Oprah Quotes

While abstraction elevates you from details, it also alienates you from them. Like a virtual tour of the Grand Canyon. We should never lose touch with experiencing raw mathematical reality - I think most of its beauty lies in staring at its untouched wilderness. 7/7

Abstraction lets you see only what is truly important. But that requires you to know what is truly important, and how you ever find that out? 6/7

Even if category theory is unreasonably effective we should never get to a point where we are “well, this is what math IS now”, and we should be careful to get this across to students. A lot of good stuff would inevitably be left behind. 5/7

Nobody is like “where are the sets and where are the elements in this problem” the same way they are told to do for maps and objects. 4/7

A key thing about the set theory mindset is that its purpose is to be universal. Even if it is hacky, set theory is fundamentally a language to talk about whatever we want, and that’s how people think about it. 3/7

What a sad answer! I don’t know what the hell math really is, but I am sure that’s not it. The mathematicians that I think of more dearly: Euler, Ramanujan, Gödel, Erdös - their work are not captured meaningfully by category theory. That is also true of my own work. 2/7

What makes me most uncomfortable about category theory is that it implicitly tries to fit math into a mould. More than once when talking to mathematician friends about “what the hell even is math”, their idea was something like “math is the study of objects and maps”. 1/7

Really it is somewhere in-between a self-aware ponzi (in the likes of fomo3d) and an useless token.

Calling #hex a scam might not be the best way to keep people away from it because it is not quite accurate.

Makes you think about cryptos that think it is a good thing their mining difficulty is irrationally high. Actors behaving rationally is a good sign.

What would happen if a state tried to 51% attack bitcoin? The price to mine a bitcoin would become a lot larger than the traded value of one, since difficulty and ASICs price would soar. If that happens, it probably means somebody is trying a takeover.

What is the smallest natural number that can't be described with a tweet?

Forks are to bitcoin what politicians are to a democracy: a complete shitshow, but there is not really another way to do it.

IOTA just announced they will be moving from ternary to Fibonacci basis (the lack of consecutive 1's is gentler to IoT devices)