As part of some original work I’m doing (which I will be elucidating here for you all soonish), I’ve been learning about tensors, a subject with which I am only vaguely familiar. The tensor abstraction is very mathematically weird, because it is stateful. It’s almost like object-oriented programming ported into mathematics. Despite it’s mathematical weirdness, […]
Category: Computing
QAnal is exactly Entropist mathematics
The two thinkers who have had the most influence on my thinking are Norman Wildberger and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In a sense, my two big projects are a reflection of each school of ideas: QAnal is Wildberger’s influence, and Entropism is Taleb’s influence. There’s a rough idea here that I haven’t quite figured out how […]
First steps in rational geometry | FQA 4
This is part of an ongoing series called Foundations of QAnal Outline Today we’re going to talk about very basic points and lines geometry. Specifically we are going to address the following questions: What is a point? What is a line? How do we calculate the line that intersects a pair of distinct points (the […]
The SHOCKING truth about determinants
I recently wrote an article about how to code rational arithmetic in Erlang. In the article, I mentioned that the criteria for two rationals a/b and c/d to be equal is if ad – bc = 0. If you are even a little bit familiar with linear algebra, you will recognize that as a determinant. […]
Rational number arithmetic in Erlang | FQA 2
This is post number 2 in an ongoing series called Foundations of QAnal. Outline The goal for today is for you to understand what a rational number is how it is represented in Erlang how the operations are defined basic properties of the operations This is going to be brief (ish). I want to talk […]
Experimental new series: Foundations of QAnal
I may or may not stick with this. I am having horrible writer’s block trying to write this all out in a LaTeX PDF, Erlang, my videos, or in my Revelations. So I’m trying the blog medium. The blog has the “fire and forget” property. So we’ll see. QAnal is my fork of mathematics. QAnal […]
Erlang: How to browse ZX/Erlang source files on Windows
Windows is a profoundly annoying development platform for non-MS languages and a fairly rare deployment target so it doesn’t really get much in the way of attention or tooling. The smoothest Erlang experience on Windows so far is running applications via Vapor (a GUI frontend for ZX), but that depends on applications being developed and […]
Standarditis
This is a repost of a Substack post If you don’t know, I have a series of “podcast length” mathematical documents that I call Revelations, which you can find on my GitLab. I’m composing a new one (Revelations 27) right now about WF Algebra, which is a mindblowing take on formal logic. I wrote out […]
Erlang: Protip — `throw` is an antipattern
throw is bad. EEP 0049 is a whole set of bad ideas. Deeply nested case is bad. Using if where it doesn’t belong is bad. try … catch is bad, but there are a handful of builtins and library functions that force you to use it instead of providing an ok | error return (use […]
erlang-questions: A tale of push VS pull and authority VS lolberty
I just plowed through my email backlog for the first time in a long time to find that the venerable and seemingly eternal resource for n00bs and webtards in need sage graybeard advice known as the “erlang-questions” mailing list is now deprecated by the Erlang Something-or-other (Foundation? whatever). I suppose this means they intend to […]