In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
> In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's.
Most streets have street lighting and electricity, easy to add chargers to lamp posts. NYC probably hasn't heard of street lighting yet?
> The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
I think it would be an impressive feat of engineering to charge cars while they are on the move. I like how you think, cars are mostly idling in traffic, we can consider them as stationary, and charge cars while they idle!
Parking is not assigned, sometimes you got to drive around for 20 minutes to find a spot to park over-night and its not guaranteed to be next to a street light.
By idling in traffic, I meant that we would love ev's since most of the time we are just wasting gas and fuming up our own neighborhoods.
> Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
Probably a significant part of this is people experiencing friction in trying to access this, realising that they don't actually need to consume pornography, and having this break the cycle of compulsion. Which is the most positive outcome really.
Sadly what has actually happened is that many niche interest discussion forums have shut their doors due to fears of regulatory repercussion and fines.
a vast amount of fluff for less than a college statistics professor would (hopefully) be able to impart with a chalkboard in 10 minutes, when Quanta has the ability to prepare animated diagrams like 3Blue1Brown but chooses not to use it
they could go down myriad paths, like how it provides that random walks on square lattices are asymptotically isotropic, or give any other simple easy-to-understand applications (like getting an asymptotic on the expected # of rolls of an n-sided die before the first reoccurring face) or explain what a normal distribution is, but they only want to tell a story to convey a feeling
they are a blight upon this world for not using their opportunity to further public engagement in a meaningful way
I probably don't have your mathematical sophistication - but I like and appreciate Quanta precisely because it helps people like me to understand a little bit about challenging things. This enriches my tiny life, and I hope it also makes the world a fractionally better place for us all.
Perhaps you're just not in their intended audience?
A lot of times on HN when a math topic comes up that isn't about 3b1b, someone will jump in to say "this isn't as good as 3b1b". Last time I saw that, I was moved to comment:
3b1b doesn't have the same goal as Quanta, or as introductory guides. It's actually not that great a teaching tool (it's truly great at what it is for, which is (a) appreciation and motivation, and (b) allowing people to signal how smart they are on message board threads by talking about how much people would get out of watching 3b1b).
This is prose writing about math. It's something you're meant to read for enjoyment. If you don't enjoy it, fine; I don't enjoy cowboy fiction. So I don't read it. I don't so much look for opportunities to yell at how much I hate "The Ballad of Easy Breezy".
I don’t fault Quanta (or 3b1b) for being the way they are. Each is serving their goal audience pretty well.
My compliant is only that there should be a dozen more just like them, each competing with each other for the best, most engaging math and science content. This would allow for more a broader audience skillevel to be reached.
As it stands, we’re lucky even to have Quanta and 3b1b.
I think there is hope though, quite a few new-ish creators on YouTube are following in Grant’s footsteps and producing very technically detailed and informative content at similar quality levels.
well for one who does buckle down and read and do math, the expected amount of new information brought to them by a 3B1B video as supplementary material upon a topic (with the normal distribution being one that admits a direct comparison from the article) is nonzero, by merit of it possibly having ideas to convey from outside their usual purview and formal background that may be applicable to the doing of math (as has been the case for me, someone who [does math](https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Natalia_L._Skirrow)), while for Quanta fluff pieces it's zero.
by the metric of "if this expository piece were to be taken to a time before its subject had been considered and presented to researchers, how useful would its outline be towards reproducing the theory in its totality," Quanta's writings (on both classical and research math) mostly score 0
citing the Wikipedia page for trigonometry makes this feel a lot like you just told an LLM the expected comment format and told it to write insightful comments
I had to check the precise definition for trigonometry while writing my comment, found it interesting so I added a reference.
As with many subject that we learn early in school, it's often interesting revisiting them as adult to perceive additional layer of depth by casting a new look.
With trigonometry we tend to associate it with circle. But fundamentally it's the study of tri-angles.
What is interesting is that the whole theory is "relative". I would reference the wikipedia page for angle but it may make me look like an LLM. The triangle doesn't have positions and orientation baked-in, what matters is the length of the sides and the angle between them.
The theory by definition becomes translation and rotation invariant. And from this symmetry emerge the concept of rotations.
What is also interesting about the concept of angle is that it is a scalar whereas the original objects like lines live in an higher dimension. To avoid losing information you therefore need multiple of these scalars to fully describe the scene.
But there is a degree of redundancy because the angles of a triangle sums to pi. And from this degree of freedom results multiple paths to do the computations. But with this liberty comes the risks of not making progress and going in circles. Also it's harder to see if two points coming from different paths are the same or not, and that's why you have "identities".
Often for doing the computation it's useful to break the symmetry, by picking a center, even though all points could be centers, (but you pick one and that has made all the difference).
Similar situation arise in Elliptic Curve Cryptography, where all points could have the same role, but you pick one as your generator. Also in physics the concept of gauge invariance.
counterpoint to
> easily four or five years of study just to play around a bit
it depends significantly on the branch of maths you choose! I've been told by a professor of fluid mechanics that he has difficulty posing and approving subjects of undergrad dissertations because the knowledge threshold for contributing meaningful ideas reliably is so high, but in my primary interest (combinatorics) this is very much not the case.
the OEIS is replete with old sequences that no-one has considered in much detail in a decade or two, and have a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for one willing to toy with them.
https://oeis.org/A185105 is a good example of such a sequence; "sample the elements of a random permutation of [n] in a random order and record each one's cycle (under repeated iteration), then T(n,k)/n! is the expected of the kth distinct cycle recorded," which seems like it would have been of some interest to someone in the last ≈13 years (since ie. it's well-known that the first cycle's length is uniform in [1..n]), but didn't receive any formulas until I happened upon it recently with my own toolbelt (which is quite modest and certainly could be learned in less than 4 years).
the OEIS is an excellent resource for both readinh and sharpening one's amateur teeth on novel (ie. unexplored, or at least undocumented) problems and very rewarding, if that's your goal with learninh maths
the proofs written by ChatGPT are necessarily reasoned about in plain language, and are a human-comprehensible length (that is what Tao did, since it hasn't been formalised in a proof-checking language); today, the many-gigabytes (or -terabytes) proofs (à la 4-colour theorem) are generally problems solved via SAT solvers that are required to prove nonexistence of smaller solutions by exhaustion.
and there is an ongoing literature review (which has been lucrative to both erdosproblems and the OEIS), and this one was relabelled upon the discovery of an earlier resolution
is there any further information on how she was trained and whether it used a reward for reaching objectives like teaching Kanzi (a bonobo) to play Minecraft? did a human demonstrate the controls or was there a simulation before the actual vehicle? or a hardcoded speed limit that was slowly raised?
it's weird to see that 6 years ago the public consensus on Musk was just that he was a well-intentioned soft-spoken nerd who liked computers and found himself with inadvertent money to allocate altruistically
other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.
although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard
It's short term annoyance for a long term greater good. I'm not oblivious - but of course the impact on me is simply negative (and I'm not going to leave the walled garden anyway so what were we ever achieving really)
I somewhat take issue with the second math example (the geometry problem); that is solvable routinely by computer algebra systems, and being able to translate problems into inputs, hit run and transcribe the proof back to English prose (which for all we know was what it did, since OpenAI and Google have confirmed their entrants received these tools which human candidates did not) is not so astonishing as the blog post makes it out to be
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