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eapriv

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Basic Math Textbook: The Napkin Project

web.evanchen.cc
245 points·by eapriv·hace 9 meses·73 comments

“Clean” code, horrible performance

computerenhance.com
739 points·by eapriv·hace 3 años·907 comments

comments

eapriv
·hace 16 días·discuss
Are there any pages of French in “Crime and Punishment”?
eapriv
·el mes pasado·discuss
> Late last year I started writing a math blog and decided to use LLMs to polish/enhance my writing.

Why would you do that in the first place? If you are just starting writing about math, I assume your goal would be to get better at it, and using LLMs is not how you get better at writing.
eapriv
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Looks like AI slop in (some of) the thumbnail images. Why would anyone do that?
eapriv
·hace 2 meses·discuss
The problem is the use of AI. It’s a reliable indicator that the author doesn’t actually care about the quality of the work, so I shouldn’t bother to read the text.
eapriv
·hace 5 meses·discuss
Not sure what “your own” in the title is supposed to mean if you are running a model that you didn’t train using a framework that you didn’t write on a server that you don’t own.
eapriv
·hace 7 meses·discuss
The problem is “to add two numbers”. The meta-problem is “to learn how computers work”.
eapriv
·hace 8 meses·discuss
Removing layers usually improves stability.
eapriv
·hace 8 meses·discuss
Sounds like most of these problems come from using Python.
eapriv
·hace 8 meses·discuss
Spoiler: it’s about AI.
eapriv
·hace 8 meses·discuss
No, it says nothing about LLM output being invertible.
eapriv
·hace 9 meses·discuss
You are wrong. Prime numbers are fundamental to mathematics.
eapriv
·hace 9 meses·discuss
If I were to write such a text, it would have a lot more about building intuition for advanced mathematical concepts. This intuition is extremely valuable, but missing from almost all advanced-level texts. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to put into words, and probably quite personal.
eapriv
·hace 9 meses·discuss
I submitted it, and the word “basic” is mine, because the author doesn’t really go deep into what I would consider “advanced” mathematics. It can be a good prerequisite for advanced things, though.
eapriv
·el año pasado·discuss
Spoiler: it’s not about how GPUs work, it’s about how to use them for machine learning computations.
eapriv
·el año pasado·discuss
Yet people wouldn’t write a Fortran compiler in Fortran, or a MATLAB compiler in MATLAB.
eapriv
·el año pasado·discuss
“Nice” doesn’t mean “well suitable for writing a compiler in”. It’s strange to think that all languages should be equally good for writing all kinds of things, and choosing a web language for a non-web task is doubly strange.
eapriv
·el año pasado·discuss
It’s not obvious from the text, but the compiler was previously written in TypeScript (which was kind of a strange choice for the language to write a compiler in).