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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 10d

grep -A/-B might be the worst flags in all of Unix. Is A=after or above? Is B=before or below? Even the alphabetical order is backwards! (A comes *AFTER* B according to grep)

I've given up and just use `grep -A {N} -B {N}` for everything

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 14d

Does anybody know the actual page limit for ICLR submissions? The author guidelines page contradicts itself:

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

Cambridge eventually decided it was a bit much, and, led by the mathematician G.H. Hardy (who, I should note, was Fourth Wrangler in his year...) reformed the system to make it less competitive.

More history:
www.maths.cam.ac.uk/about/history
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-...

A History of Mathematics in Cambridge | About the Maths Faculty

About the Maths Faculty

www.maths.cam.ac.uk

Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

It was, as you might expect, quite competitive. C.T. Simpson (Second Wrangler, 1842) apparently took a stimulant (ether) to endure 20-hour study sessions. And James Savage studied so hard he was found dead of apoplexy a few months after being named Senior Wrangler in 1859.

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

(Many famous names didn't make the list – J.J. Thomson famously sent his servant to ask who came second, only to learn it was himself.)

Before 1909 reforms, the examination was a bit of a national spectacle, with substantial betting taking place on the outcome.

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

Philippa Fawcett came first in 1890, a full 13% above second place, but since women were not yet awarded degrees until 1948, she was given the title "above the Senior Wrangler." Today, the Maths HPC cluster is named after her.

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

Wikipedia has a list of all Senior Wranglers going back to 1748 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_...). The list has some recognizable names in science – Herschel, Stokes, Rayleigh, Eddington, etc., along with some interesting ones, like Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong!

Senior Wrangler - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

When Maths became the first subject to institute written examinations, it kept the name. The top-ranked students are (still) named "Wranglers," and the top scorer overall is named the "Senior Wrangler," then the "Second Wrangler," and so on.

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 23d

Cambridge Maths calls the top student in a given year the "Senior Wrangler."

Why?

Apparently this originates in Medieval examinations called "disputations," where students would literally wrangle (argue) in Latin with designated opponents.

Historical depiction of an academic disputation

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Sep 4

PolymathicAI is recruiting two postdoctoral researchers to join our team at Cambridge, to work on building and understanding large-scale foundation models for science. Please share with potential candidates!

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Aug 2

Cannot wait for someone to wrap SAP Concur in an MCP

It’s kind of crazy you still can’t generate expense reports from a folder of receipts!

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 15

These ones are the XREAL One. I quite like them though haven't tried others to compare. These have no 3D, no bluetooth, no battery, you just plug it in your laptop as an external monitor on your face. Works brilliantly for this, its like a hovering external monitor for your laptop

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 15

That makes sense!

I've had a few people ask for this and am considering it. For now, though, you could implement this constraint manually with the following custom loss function: gist.github.com/MilesCranmer.... Pass it as a string to `loss_function_expression`.

(Let me know if this doesn't work!)

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 15

Really loving AR glasses for working while traveling. No squinting at my laptop + I can still enjoy the view!

These just plug into my closed laptop as an external monitor. Means I'm actually productive on planes now because I'm not hurting my neck looking down the whole flight!

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 14

By the way, just curious, is that `complexity_of_variables` supposed to be `complexity_of_constants`? I only ask because usually in the pysr forums people are looking to minimize the # of constants rather than # of variables

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 14

This looks pretty good to me! Do try out parallelism=:multiprocessing and let me know if that helps. For whatever reason its better at getting better CPU utilization, though it takes longer to start up every time you launch a new search.

(Likely small, but could try larger `population_size`)

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 14

Tomorrow I get to give my favourite type of lecture to some new physics PhD students 😃

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 13

I haven’t done a detailed study myself but it would be cool to see! I can try to ask them what they settled on.

Interesting! Do you remember what hyperparameters were used? It might be there weren’t enough populations to use all cores? (Also you could try parallelism=:multiprocessing)

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Jul 8

I am a HUGE fan of Mooncake.jl github.com/chalk-lab/Mooncake.jl, a new language-level autodiff for Julia.

Most impressive is how uncompromising the devs are about correctness and reliability. It has some of the best software engineering practices I've seen in the entire ecosystem!

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · May 21

Wow. Apparently some PySR users are building dedicated rigs for faster equation discovery!

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · May 15

I just referred to the literal letter 'z' as 'redshift' 😵‍💫

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · May 2

SymbolicRegression.jl v1.10.0 is out! It can now evolve expressions over arbitrary input types.

The video below shows it reverse-engineering a string transformation from examples.

Curious to see how people use this!

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Apr 11

Just released BorrowChecker.jl — a macro library that brings Rust-style ownership and borrowing to Julia!

github.com/MilesCranmer...

GitHub - MilesCranmer/BorrowChecker.jl: A borrow checker for Julia

A borrow checker for Julia. Contribute to MilesCranmer/BorrowChecker.jl development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Apr 8

You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this 😮‍💨

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · Apr 2

We have just opened a fully-funded PhD position at Cambridge, supervised by me & Vasily Belokurov.

Topic: AI + astronomical imaging (broadly defined).
Deadline: April 16.

Please share with anyone who may be interested!

www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/dire...

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