> Some of you want to keep working without being paid, because that feels a bit like communism within capitalism, it makes you feel good to contribute to the greater good while not having the system determine your value over money. I hear you. I’ve been there (and sometimes still am). But as long as we live in this system, even though we didn’t choose to and maybe even despise it - communism is not about working for free, it’s about getting paid equally and adequately.
Crazies say they validate and test their idea, but they actually suffer from severe confirmation bias where they summarily dismiss any counterexample or problem.
> Would you be able to spot a Ramanujan from the dross?
Yes. We would do this by analyzing their arguments for logical errors, then testing their new theory, then hopefully proving their new theory. The difference between a crazy and genius is the results their new ideas produce.
I don't think you appreciate how crazy Ramanujan was in his time. While he was somewhat appreciated in India (not at any high level though), when he reached out to professors in the UK, the first several thought he had no ability to become a mathematician. They were used to seeing mathematical proofs, and Ramanujan not providing any made him appear fraudulent. The only one who understood his brilliance was G.H. Hardy, also considered an eccentric by his peers.
In Ramanujan's words, "an equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God". In mathematician circles of the early 20th century, this was an obscene statement. Even today, can you imagine a researcher in any field saying something like that, and being taken seriously?
Yet Ramanujan is probably one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. In Hardy's word, he had "never met his equal, and can compare [Ramanujan] only with Euler or Jacobi".
To think that "we" (whoever you mean by that) can recognize sheer talent of Ramanujan's type is, frankly, arrogant. If anything, the ivory towers are even more enclosed - research is more and more about the quantity of publications, not about the quality of ideas. A recent Nobel Laureate stated that if he had not received the Nobel Prize, his university would have probably fired him, for lack of a consistent publication record.
So no, I don't agree with your statement. While the scientific method you describe for approaching nature has worked tremendously well for understanding the world, it still completely fails to capture the core of what it is that makes a person a true genius.
Which only proves the point further - Hardy could have easily selected one of the other 999 cranks, yet by some intuition he knew that Ramanujan was the real deal.
After seeing Ramanujan's theorems on continued fractions on the last page of the manuscripts, Hardy said the theorems "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before", and that they "must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them".
Ideas are cheap and proof is expensive. It’s impossible to give all ideas equal consideration. You have to apply a filter, it’s inevitable. The question is just what filter you apply.
Ramanujan was missed by at least one maths professor. Also, there are mathematical proofs such as that of Fermat's last theorem, or the claimed proof of the abc conjecture by Shinichi Mochizuki for which verification is very difficult.
I'll agree that the costs don't come close to replicating work by LIGO or CERN.
There's a difference between a flawed proof (e.g. Wiles's original proof of FLT which was found to contain a gap) and outright crankery, though. There are more mathematical cranks than most people would think, and their arguments usually fall apart rather easily.
yes, but it depends on the field. ramanujan had the great advantage of working in a field where ideas can be tested with pencil and paper. if you show a purported ramanujan a lacuna in his proof, or if you can't find one, that's pretty good evidence
it's much harder to skim the dross off a leonardo, to correct your mixed metaphor, because siege engines and flying machines require empirical testing, and that's expensive. within the hypothetico-deductive method you can tell whether someone's logic is incorrect (just as with ramanujan) but if they're proposing a different hypothetical basis, you often have to test it empirically
often you can proceed from their proposed hypotheses to obviously empirically false conclusions. but historically that hasn't been an especially good guide; in the 19th century kelvin proved that the sun was younger than the earth, demonstrating that something was wrong with his hypothetico-deductive framework, but it took quite a while to figure out what. and today relativity and quantum mechanics are widely considered irreconcilable
Would you, though? Ramanujan famously left out his proofs quite often, relying on his intuition which was especially phenomenal. Many accomplished mathematicians did not see his genius for what it is and it took the support of Hardy to really further Ramanujan's career and accomplishments.
Maybe not me personally, but more accomplished, smarter mathematicians would. His results were checked as being correct and he did publish papers in which he showed some of the steps and this was before Hardy. T
Ramanujan was so ahead of his peers that they didn’t even know how to assess him or his work.
After seeing Ramanujan's theorems on continued fractions on the last page of the manuscripts, Hardy said the theorems "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before",[76] and that they "must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them".[76] Hardy asked a colleague, J. E. Littlewood, to take a look at the papers. Littlewood was amazed by Ramanujan's genius. After discussing the papers with Littlewood, Hardy concluded that the letters were "certainly the most remarkable I have received" and that Ramanujan was "a mathematician of the highest quality, a man of altogether exceptional originality and power".[74]: 494–495 One colleague, E. H. Neville, later remarked that "not one [theorem] could have been set in the most advanced mathematical examination in the world".
The current norms of pedagogy permit incremental improvements, but they fail to handle talent that is far and away better than the current top of the field. In fact they find ways to prohibit people from shaming them in such a way, which is understandable. But unfortunately, a Ramanujan today would probably be relegated to “remedial education” or institutionalized.
As for his results being checked, they were - after nearly a century in some cases:
As late as 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death.
What I learned from reading about Ramanujan is that true geniuses are not just incrementally ahead of their field - they are so far ahead, it is literally unfathomable to laypeople and experts alike. The best approach is to step aside and try to nurture the talent without interfering in their methods and ways.
If I remember correctly, the TLDR is that RDRAND output is mixed with other "standard" entropy sources and basically making getrandom() non-blocking immediately.
I have a Toshiba hard drive in my pc and it's been very reliable. The only problem I have with it is that it goes to sleep after some inactivity, and takes forever to wake back up - and Windows locks up while it waits.
Maybe relevant, from Conversations with Tyler (Ep. 184, with David Bentley Hart):
COWEN: Let’s say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds — they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than, say, the EU members to the East: Bulgaria, Romania.
HART: Well, they had certain advantages to begin with, too, but better relations. Again, I don’t think it has any particular... To be honest, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy. There, you’re going to find that culturally, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West.
Trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories, I just think is a mistake. There’s no way of saying one way or the other. Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while after Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox, too. Even more than Poland, it is committed to a set of real democratic norms. In Poland, there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.
and also from Ep. 192, with Jacob Mikanowski:
MIKANOWSKI: [...] I think that idea of an Orthodox disease is maybe a figment of geography more than a deeply cultural matrix that we think. I’m not — I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously. Bulgaria maybe too. I’m not sure that I believe in a kind of Orthodox curse. I think it has more to do with how things shook up internally in former Yugoslavia and where those countries are in relationship to that industrial core of Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
Yeah, I also don't think I'd really call Czechia a place with a "lot of Catholicism in its background." It was a hostile top-down imposition from the Austrians, with the consequence that Czechs are largely agnostic/areligious today.
Prior to re-Catholicization of the 17th century, there was a strong presence of homebrewn Hussite/Brethren Protestantism (mostly Czech-speaking people) and somewhat smaller presence of classical Lutheranism/Calvinism (mostly German-speaking people). There wasn't any clear geographic boundary between those two, the communities were mixed, though there were regional "strongholds" - e.g. Silesia was strongly German-Protestant while southern Moravia was strongly Czech-Catholic.
Orthodox communities, with the exception of ambassadors or foreign businesspeople, weren't a thing in Early Modern Kingdom of Bohemia.
I have to say that I met Mikanowski in HS in passing a few times in academic competitions and I never heard anything about him being bigoted in any way whatsoever.
That’s a pretty big claim and I’d be curious to see this research. I think you’d have a hard time untangling the communist effect (and earlier Ottoman effect) on Orthodox states to make any kind of deeper argument here.
> Religion plays a significant role in influencing corruption levels [26,[29], [30], [31], [32], [33]]. While all religions encourage good moral conduct and ethical behavior, studies show that different religions are associated with varying levels of corruption. Notably, countries whose primary religions are hierarchical religions such as Catholic Christianity (Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Islam, tend to have higher corruption levels, particularly in comparison to Protestant Christian countries [21,30,[34], [35], [36], [37]]. Supporting this claim, [30] found that corruption levels are lowest in countries with a Protestant majority and highest in countries with an Orthodox Christian majority.
This claim of hierarchy doesn’t make sense for Islam, which explicitly does not have a fixed religious hierarchy like Christianity (which I will also note it’s interesting that Christianity was split into sects but not Islam for this study).
All studies analyzing countries as a whole are flawed. First of all, it's low sample size, there are 200 something countries. Secondly, countries are complex systems with thousands if not more variables, that are impossible to account for, so any finding is incidental at best.
But how many of these Orthodox countries have been Orthodox countries officially for more than a few decades? I’m struggling to think of any besides Greece.
Lebanon never got communism and the country was founded as largely a Catholic and Orthodox project, but it still has considerable corruption. (Not defending the OP's claim, just offering another data point.)
But the question is concerning studies done recently, not centuries ago. So I think the only way to determine if Orthodoxy leads to "more corrupt" states would be to analyze one that wasn't something un-Orthodox (e.g., socialist Yugoslavia) for the last half-century.
Huh, Orthodoxy is very old and widespread. Ofc during Communism, it tended to be suppressed, but as a bedrock of the society, Orthodoxy definitely prevails in Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Belarus and Russia at least.
Ukraine is more complicated, a nation sewn together from very different regions; Greek Catholics are an important minority, mostly present in the formerly Austro-Hungarian western part of the country, which also seems to be the most nationalist one.
Presumably these studies have been done recently, not two centuries ago, so I'm not sure how useful they are in determining that Orthodox states are "more corrupt."
I am not sure either, but I wouldn't rule it out either. Caesaropapism was probably, on the net, a negative shaping force in societies which indulged in it.
In the world of Islam, the Shi'a system of ayatollahs is structurally fairly close to Christian Orthodox Churches, and the Iranian theocracy which builds on it is corrupt beyond belief.
That said, it probably makes sense to study why some countries are somewhat less corrupt or how they managed to keep corruption in check. Corruption seems to be fairly widespread across space and time, one of the universal blights of mankind.
FWIW I don't know about the statistics, but it is true that Eastern Orthodoxy does have notions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonia_(theology) that are especially conductive to authoritarianism and its associated ills (including unchecked corruption by local authorities).
This is not always true - for many GCs, threads need to suspend at least some of the time. If the compiler can't prove a small bound on the iterations of a loop, it needs to insert safe point instructions.
Also depending on the GC, read or write barriers may be required.
Lastly there are circumstances in generational moving GCs where there is extra overhead due to checking to and from space - for example if you attempt a compare-and-set on a reference type, you need extra code to check if your CAS failed due to comparing the from-space and to-space addresses of the same object.
I work primarily in garbage collected languages, and there are many benefits - safety, throughput, easy ABA avoidance in lock-free code - but using a GC carries tradeoffs.
> Another thing you can immediately see is that the QML version of the algorithm is generally much slower than the JavaScript version. As noted above, this is due to it being built on QObjects rather than JavaScript objects.
Of course, QML is trying to beat the browser at it's own game, but can't match the billions invested in browser performance.
Qt classic is dead, and QML is a less featured, less documented, underperforming copy of Electron.
Qt/qml is not an ideal, of course. There are many controversial things. But it outperform all of the alternatives in terms of portability, built-in features and performance in complex.
Qt Widgets is not dead, its feature complete and in many industries that's a very valuable. New projects in Qt widgets are being done all the time in the embedded space.
QML is not trying to beat the browser at its own game. It is not made to display, you know, websites (and web apps), with a stack that was originally created for documents, and that still shows. QML is not JavaScript, it's a neat UI description language that uses JS for dynamic aspects.
It's not less featured, it's differently featured: it has features that have been directly designed to create user interfaces. Unlike HTML and CSS!
The documentation is very good, actually. Of course, if you are already familiar with the web stack, it may seem obscure to you.
Sorry, but this is FUD. Qt is miles ahead of Electron in terms of performance, app startup, native platform support, and low memory consumption, to name a few.
Additionally, its documentation is one of the best in the market.
+1 on the documentation. As someone whose job involves a daily use of Qt, I think I've been spoiled by the documentation. Qt does a tremendous job of explaining nearly every function and property in detail, as well as giving a healthy class-level overview (often with code snippets and even screenshots where it might be useful). In fact, even their (many) example programs each have their own documentation page explaining what the example code ia doing.
Short answer: yes. Tauri is using your OS own web view instead of shipping y’know… entire Chrome. And for native stuff, it’s generally faster and smaller with Rust than… checks notes… the entire Node runtime.
In short, it’s not super hard to beat electron especially in terms of disk/memory.
Now, that said. Many of you think you suffer because web=slow, JavaScript=bad yadda yadda. But this is often not true at all, which almost always turns up in apples-to-apples benchmarks. In fact, the suffering is almost always because of lazy/hypey/bloated stacks full of ads/multiple cloud backends for metrics, ads, logging, etc etc/poor coding standars etc etc. So the long answer is that Tauri won’t help with those deeper issues.
