4/ I was in love with algebra when I was a preteen. I loved that you could rearrange one equation to put one variable on the left side and then effectively have a definition of the variable, and then substitute that definition in elsewhere.
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5/ This is related to a good debugging technique in both code and mechanical engineering - substitute in other components as "mocks" or standins for things. I recall once about 20 years ago I was debugging a garage door opener, and I thought "I'll mock out the obstacle sensor >
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6/ ...but shorting the wires". THIS DID NOT WORK. I dug into it much further and realized that my mental model was that the sensor was fed DC on one wire and would return the DC back through the second wire if an obstacle was / was not detected. Turns out the sensor was smart
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7/ and was actually modulating the signal somehow, not just doing a binary on/off. The sensor was a complicated function. It could not easily be mocked. It's said in software that one big differentiator is people who grok pointers and others who never will.
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8/ I think another differentiator is understanding pointers to FUNCTIONS. A given function X may take as an argument a pointer to a function Y, and use that function...meaning that X can do RADICALLY different things based on what's passed into it. Getting back to philosophy >
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9/ side note: YES, EVERYONE TWEETING AT ME THAT AXIOMS EXIST, I KNOW THAT. THIS RANT ISN'T DONE. HOLD YOUR HORSES.
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10/ When I try to read philosophy, I often see X vaguely defined in one place, then substituted in another, and it's not clear to me that X actually behaves the same in a second environment. Hand-waving argument to functional programming goes right here, because even worse than
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11/ (in a complexity sense) than a function X that does different things based on a pointer to function Y that is passed in, is a function X that does different things for entirely cryptic reasons re global variables or other "not actually passed via the function's API" stuff
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12/ Yes, obviously. No child learns what "red" is by being told how many angstroms between wavelength peaks, and then digging down into quantum mechanics. We can approximate a definition by enumeration. https://twitter.com/YIlan90/status/1166692826551332865 …
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13/ I object strongly to the word "cheat". Rigor is a tool that constructs things crisply ATOP the axioms. The fact that when we scan down the 20 story office building we find a basement, a sub basement, and then a massive set of pilings doesn't >> https://twitter.com/DM_Berger/status/1166693868584296448 …
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14/ invalidate the rigor with which the steel I beams have been placed, merely because "it rests on pilings at the bottom". OF COURSE it rests on pilings. ...I just want to make sure that it DOES rest on them, and not on air !
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15/ I disliked "cheat" in the previous tweet and I dislike "if you're honest with yourself". There's no need to lard the discussion with moral weight, and I find it correlates with "more heat than light" conversations. https://twitter.com/DM_Berger/status/1166694759261462529 …
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16/ And, screw it, I'm not up for a "more heat than light" conversation, so I'm out.
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