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 · 1m

Rustle roarks!

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

"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 · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

absolutely here for it. :3

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

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

No idea!

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

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 · 2d

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 · 2d

„[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 · 2d

Her curled feetsies more than make up for it though.

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

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

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

Listen. To. That.

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

It's the expected thing to do to an out-of-place tree. I had it coming.

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

I probably have, but my instinct on Reddit is always to downvote the ad and ignore it. Advertising is the mindkiller.

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

Halloween thought: Now that I've been properly City Folk for 20 years, I'm finally missing hayrides and bonfires again.

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

Right, and this is true for a lot of folks in engineering. I kinda find it unfair.

There are places where the rigor in analysis is essential to know, but engineering is not science, and the problem solving methods are (wildly) different.

Gut checking becomes much more important.

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

Otherwise, there are Python bindings to a pile of Fortran and C++ for doing these things, and if you're in a position to use them without needing to know how or why they work, have fun.

That isn't usually my audience though.

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

I mean, I will only make you do just enough computation to get a feel for how something works. I'm less concerned that you know and understand the rigor (though, it'd be nice!), but my principal want?

Genuine intuition that matches up well with the rigor.

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

(Yeah, this much was clear, and it's a common annoyance of mine too.

It's just that, for a surprising number of technologists, mathematics is something of a trauma trigger, and they just shut down whenever it comes up, even if the words are there.

I try to accommodate that, but fuck.)

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

Though, is it really explaining when my interlocutors are too intimidated to ask questions?

I feel like, when getting deep in the mathematics of the geometry of information manifolds, I'm just talking at people, not to them.

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