I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time.
Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers!
In this formulation, s_k equals utility. Like the Wilson score formula (and unlike the linked article), the provided equation takes into account the variance of the expected utility.
This Economist article's a bit chatty and superficial (surprise), but in an age of mass anxiety and digital distraction, I think the goal of the Epicureans is as important as ever: How does one go about producing a calm mind? It's not a simple task, and I think correctly has to analyze the mind in relation to everything else.
The atomic hypothesis of the Epicureans seems like a side quest into physics, but the fruit of the journey is that everything's just combinations of atoms and the mind must be made of atoms too, so let's think of it as a physical system with inputs and outputs, and forget about any grander god-narratives. With this perspective comes some very practical advice; Lucretius for instance has an extended passage on how to deal with a "crush". I'll paraphrase but he points out that your crush exists purely as an image in your head, and you really have no idea what the person behind the image is like, and if you finally get together the sex will probably be very awkward, so it's better to direct your mind and amorous intentions elsewhere. I believe the phrase he used was to find smaller pleasures that carry no penalty -- because seeking the larger rewards almost always leads to misery.
Lucretius is a good read and the Latham translation has some felicitous turns of phrase. It's fun imagining arguing with the ancient philosophers about their physical theories, which they support (as best they can) with the available evidence about what wind, liquids, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, smells, tastes, sights, etc. are made of. It's a shame philosophy got distracted with "higher things" for so long (i.e. 2,000 years) because here we are realizing again that everything is made of atoms, and it sure would be nice to have more advice on living life in the face of this fact.
Nice interactive examples but I'm afraid the basic setup here doesn't make sense to me. The "atom" is defined as the average encoding of inputs with the feature ("faces with a smile"), but I'd think the proper definition should subtract off inputs without the feature (i.e. "smile" = "faces with a smile" minus "faces without a smile"). The way it's defined you end up adding an extra "average face" along with the feature of interest, which is clearly seen in "The Geometry of Thought Vectors" example -- the non-smiling woman isn't so much forced to smile as to have her face merged with that of a generic smiling woman.
I'm a fan of this library -- I used it to build Hecate (https://github.com/evanmiller/hecate), a terminal hex editor. If you get creative with Unicode box and box-drawing characters, you can build some interesting interfaces (tabs, progress bars, etc).
Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers!
https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html