So much fear of missing out...
Rather embrace the joy of missing out.
Life’s better when you’re missing the stuff that doesn’t matter anyway.
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises revolutionary advancements across various sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and environmental science. AI's capacity to analyze complex datasets and perform early cancer detection in healthcare, predict stock market trends in high-frequency trading, or optimize energy consumption in large data centers showcases this transformative potential.
There are few creatures in mathematics as interesting yet, somehow, useful as the Gamma function,
An interesting result about this function is that for positive integers . But why is that so? Better yet, why is the gamma function defined so, how is it related to factorials, and what does its values at non-integers mean?
One day Shizuo Kakutani was teaching a class at Yale.
He wrote down a lemma on the blackboard and announced
that the proof was obvious.
One student timidly raised his hand and said that
it wasn't obvious to him.
Could Kakutani explain?
The Riemann hypothesis is considered one of the most important unsolved problems in pure mathematics, with wide-ranging applications across quantum physics, cryptography, number theory, and other fields. It is one of the millenium prize problems by the Clay Mathematics Institute.
At the heart of the hypothesis is the Riemann zeta function;
What makes this function so interesting and consequential across scientific fields?
The Gamma function, , is at the heart of important results in mathematics including the Riemann hypothesis.
It is defined as follows:
What does it represent, and why is it touted as an analytic continuation of the factorial function?
The tendency to put off, push away, or otherwise delay is strong. Yet, it is best to act and move on, or act again, if you have to.
When I experience a creative block, I sometimes try to force my mind back into a productive state, to think ever so hard about the problem, and squeeze out a new idea. The physicist Richard Feynman speaks of a similar period of "burn-out" in his work, where he felt he was not making progress. Except he decided to stop trying to do research entirely, instead playing with interesting ideas in his field without regard to where they would go.
Does our perceived reality have merit in itself?
Our perceptions are marred by psychosis, delusion, and an
otherwise dysfunct mental model that cannot fully emulate human experience.
Is our reality any less real, then, or is it just as valid?
Westworld, "The Bicameral Mind".
Knowing nothing is the first step to knowing anything. Yet, it is often frowned upon to admit that you know nothing. In the Socratic Dialogues, Socrates posits that it is worse of oneself to think they know that which they do not know than to admit that they do not know.
What happens after we die?
Where does our energy go?
And what about the universe?
Can it die?
Where did it come from?
How could there be nothing.
And then, suddenly, something?
If you write software, then you should be using version control tools such as git. However, following git best practices frequently leaves you with a messy commit history. How can one clean it up?
I've got to ask—
What made you pick this line of work?
I read a lot of biographies about successful people.
Do you know what they all have in common?
They do what they love.
I figured I should too.
I sometimes think about the inner workings of who I am and the transparency of my truth, the regressions and progressions I've learned to grow within and from, the ever changing ebb and flow of experiences I've had and I'm yet to have. I'm grateful that I have taken in so much by naturally being an observer, but it all feels so overwhelming, especially lately.
The world champions the quick-witted.
That does not mean taking your time to formulate considered
and nuanced views is a bad thing.
Human relationships are complicated, and so are the things we do to maintain them.
Indirection is the cause of complexity. It is also the solution to complexity. When, where, and how do we draw a line?
We often underestimate the stories that live in our hearts. Stories that square our truth to feelings unchanged by time. We may reject them in fear of their pain — denying, rather than holding, and concealing, rather than revealing — hoping that they fade or vanish entirely. But such artifacts do not easily faint; instead, they grow in perpetual search for a shadow to call home.
If we list all the natural numbers below that are multiples of or , we get , , and . The sum of these multiples is . Find the sum of all the multiples of and below .
ChatGPT, AlphaFold, AlphaGo, the list of recent developments in Machine Learning and AI are endless. Still, AI solutions are causing bigger ripples in existing industries as existing norms and relevant human roles and relationships between humans and machines are re-imagined.
With developments in technology and the realization of the harsh reality that human life might someday need to relocate from a dying earth, space exploration is becoming an increasingly important endeavor for humanity.
Technology is one of the primary drivers of accelerated development in developing nations. This paper explores the role of technology in the developing world, looking at the possibilities and challenges, and addressing how the technology disparity between developing and developed nations arose in the first place.
Putting your all into everything you commit to also means some big disappointments.
A short poem on the human condition and how our determined-ness eventually digs us into our own disasters.