sh8 Figuring out dependency chains of Python packages (other languages probably too but that is the one I have experience with). You think NP hard means "takes a long time", you end up running the algo over and over again, and you get a sense for worst vs typical complexity.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

I let claude go over my course notes and slide decks, and it finds errors that have passed by 100s if not 1000s of eyes (well, one assumes)

[Steve McCormick @Quasilocal]

Endorse. Recently I had it inform me that in some parts of a paper I used w and other parts \omega for the same quantity... These are the things my eyes will never catch 😅

[Emily Oster @ProfEmilyOster]

Advice for PhD students in economics about using AI, from the brilliant Isaiah Andrews. This should probably be circulated to all PhD cohorts

https://t.co/07xEbmx5n5

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@remilouf I'm curious, why an Obsidian vault and not an org-mode repo? Lack of mobile support for org? Some other functionality that Emacs doesn't provide?

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@mmbronstein @skdh decohering

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@giffmana How else are you going to get your mutable strings? https://t.co/vHh4jOvAoS

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

For clarity, the lines leading up to that were

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@simonw Another useful comparison is the fact that a cell phone holds about 20 Wh when fully charged, so 65 ChatGPT queries is about one full phone worth of energy.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@prof_g Are the slides available online?

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

If I compare what I worked on in 2007-09 (control and dynamical systems, Caltech postdoc) with what is possible now, hard to agree more. Old days feel like playing with pebbles in the sand...

[prof-g @prof_g]

"Shorting the jobs AI apocalypse"
-- strong agree : article linked below...
i was in a panel discussion w/faculty about AI and i asked "how many of you would trade your current self to be a student again?" : zero takers, save me. it's the best time ever to be young...

[Daniel Litt @littmath]

Huge congrats to OpenAI for their IMO gold. I don’t find it too surprising that an AI tool was able to achieve this (see below, though I’d sort of lost hope the last few days) but I’m pretty surprised it was an LRM with no tool use etc.

[Martin Renou @martinRenou]

Friendly reminder that:
- conda-forge IS NOT anaconda
- conda-forge is free and open-source
- micromamba is a fast drop-in replacement for the conda CLI

💕

[Michiel ☁️ @Michielstock]

We set up a Discord server to share ideas and brainstorm about the intersections between #synbio, #AI, evolution, evolutionary algorithms and alife. It is a place to think about how we can make biology open-ended. DM me if you want to join. We welcome diverse viewpoints! (RT=💕)

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

Busy week at GUGC: the opening of Marine@UGent, our 10-year anniversary, Belgian beer festival, and engaging talks with visitors from near and far. All very rewarding, but I’m secretly looking forward to Wednesday, when I can tell our incoming students all about integrals.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

Cambridge, 1 August 2024

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

You thought a single function should not do too much... Welcome to R, where a single statement spans a whole page.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

@pfsmet @guardian What is the correct annual growth rate? Is it the 1.0083 cited in the article?

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

Link to the program: https://t.co/hMDGPG030I

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

Do you know any students who want to spend a summer writing code and get paid by Google in the process? I'm one of the GSoC mentors for GA4GH, a standards-setting body for genomic data management/analysis. Message me for more details.

[Joris Vankerschaver @jvkersch]

At some point, the UK tax authorities should just switch to mathematical notation

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

# on shortification of "learning"

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.