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!
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...
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.
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ALT Children playing on a climber. The colors of the climber and the foliage behind them has been oversaturated and shifted, making it surreal. The kids' heads have been replaced with the red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Standing in the foreground at rigid attention is a man in short-sleeved military garb, wearing aviator shades.
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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Jorge Royan (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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Noah Wulf (modified)
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
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:
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"
@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?
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:
ALT Text from the commit message for a critical-level CVE bug fix in Android's Bluetooth code:
Fix UAF in gatt_cl.cc
gatt_cl.cc accesses a header field after the buffer holding it may have been freed.
Track the relevant state as a local variable instead.
Hello @Mitre10: most of the links on your website appear to be broken, as is the search function.
ALT Trying to visit the URL "mitre10.com.au/customer-care/contact-us" returns a 403 Forbidden, with the message:
The requested URL was rejected.
For additional information, please contact support and provide this reference ID:
169193958387d51ea28f42485691c314e449602ca7c02e89436685cfeb066a37d76f5f353f
Tonight: Stephen Sherratt
"Llama is a new OCaml library for building software-defined audio synthesizers with a declarative EDSL... I’ll show how the library works, give a tour of its features, and then use it to turn my laptop into a musical instrument"
meetu.ps/e/Mhr8H/1WgKS/i
Thanks, ChatGPT!
Even though the "RA" is duplicated — and though I don't actually *need* the mnemonic anymore — it certainly beats my earlier attempts, hands down.
ALT Adjoints: LAPC-RAPL mnemonic
Of course, my friend! I'd be happy to help you with a mnemonic to remember the sequence of letters "LAPC- RAPL" and its significance in elementary category theory.
Here's a mnemonic that you can use:
"Little Animals Prefer Cozy-Roomy Abodes, Right After Playing Loudly."
Let's break it down:
• "Little Animals": Represents the left adjoints (LAPC), which are depicted as little animals.
• "Prefer Cozy-Roomy Abodes": Refers to the fact that left adjoints preserve colimits. The cozy-roomy abodes symbolize the colimits in category theory.
• "Right After Playing Loudly": Corresponds to the right
adjoints (RAPL), which are depicted as playing loudly. • "Right After": Indicates that right adjoints preserve limits.
By associating these vivid images with the letters in the sequence, you can create a mental picture that reminds you of the lemma in category theory: left adjoints preserve colimits and right adjoints preserve limits.
In any case, *miles* better than my previous efforts, which involved "Los Angeles police chief/cars/constables", with uncomfortable overtones of brutality, corruption, discrimination, systemic civil rights violations, lack of accountability, ....
And, interestingly, if I simply ask ChatGPT for one that starts with "Los Angeles police", it offers: "LAPD Arrests Protesting Civilians, Right After Peaceful Lawfulness". Food for thought...
Well, if that helps you remember your category theory, great.