don’t fuck the carbonara

likewise, thanks for bedng so helpful!

it’s a good attempt too, because i had completely forgot how to do that (mostly because we were taught something called the “chair method” for long division which tends to take up entire pages) and it reminded me of another thing: times tables.

whet i was in school, we got these arithmetic worksheets with times tables on them once a week, (one meek it was 4×n, then 5, then 6…) and we were supposed to do them while being timed. iirc we had five minutes at the start of maths. i don’t think i have to tell you how stressful that is with no intuition as well as fine motor issues. anyway, point being, i don’t remember ever doing one for division. we went from pieces of pies, to the chair method, to short division problems. now, i’ve since learned that apparently the worksheet method isn’t a good pedagogical tool, but it still feels like we skipped a step.

well the three-year strike is over so that must mean theyre okay to buy again!

idiots

an llm isn’t a graph structure, it’s a list of vectors. anyway my point is that google started integrating transformer models almost as soon as they got them working, which is about 2017.

…and when did google pioneer the gpt architecture again?

i know, right?! like, a friend of mine was doing a homebrew computer project a year or so ago and had issue with some complex instruction logic in the alu or whatever, and without having done it for over a decade i just sketched up a karnaugh map and struck two terms out. i even confused myself with that one.

holy shit, now that’s a post. very well written, easy to follow. nice.

unfortunately, what you’ve described is basically what i’ve been doing, which is way more steps than i tend to need with the others. i don’t know if it exists in other places but we had an entire module in middle school on “överslagsräkning”, which basically translate to “rough calculations”. it was about using iterative methods like this to land at a plausible solution to a problem.

unfortunately, i mostly need actual solutions. as an example i’ll tell you what i did today.

today, i tried to refine an algorithm that, given a set of points (represented by a c array) and a “fractional index” (a positive non-integer value) can give result for a number between two defined points. i had previously done this through simple linear interpolation, but since we sample data from actual physical objects the points tend to represent a curve, and the common way to solve that is with a lagrange polynomial. so, i found an algorithm that, given a set of n + 1 points, evaluates the unique lagrangian of at most degree n that intersects all the points at the given index. i split the terms out to an (a + b) / c form and then i realised that i have no fucking idea what i’m doing.

like yes, i can run the algorithm to see if the numbers line up, but i could never actually do the math. i’m not talking about the algebra part, i’m talking about the arithmetic. if i plug some numbers in and do the parts i can do, i end up with something like 0.23 / -7 and i don’t even know where to start. i have no idea where that would even land. so, while i can verify that my test data works, i have no way to quickly extrapolate numbers. which in turn means i can’t come up with plausible input. i’m back to using a calculator for that, which is so damn annoying.

i can’t not hear it.

goongas

they already broke the universe before the seventh movie by declaring that nothing mattered. eight felt like a fan reaction to that by trying to bring stuff back.

the question is where to start practising. i am absolutely terrible at most math; i can’t balance an equation to save my life, i tend to get all my trig backwards, and the only thing i consistently get right for calculus is that odd-power exponentials are assymmetrical. despite that i struggled my way up to differential equations and found that annoyingly, combinatorics and boolean algebra came naturally.

yeah i understand the principle, but the issue is i have to “go through the motions” every time. i can’t do a quick ballpark for division in the same way as for other arithmetics so i can’t self-correct.

we have over 15 thousand of the things up there now, surely someone must have seen something

that’s apparently not true, it would take off with half fuel because the landing gear could buckle under the full weight.

even with a full tank it could only go for about 90 minutes though so anything nontrivial did indeed require a tanker.

you know cuisenaire rods? those counting stick things. i think in those. that means addition makes a line, multiplication makes a plane, exponentiation makes a cube. higher exponents make cubes of cubes.

division doesn’t really fit in that visual because it’s a quantised system. fractional multiplication fails for the same reason.

the sr-71 is definitely not a scramble-able plane:

• it leaks fuel when on the ground (it shrinks when cold) so it’s stored empty,
• it’s as aerodynamic as a brick when subsonic so it needs an insanely long runway, and
• it has an always-on afterburner so it burns an alarming amount of fuel.

when they were doing surveys of iraq during desert storm they had to field a fleet of eight tanker planes over the indian ocean just so the damn thing would make it from japan to the gulf.

Edit: oh and those are specially designed tanker planes because of course it uses JP-7 so they needed separate tanks for that and their own fuel. they also needed to be able to refuel at like 850km/h or the blackbird would just drop out of the sky.

love that plane.

i haven’t heard of most of these but if “solo” was mid tier then i don’t think i want to watch anything either above or below

wow, i had no idea this existed.

weirdly us-centric take considering you guys have to use arithmetic for vat