pandoricity

Well, actually not all of us, really just me (I?).  I was listening to a vaguely interesting podcast this morning about David Bessis' book Mathematica, which (apparently?) emphasises the importance of intuition in mathematical thinking rather than logical proofs. In particular, the idea was that being a good mathematician is learning to train your intuition to agree with the reality, battering it into the right shape when you make a mistake instead of just giving up. It can then be a useful guide and inspiration when exploring new mathematical concepts. What most struck me about this idea of 'training your intuition' was that this was analogous to machine learning (LLMs/AI/whatever). You don't really care about the steps or formally proving something, you're just trying to make the outputs of the system agree with reality. Our big advantage over LLMs in this context being that for us reality is more than 'all the text on the internet'. But then I got to thi...

One of my work colleagues has recently moved to Sydney, and was asking me about schools. Public? Selective? Catholic? Private? The second greatest topic of conversation in our blessed city after housing. There are no good answers; I think the most I can contribute is a biased, almost completely unresearched and probably fundamentally incorrect take on why it's such a mess. In the before times, there were three systems. If you were rich, you went to a fancy private school; in such times, this was tautological. All private schools were fancy. Otherwise, if you were Catholic you went to a 'systemic' Catholic school for a smaller amount of money, and if you were neither rich nor Catholic you went to your local government school. Then, the systemic Catholic schools started running out of money as the nuns and monks aged out and they couldn't afford to actually pay teachers, so they extorted the government of the time into funding them since it would be cheaper to do this tha...

I have more ideas than I know what to do with; sadly, this is not because I'm busy, but more that I lack motivation to make time for my own ideas. This is particularly frustrating for programming projects: I enjoy programming for the sake of it, I really want some things to exist, and I'm ok if I'm the only one who ever uses the program... yet usually I can muster at most 10 hours of enthusiasm for any particular project, of which at least half is spent over-thinking (and under-delivering). So, I thought I'd ask the internet what it thought of some of my programming thought bubbles where I've actually got to the point of writing some code. Tell me something sounds boring, or tell me something sounds great. A single comment either way may inspire me to do something, if only through orneriness. And though I've provided links, they're not likely to be useful. Not one of these is MVP-worthy. PythonRepl is the result of hacking on Skulpt to give it some more Lo...

I have a Fuji Xerox CP205 w. Which is a boring colour laser printer from many years ago, and like most laser printers it just keeps working. Unfortunately, it doesn't just work in Linux, so... I searched.   Apparently, it uses a something called HBPL. There is/was a package that supported this that has recently disappeared from the internet made by someone who apparently had a few issues with linux distributions. Confusingly, the nominally HBPL printers are supported by the foo2hbpl2 program in the foo2zjs package (named after the separate - ? - ZjStream protocol). Which would imply that my printer should just work, except that this printer was so cheap it was an HBPL1 printer, which apparently was a subtly different format that foo2zjs's HBPL2 program doesn't support. A few HBPL1 printers (not mine) had manufacturer provided binary i386 drivers that people are having fun with . That's not the sort of fun I really want to get into anyway. The good news is that back in ...

A few years ago, I was on playground duty and a charming 17-year-old threw some of his rubbish on the ground. When I told him to sort it out his retort was 'I'm making sure the cleaners have a job'. And this is true, just as if you go and break windows it'll help your local glass company , but. you need to think a bit deeper, right? This kind of immature behaviour reminds me a lot of how Australia interacts with the world, roughly summarised as "do whatever we feel like, as long as we can find some excuse and it might be ok for the economy". After all, we're only one little country anyway, so whatever we do doesn't really matter for the world. Our government is usually just like that 17-year-old: morally vacuous. Obviously, if you're going to harangue politicans for short-sightedness, it's hard to go past climate change. Yes, it's true that Australia contributes a relatively small proportion of the world's emissions, but as a rich count...

Because I was thinking about multi-member electorates , I couldn't help but jot down a few responses to common objections. This is not my first rodeo with off-the-cuff electoral reform proposals ( local copy ); hey, someone's got to be interested in voting systems! (1) By reducing the percentage of votes required to win a seat in parliament, the government will become less stable. Having multi-member electorates would pull us towards a more representative system, but runs the 'risk' of requiring more coalitions: just as frequently happens in Tasmania where both Labor/Greens and Liberal/Greens have formed functional coalitions. Of course, there is the possibility that the coalitions are unstable or unworkable; some countries (e.g. Italy, Israel) are notorious for having chaotic governance because coalition partners can and do easily drop support for the government, or simply end up not being able to form a government in the first place. If you truly do value ...