Every Day I’m Galerkin

Every Day I’m Galerkin

@bikemath.bsky.social

Applied Mathematician, Veteran, Nevadan — Probably watching Star Trek. (he/him/his) up

72 Followers 55 Following 92 Posts Joined Jul 2023
10 months ago
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three angry birds are playing a game with dice ALT: three angry birds are playing a game with dice

Di hard

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10 months ago
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Why Would You Interview Donald Trump? ABC laid bare some of the media's worst tendencies

I wrote about the problem with interviewing Donald Trump, and how the media's fixation on its own biases has left it toothless.

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10 months ago

I still get uncanny valley when reviewing some papers. Established folks are absolutely using them, and it’s hilarious to me because these same people wouldn’t have survived this job market with their early career CVs.

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10 months ago

I don’t want an answer to this, but I’ve always sort of wondered what the French call a French horn.

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11 months ago

It’s funny that the “correct “way to respond to authoritarian attacks always begins with recognizing and admitting all the things the authoritarians are right about, and knocking that off. That’s always step one.

Then the authoritarians are satisfied, right?

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1 year ago
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a hockey player with the number 10 on his jersey stands next to a player with the number 3 on his jersey ALT: a hockey player with the number 10 on his jersey stands next to a player with the number 3 on his jersey

Flight attendants cross check for arrival

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1 year ago

Bury the powerlines

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1 year ago
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1 year ago

By the time these experiments make it to human trials, the risks tend to be extremely well understood, even in our non-utopian society.

I think yes. The benefit to society would be easier to apply to the risk / “reward” balance.

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1 year ago

Utopian society just means that the usual, cynical motivations for participation in any activity are basically eliminated.

Subjects would be willing, and fully understand the system and risks. They wouldn’t need compensation, because their needs are otherwise met.

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1 year ago
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1 year ago

I drive a subaru and people always think they're illuminating me when they tell me it's the lesbian car like that's not the reason i got it

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1 year ago
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I had this shirt in high school. I recall being interrogated at length by a few different people, each with a vested interest in making sure I was adhering to all appropriate interpretations of “aesthetic irony” relevant to teens in 2001.

Anyway, now they’re at Costco.

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1 year ago

Nosferatu is a part of the Pacific Rim extended universe.

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1 year ago

Grocery shopping on a budget is a daily exercise in home economics fiction

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1 year ago
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a man in a suit and tie is sitting at a desk and says i prefer my opinion to yours ALT: a man in a suit and tie is sitting at a desk and says i prefer my opinion to yours

Realized I wasn’t feeling enough existential dread, so I decided to rewatch Chernobyl.

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1 year ago
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We suspected data centers were creating an energy crisis for Virginia. Now it’s official. • Virginia Mercury The unconstrained buildout of data centers has handed Virginia leaders a problem that is, in the parlance of JLARC, “very difficult” indeed.

virginiamercury.com/2024/12/24/w... "For those of you unfamiliar with the vocabulary of bureaucrats, “very difficult to achieve” is a term of art that translates roughly as, “This is nuts.”"

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1 year ago

Until I see numbers otherwise, my gut tells me we (as a society) spend more money on police and private security (to police the homeless) than is needed to house and feed everyone in need.

Just saw a man give himself a sink bath in a soda fountain before getting run off.

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1 year ago

This stresses me out, haha. I’m so bad with new names as it is.

At some point the complexity would get wild that we’d see headlines about new prime numbers that read like race horse names at the Kentucky Derby.

“Introducing the new prime number: ‘The wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald’!”

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1 year ago

I hereby give you permission to toss the thanksgiving leftovers

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1 year ago

I love a good typo

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1 year ago

Man, I just knocked a solid millimeter of dust off a buster album the other day. Sitting there, I actually asked myself out loud “I wonder how many human beings actually remember this band?” fully convinced that the answer was quite small.

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1 year ago

To get past the AI problem we either need to build some ludicrously expensive countermeasure (and charge students for the privilege) or simply do what we used to do.

You can assign online homework credit, but the bulk of their grade should probably come from something verifiable.

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1 year ago

The solution (for math) is to not score online homework and only score in person quizzes and exams.

The solution for some writing-based classes is to adjust the credit / grading pie to include an in-class editing portion where they identify false statements, etc.

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1 year ago
eravioli wrote on Oct 17

I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man | did not realize how dire the A/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:

* I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us”

* One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

* l asked one of my TAs in @ math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

* A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When | asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He stillinsisted he was right when | pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

* A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the “computational” version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often’. He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??

Long term I think unis will find a way to combat LLM use, if nothing else to preserve their societal role as the official designator of "smartness" to save companies the trouble of developing a hiring procedure

But in the meantime we'll see a couple of cohorts absolutely determined to learn nothing

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1 year ago

Dad: “where do all the drippings go? I have tons of them when I cook it the normal way”

Me: “why do you think it’s so dry?”

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1 year ago

Can we start a spatchcock train? 🤣

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1 year ago

Post a *perfect* album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice In Chains

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1 year ago

What bad boy image?

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1 year ago

Who’s next? Toad the wet sprocket?

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