4+ day, 8+ hour ago   (254+ words) The idea of using computers to assist with proofs is not new. The first major computer-assisted proof was published in 1976, the proof of the four color theorem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. The authors reduced the proof of the…...

6+ day, 5+ hour ago   (282+ words) “understand empathically,” 1961, an arbitrary formation by U.S. science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) in his book “Stranger in a Strange Land.” In the book it is a transliteration of a Martian word and is said to mean etymologically “to…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (142+ words) NVIDIA has offered by buy Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. 129303 is the Unicode code point for the Hugging Face emoj (U+1F917), which you can verify with the following Python code. >>> import unicodedata >>> 129303 == 0x1F917 True >>> unicodedata.name(chr(0x1F917)) 'HUGGING FACE' Related posts Prevent characters…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (244+ words) Eric Lu announced on X today that he has factored RSA-260, a number N with 260 digits (862 bits) that is the product of two large primes [1]. RSA numbers are challenge problems posed to gauge the security of RSA encryption, which rests…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago   (353+ words) I watched a few videos this morning, looking for ideas of what I could use AI to do. In one video, someone had an agent monitor tech news sites every 30 minutes to notify him of a variety of developments. No…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago   (239+ words) This post provides a couple examples to go along with two earlier posts. The pattern we’re illustrating is families of polynomials pn(x) that each satisfy a differential equation and a three-term recurrence. The differential equations have a second solution…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (276+ words) AI-powered coding agents increase productivity for many developers. But do these agents produce good-quality code? Some say this doesn’t matter, we are heading toward dark software factories with source code never inspected, and maybe we should eliminate source code altogether…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (254+ words) When you’re interested in studying a family of functions, it can be useful to look at a differential equation that the functions solve. This is a theme I’ve written about several times, most recently here and here, but also three…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (259+ words) Probability density function must integrate to 1, and so if you know a density function up to a constant, the constant is determined. This post will do the opposite of the advice above and focus on normalization constants because this ties…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (100+ words) There many examples of families of functions where each function can be computed as a linear combination of the two previous terms where a and b are functions of x but not on n. This is called a three-term recurrence formula....