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victor.yodaiken@gmail.com
See also: Damore’s Defenders. Scott Aaronson is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Texas. I ran into his blog a while back, when someone sent me to his muddled defense of Damore and the Google Memo – a defense in which he essentially called Damore critics hysterical and anti-science. For example:…
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New and or notable.
My new favorite line: “My good sir, I worry that your groundbreaking treatise will go overlooked here on Twitter” This is a great essay on programming: Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs. This is a good point on mathematics versus the formal rigor obsession of some theory of programming people: For mathematicians = does not mean…
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More UB madness from LLVM/Clang
Via @johnregehr this further tale of compiler “optimizations” that break correct C code without even a warning by deleting a necessary null pointer check. In this example, Bar contains a stack of Foos. Sometimes the Foo stack is empty, so sometimes getLastFoo returns null. The caller is supposed to check for that case, but the…
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informal methods applied to networks and timeouts
Distributed computation involves many interesting issues concerning shared data. Here I want to sketch out what networks look like using applied (informal) mathematics so we can look at some algorithms for consensus and data consistency. No formal methods or category theory or metamathematics of any kind have been used in making this note. Start with…
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Types considered harmful. From a remark by Wolfram.
Originally Nov 30, 2017. (revised 2021,2023) Russell introduced what is often viewed as his most original contribution to mathematical logic: his theory of types—which in essence tries to distinguish between sets, sets of sets, etc. by considering them to be of different “types”, and then restricts how they can be combined. I must say that…
