There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).
But that's the issue, Nguyen is not the institution as a whole so then their concerns are just talking past each other. (And perhaps typical of a professional physicists Nguyen's complaints miss this point.)
They weren’t trying to get on the front page of hn age 1 so it’s not 36 years in a row. Why do you need to be unpleasant to someone you don’t even know?
For people who haven’t done abstract algebra, don’t be put off by the word “monoid”. A monoid in algebra is just a set with some associative binary operation and an identity element. Mathematicians in the 19th and 20th centuries realised you can study these types of structures and prove things which are true for all of them rather than having to do each one separately, and that led to “abstract algebra”.
So for example, if I have the integers and multiplication, this is a monoid[1]. The identity element is zero, which is an integer, and multiplication is an associative binary operation. It takes two integers and returns an integer.
Once you realise you have a monoid, if you do maths that only relies on the monoid properties then it applies to all monoids, so you could drop a different monoid in there and everything would still work. This ends up being very much like how typeclasses work in Haskell or traits in Rust.
[1] For the curious, it’s not a “group” because the integers don’t have multiplicative inverses. If I have x=2, there is no integer that I can multiply that by to get 1. Integers with addition on the other hand is a group, which is a monoid with the additional property that inverses are present.
Somebody asked in a now-deleted comment: 'Right, and what does it mean in the context of "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"?'
Here is an answer to this question:
What the parent poster referred to are "monoids in the category of sets". You can recognize this as they have introduced the carrier as (just a) set.
But the notion can be generalized. For instance, a "monoid in the category of datatypes" would not be given by a mathematical set and a mathematical binary operation, but by a datatype and a computable binary operation. (To make this precise, I would need to fix which "category of datatypes" I have in mind. It could be the category of Haskell types and Haskell functions, for instance; but C types and functions would work just as well. I could also go all the way to the effective topos, which contains lots of types which most mainstream programming languages are missing such as true quotient types.)
Finally, a "monoid in the category of endofunctors" is given by an endofunctor and a natural transformation. Endofunctors can be pictured as container kinds (e.g. ordered lists, unordered lists, Maybe/Optional, trees, vectors of length n, pairs, ...) and the additional datum of the natural transformation is what singles out those container kinds which support a "flattening operation" from those which don't. For instance, we can flatten a list of lists into one (long) list, but we cannot flatten a pair of pairs into one pair (we would need to drop two of the four elements).
Just as it is quite convenient that many results about integers or lists also hold for all monoids in the category of sets, it is quite nice that many results about monoids in the category of sets also hold for all monoids in all categories and hence in particular to monads.
The working programmer might be interested in the series on ropes on the Xi Editor website[1] as a practical application, as it motivates the concept as it goes. (Alternatively, if you’ve taken an algorithms class you have probably encountered the idea of computing things over an interval of an array by storing them in for each node of a tree that flattens to that array, such as a search tree or interval tree.)
For the curious, it’s not a “group” because the integers don’t have multiplicative inverses. If I have x=2, there is no integer that I can multiply that by to get 1. Integers with addition on the other hand is a group, which is a monoid with the additional property that inverses are present.
Would one be correct to say that square matrices are an example of monoids, since they have an identity element and are associative, but might not necessarily have inverses if their determinant is zero?
The operation is important too. Square matrices over integers with matrix multiplication is (just) a monoid. Square matrices with addition are a monoid too (but also a group, because there is an additive inverse).
Additionally, if you restrict to invertible matrices with matrix multiplication, they are also a monoid (so they are a submonoid), and in fact a group, the general linear group. If you restrict again to matrices with determinant 1, it's again itself a group (a subgroup, and also a submonoid), the special linear group.
Microsoft’s corporate strategy is almost the exact opposite of this though. It’s that “everything is an Xbox” ie they are massively shifting away from the special-purpose hardware to anything being an xbox if it runs windows. I would be somewhat surprised if microsoft-made consoles even exist in a generation or two’s time.
I respect that, but kind of lost patience with it when a new version of the compiler decided that my types were no longer decidable in code that hadn’t been touched for years. I tried for about 5 mins to fix it and then just thought “It’s not me, it’s you” and put scala down never to pick it up again.
You can think about the compressed size of some file as approximating the amount of information (in the Shannon sense[1]) there is in the file. A perfect compression would reduce the file to exactly the size of the amount of information it contains.
Do you think that the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic and some rationalist blog warning about covid are the same? Clearly the WHO has to be more cautious. I have no doubt there were people at the WHO who felt a global pandemic was likely at least as early as you and the person writing the rationalist blog.
This is going to be controversial. But WHO wasted precious time during the early phases of the pandemic. It could have been contained more effectively if they weren't in denial. And when they did declare a pandemic, it was all very sudden instead of gradually raising the level, leading to panic buying and anxiety.
Are the WHO personnel rational and competent? I would like to believe so. But that isn't a given - the amount of nonsense I had to fight in institutions considered as pinnacles of rationality is just depressing. Regardless, WHO was encumbered by international policitics. Their rationality would have made no difference. That is why the opinion of rational outsiders matter - especially of those with domain expertise.
The signs of an uncontained contagion were evident by the middle of December 2020, well before the WHO declared the pandemic in March 2021. They could have asked everyone to start preparing around then. Instead, there were alarming news coming out of Wuhan and endless debates on TV about the appeasement of the Chinese administration by WHO - things that started ringing the alarm bells for us. We started preparing by at least the middle of January. WHO chose to wait again till everything was obvious and a declaration was inevitable. People were dying by the thousands everyday and the lockdowns had already started by then. Their rubberstamp wasn't necessary to confirm what everyone knew already. That was one instance where waiting for the WHO wasn't a prudent choice.
WHO is a critical institution to the entire world. Their timing can mean the difference between life and death for millions everywhere. These sorts of failing shouldn't be excused and swept under the rug so easily.
If you look at the timeline, it's purely political. Some earliest warnings came from Taiwan/ROC who found it in travelers from mainland. But WHO did not dare to anger PRC so they ignored Taiwan and that way caused probably thousands of unnecessary deaths in the whole world
Kodak managed the film and camera market about as well as they could. The mismanagement was a failure to diversify. The total digital camera market excluding cell phones, would be a fraction of Kodak's film business back in the film era. The film and camera story is a popular one but is fundamentally wrong. The shrinkage of the camera/film market was inevitable. You can look at Fujifilm who does sell cameras and basically owns the remaining film market with instax, however neither of those sustain the business they are effectively a chemical and medical manufacturer who dabbles in photography now.
Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.
That was in 1975. It took multiple decades for digital camera technology to become cheap and practical for the mass consumer market, and another decade or two before it was good enough to be taken seriously by professionals.
There was no upside at all in being first with this particular invention. No lessons to learn, other than "Keep working on this and try to grab all the patents, even though they will expire before anyone cares."
> give the world the first digital camera... mismanagement on a gargantuan scale
Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.
Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.
Obviously not, but Wright and Kenbak weren't dominant in their markets and Bell was broken up by the courts, so those are pretty poor examples you've chosen there.
They were the first to market, though. That's my point. Being the first is a small advantage that can be lost for a ton of reasons, most of which don't require gross mismanagement.
And Bell's telephony network (which unlike consumer devices has a moat) was split up by the courts. I'm talking about telephones. Those devices with a base station, a handle, and a dial pad or a rotor (or sans all that, a switching board lady who will connect you to whomever you need to talk to).
Bell was the first to market with the personal telephone, but for some reason, didn't corner the market for consumer devices.
Irregardless is fine and people who try to be pedantic about it are just mistaken. It is literally in the dictionary as an intensified form of “regardless”.
That's cap. 'Ir' is usually used in the english language to denote the negative of the following property that follows it, e.g. irrespective meaning not respective. Regardless alone signals the negative assertion of the following property, so a prepending of 'ir' before it connotes a not-not, a double negative, and against the context of what is trying to be communicated. Having a problem with this abuse of language/meaning/communication is to be expected.
It’s not an abuse of language or meaning or communication. It’s a rule that you really want to be true for English but which unfortunately has exceptions. Irregardless is one of those exceptions. It’s not a word that I personally use because I don’t like it (probably for the reasons you’re articulating) but English doesn’t actually care what you or I think. Using “irregardless” as a synonym for “regardless” or “irrespective” is not incorrect.
Not going to happen. No one’s ever going to successfully retrofit a logical system into English. English has even got two words (guarantee and warrantee) which are spelled and pronounced slightly different while meaning the same thing because they were borrowed from French separately at different times.
Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/
[1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
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