always remember, <=> is the three-way comparison operator. it takes two arguments.

what about haskell

no it does not. it’s basically just a poll to see what other countries think. at least, that’s my understanding based on what i’ve read.

sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bnissh/eli5_what_happens_if_a_country_doesnt_abide_by_un/?rdt=40494 https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/9/19/unga-resolution-against-palestine-occupation-will-it-change-anything

Treat OR NO Trick

who’s sister?

it’s very telling that being pro palestine is immediately interpreted as being “anti israel”

no not like that

that’s what they tell you right before throwing you off the plane

i think you’re taking that quote out of context a bit. a few sentences later, the article says

Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.

“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.

so the point they seem to be making is that, while BMI is controversial partly because people like to shoot the messenger, it’s also just not a reliable measurement in a medical context, even as a heuristic. the article also goes into more detail on its other shortcomings as well. the article also indicates how BMI was never intended to be used in a medical context. so, there are plenty of valid reasons for wanting a new metric.

but i do think the sentence you quoted isn’t really doing the author any favors in terms of trying to communicate the central point of the article.

i think “content creator” would be a better term in this case. because i’m not convinced it’s art, but it sure is “content”. maybe “content requester” would be more accurate.

oh man that’s an incredible option. i was already super happy with the “share as image” option they have, but it seems like they just keep outdoing themselves

we’ll be done with it exactly when the next fad picks up steam

what a beautiful language

it’s floor 5 from monday to wednesday, and floor 2 from thursday to sunday

god i hope so

i wonder why people haven’t made a language that starts indexing at 2 yet. maybe some day

i wish the people making buildings around here knew that. some start at floor 3, others at 5. some start at 0. others at 2. every building has its own story. you need to understand the building before you can understand your position in it.

do you also have minced tables there?

he’s in a better place now

anytime. i’ve also had my fair share of long days studying analysis. and i feel like most of my time spent trying to learn analysis was spent fighting with the textbooks. i think the (ε,δ) stuff is to blame for that, but that’s a whole other topic.

anyways, i was thinking a bit more about the matrix stuff and i think i have a better explanation if you’re interested, since my previous one was probably a bit too abstract. i think it should honestly be criminal to teach multivariate analysis before linear algebra, since a lot of the purpose of multivariate analysis is to turn complicated problems into linear problems. but anyways, here’s the big picture:

you don’t really need to understand the ins and outs of matrices and be super familiar with them to get a sense of what the total derivative is, and how it should behave. for that purpose, here are some of the highlights of matrices and the total derivative:

Let A be an m x n matrix. Then:

• Multiplication with A defines a so-called “linear function” from ℝⁿ to ℝ^m. put simply, this means that if you have a line in ℝⁿ, and you multiply each point in that line with A, then the result is a line in ℝ^m. (This is because, under the hood, matrix multiplication is just a bunch of scalar multiplication and addition.)
• There’s a slight catch to what I said above: sometimes you multiply the points in a line with a matrix and they all get sent to the 0 vector instead of to another line. (Compare this to what happens when A is a 1 x 1 matrix, i.e. a number, and multiplying every point in ℝ with A will either give you only the number 0, or it will give you all of ℝ.)
• Now think about a plane: it’s something spanned by two lines. (The simplest case being ℝ², which is spanned by the x and y axis.) Since matrices send lines to either lines or 0, there are three options for what can happen to a plane: it gets sent to a plane (no spanning lines get sent to 0), or a line (one of the spanning lines get sent to 0), or a 0 (both spanning lines get sent to 0). You can do some fancy math to show that the first case (where a plane get sent to a plane) is much more likely than the other two cases. So this is where the idea of a tangent plane comes from: approximate a function with a matrix, and the matrix corresponds to a plane that “stays close” to the function.
• In any case, matrix multiplication is an extremely easy thing for computers to do, because there’s a formula for it. In contrast, evaluating arbitrary functions is not easy, and there’s no formula for that. This is really the main benefit of the total derivative: you can approximate the behavior of a function with matrix multiplication. And we know a whole lot more about dealing with matrices than we do about dealing with random functions.

So those are two ways to look at the total derivative: you can try to get a geometric understanding of what it does (approximate the function with the best fitting plane), or try to look at why it’s useful (turning harder problems into easier problems). But just to be clear, dealing with matrices is still hard, it’s just comparably a lot easier than dealing with random functions.