Author | Lightnews

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer

@nrr.corvidae.org

2.3K followers 4.5K following 9.4K posts

I get told "no" a lot. I studied actuarial mathematics in college. I pretend to be a yerba mate maned wolf on the Internet. Trans rights are human rights. This is not an activism zone. Use @nrr1.618033989 on Signal for that.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 1h

Haha, I mean, this is the perpetual curse of being a Math Guy. I talk, and it's like the lights are on but no one's home.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 1h

I had forgotten how much of an utter pain in the ass it is to compute the unit vectors of the Frenet apparatus when the curve isn't parametrized by arc length.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3h

The real MMT taxation was the millions of dollars spent by billionaires along the way.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 4h

You're adorable. <3

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 5h

Do I need to combine you with a noun in the instrumental case?

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 10h

It's a combination of things. In aggregate, we don't smoke or drink as much as we used to, and wearing sunscreen is a lot more common.

Those alone have done a lot.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 11h

I somehow never took a college-level rhetoric sequence my first go-around at this whole undergrad thing, so part of this quarter is dedicated to fixing that.

Karen Hao's "Empire of AI" is assigned reading, and the dramatis personae is basically a who's-who of folks who have me blocked on Twitter.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 1d

Man, I just want unions and cooperatives.

Like, let me take my union contract and everyone else's union contracts and use them as the basis for new legislation so that our next contract renegotiations can involve asking for more stuff without worrying about sliding backward.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 1d

Rustle roarks!

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 1d

"The intern was later commemorated for his heroism with a 'jackass' trophy."

We should all be so lucky.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

Oh, this dude was amazingly trollable, and after I'd eaten an hour and a half of my time keeping him away from other folks in the student union, I didn't want to press his buttons further.

He started with simulation theory. It was already a bad time for him from step one.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

Scaling can manifest in a few ways. Consider a vector space with a basis set that represents the fundamental dimensions: M, L, T, etc., where vectors in that space represent compound dimensions and scalar multiplication represents the powers of those fundamental dimensions.

Dimensional analysis!

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

They actually show up a lot in signal processing, optimal control, and some areas of robotics, where the ideas of direction and magnitude aren't as robust but you can nonetheless work with just the shape of the space and the connectedness of the elements within it.

Also, quantum mechanics.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

absolutely here for it. :3

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

They're still useful for addition and some sense of multiplication (really, scaling) of objects that otherwise wouldn't seem addable or multipliable.

The space of smooth functions (maybe diffeomorphisms) mapping points between manifolds is an example.

Divergence and curl also don't rely on it.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

Metrics, functions that tell you how far two points in a set are from one another, kind of throw a wrench into this because you can sometimes induce a norm from a metric but not always. It's conditional on translation invariance and playing nicely with scaling.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 2d

I love breaking folks' brains when I go on about how vectors don't necessarily need a magnitude or a direction.

If you don't have an inner product, you don't have a notion of direction.

If you don't have a norm, you don't have a notion of magnitude.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

This dude was extremely MAHA and extremely into the Great Replacement, and I suspect that racism and eugenics were playing a greater role in his politics than anything truly economic.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

No idea!

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

I mean, the important thing is being able to copy and paste from whatever they're calling Outlook Web Access these days. What you actually run deskside doesn't matter, and I'm sure you aren't the only curmudgeon OIT has to deal with.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

I've always wondered how the social sciences cope with this. Mathematics is all TeX all the time with collaboration done over email.

Like, we're stuck in the 1980's. It's pretty great.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

„[Wir treffen] meist auf zwei Typen von Autoren: die einen, die kaum Dialoge schreiben, und die anderen, selteneren, die nicht aufhören können, Dialoge zu schreiben.“

A cultural universal among fiction writers? There are authors who don't want to talk and others still who (seldom) can't shut up.

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Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

Her curled feetsies more than make up for it though.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

I wish either of my cats purred that loudly. They're both reasonably quiet, haha.

Anti-Fascist Reliability Engineer @nrr.corvidae.org · 3d

Listen. To. That.

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