local minimum

That seems like a fair trade off when the only real alternative seems to be to return a special value like NaN? Which leads to all the pain and heartache of null in other languages except magnified since so many functions and methods will happily operate on NaNs as if they are numbers

A photo of the Dover Books for the Holidays catalog. There's an illustration of a vehicle covered in presents and a Christmas tree on it

I have noticed that Dover Publications included not even one pure math title in their 2024 holiday catalog which I think goes to show that these people are cowards and fair weather friends who don't truly care about us. If anything they are probably ashamed

in fact all geometry is sacred

A screenshot of a math figure from "Conics and Cubics" by Robert Bix. It consists of a plane intersected by two other planes that are parallel, and the projections of various points into the plane, illustrating the "vanishing line"

The Heartbeat of God:

It's sometimes excruciating to be into math while also having a day job. Like I could be listening to the heartbeat of God right now and instead I'm just. Building a data pipeline to hydrate a dashboard

That thing where you vaguely remember a theorem that you're sure it would be helpful right now, but you can only remember one of the assumptions and the punch line but very hazily and that you maybe read it in a book on analytic theory of polynomials or no was it an applied func analysis book hmm

But people are also struggling, folks are really desperate. There's no healthcare. Like absolutely nothing, even if you have the cash and are willing to pay out of pocket. It's pretty bleak

It's a really beautiful place. Coming from California I love the intensity of the weather, the thunderstorms and monsoon season. Unlike California, not everyone is trying to do a startup or become an actor or something, the culture here is great. Lots of queer folks

Zelenskyy says wants Ukraine to become a ‘big Israel’ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the main issue for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion ends will be security.

He's been very chummy with Israel for a long time, even prior to the invasion

www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/...

A shot of blue asters blooming with anthills and rubble in the backyard

Love when the blue asters start blooming in Albuquerque

Like even this badly limited implementation has connected people separated by oceans and war and led to the overthrow of governments. Anyway learning about its history and playing with technologies like tiddlywiki you find that we could have so much more still

Even HTML has been deeply transformative as the backbone of the Internet, despite it being a hypertext implementation that is deeply limited relative to the dreams of hypertext visionaries.

The book "Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext" in the "Anthem Scholarship in the Digital Age" series by Belinda Barnet laying on a blanket against a black laptop

Been reading about the early history of hypertext in Memory Machines by @manjusrii.bsky.social -- the term hypertext has become so popular and tightly associated with HTML that I think most people today aren't very excited by it, and that's really a shame

although i really wish this thing had bookmarking, it's a little less bleak than that other place that is nowadays dominated by blue checked ayn rand big science accounts. like a wasted universe with nothing but photons from hawking radiation