DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
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dougmerritt.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
@dougmerritt.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy
I'm a philomath (many interests; call it polymath-wanna-be) professional computer programmer in Silicon Valley, specializing in operating systems […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mathstodon.xyz/@dougmerritt, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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"A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject." -- Winston Churchill.

(Regarding someone who posted to me 1000% off-topic)
Very unusual, shaking up the now-traditional hierarchy of aleph_sub_uncountable infinities (and with ultrafinitists strongly opposed, naturally); ultraexacting cardinals are consistent with ZFC:

"Large cardinals, structural reflection, and the HOD Conjecture"
Juan P. Aguilera, Joan Bagaria […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
December 4, 2025 at 6:38 AM
@AmenZwa @skewray
FYI I found this talk on the history of programming language features interesting, although he ends with a believable point about why he's depressed about functional languages:
The Past, Present and Future of Programming Languages - Kevlin Henney - ACCU 2025
ACCU Conference […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
December 3, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
I would not have guessed this was possible!

Vladan Majerech has found a one-dimensional spaceship in the Game of Life: a pattern just one cell high and 3,707,300,605 cells wide that, after 133,076,755,768 generations (during which it is not confined to the one-dimensional line, of course) […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
December 3, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
It's a blessing and a curse.

I don't feel I understand some mathematics until I think I could have invented it myself and I try to reach that stage. Well that's an illusion so I should qualify it a lot - I need to feel like if I was suitably "primed" I could have invented it. There's no way I […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
December 2, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
My lost AirTag sailed over the Gulf of Mexico and now it's in Guatemala. I wonder if it's about to take a road trip.
November 30, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
*It's odd that an artificial/virtual intelligence seems to require an artificial/virtual reality

*Have they been the same thing metaphysically all along
December 2, 2025 at 5:42 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
Best definition of the concept of emergence I have ever heard (Daniel Whiteson): "How is that we can cook chicken soup without knowing quantum field theory?"
November 30, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
Yanno, we have this whole obsession with sending off calculations to GPUs for speed. That's just vector processing from the 1970's. I don't want that. I want machinery where I can wrap up part of a problem and program it onto an FPGA *on the fly*. Say, I've got 200-bit floating point numbers […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 29, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
@dougmerritt agreed. LLMs have been a huge leap forward and simulating language conversations and just plain understanding what they're asked. they just are also clearly broken in the brain -- not thinking. I used Gemini a lot earlier this year, and for like first week I was in honeymoon phase […]
Original post on social.vivaldi.net
social.vivaldi.net
November 26, 2025 at 12:04 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
I don't usually buy popular science books when they are about physics or math. I prefer some more technical explanations, perhaps not necessarily textbooks, but more technical. But I do exceptions, like this one.

Almost all the popular physics books are […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]
November 29, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
A while back I wrote about how anyone who cares about their digital data and access to it (which is, basically, everyone these days, right?) should choose tools that cannot be taken away, and to use data formats that can be used by many tools:

https://ddrake.prose.sh/choosing_tools […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 27, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
Note that I'm not claiming that what a compiler does is easy. I'm claiming that as the result of thousands of man-years of work by extremely skilled programmers, a compiler can do an excellent job of translating source code with defined semantics to assembly or object code with the same […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
November 27, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
Another thing I like about this topic is that it's amenable to numerical experimentation. Here's how the Catalan numbers emerge from a random matrix:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12-41L30u2GMceKLCobEu3SrWy37Ttdk1?usp=sharing

(I could have written that as a matrix multiplication but […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 26, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
If I was applying for a PhD today I think the topic I'd pick would be related to random matrices. The content of this paper illustrates why in the most readable summary I've come across […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]
November 26, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
*91 terms-of-art for things failing, collapsing, dying, and blowing up

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04524v1
November 26, 2025 at 11:14 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
What is randomness? That's a rather philosophical question. Randomness is some mysterious gremlin of chaos. A demonic entity that defies certainly in the future. What is it, mathematically? If you read this article, I hope to leave you without a satisfying answer.

#mathematics #probability […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 26, 2025 at 5:22 AM
@screwlisp
> we will need the you-correcting-everything-I-said-wrong episode

My audio had problems on and off through the whole thing. If I was frequently correcting you, I wasn't aware of it; I was usually responding to comments I could see (on the mud) rather than hear.

However, if that was […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 26, 2025 at 1:58 AM
@AmenZwa
It just occurred to me that you might not have seen my post the other day, since I didn't specifically address it to you.

It's been quite popular, and the humor may suit your tastes:
"A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages" […]
November 25, 2025 at 11:02 PM
@AmenZwa
My maternal grandparents lived there (Jakarta) for a decade; he was a plant pathologist and was studying rubber trees in situ or something:

'This "megacity" has overtaken Tokyo to become the world's largest city' […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 25, 2025 at 8:20 AM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
November 25, 2025 at 1:27 AM
String Ring: A Creative Way to Manually Create Physical Images with String
Based on the Radon Transform.

https://www.core77.com/posts/138823
November 25, 2025 at 1:11 AM
"Badly translated movie titles in Germany"
[...]
"Alien: The eerie Creature from another World (Alien: Das unheimliche Wesen aus einer fremden Welt)
"Apparently German distributors hate short titles, and so when they encounter one, they will just bolt on another half dozen words or so." […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
November 24, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
When I called the Yoneda lemma the hardest trivial thing in mathematics it must have resonated with a lot of people. My claim popped up in Notices of the AMS.

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202511/rnoti-p1248.pdf
November 24, 2025 at 1:06 AM