Mark Dominus

I am an amateur mathematician, but not the angle-trisecting kind.

Public Key

npub1hgcxucrw7vg0h709590mwsgfjvg0utpvn48nh87u4hsp68jq9rcqehqfuq

NIP-05 Address

mjd_at_mathstodon.xyz@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqst5vrwvph0xy8ml8j6zhahgyyexy879skf6nemnlw2mcqareqz3uqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qvk92dd

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1hgcxucrw7vg0h709590mwsgfjvg0utpvn48nh87u4hsp68jq9rcqehqfuq

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Last Notes

2024-08-08 14:19:28

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@npub1upk…tcwy Command-line editing is messed up because the shell is confused about terminal width or terminal capabilities or the length of the prompt or something like that

2024-08-05 17:09:05

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@npub1c9m…9xjd I say this about object-oriented programming systems.
They all have the same kinds of objects and methods. But each does inheritance in its own way.
Because inheritance has never really worked well.

2024-08-05 17:08:30

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@npub1c9m…9xjd I say this about object-oriented programming systems. They all have the same kinds of objects and methods. And they all do inheritance differently.
Because inheritance has never really worked well.

2024-08-02 14:46:52

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@npub1c9m…9xjd This is also news to me. What is the function describing actually? The strength of the electric field over time? What is an unstable light beam like?

2024-08-02 10:43:20

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@npub1c9m…9xjd This led me to wonder about fixed points of the Fourier transform. I suppose you know all about this, but it was news to me and I spent quite a while down a lovely rabbit hole of Hermite functions.
Thank you!

2024-07-03 13:19:01

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@npub1ky2…ghvc You know, there are 360,000,000 Americans, so I think your use of the universal quantifier here seems likely to be inaccurate, in addition to being bigoted.

2024-06-28 09:48:43

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@npub1c9m…9xjd That's the best and the worst thing about democracy.

2024-06-18 01:36:51

I miss the days when you could do Google search for "korean carrot dessert" and it would not give you pages about non-Korean carrot desserts, Korean non-carrot desserts, and Korean carrot non-desserts. Anyone remember that?

2024-05-24 20:52:30

This is the world's first use of the modern equals sign, from Robert Recorde's 1557 book _The Whetstone of Witte_.
(Screencap from Internet Archive's scan of the book: https://archive.org/details/TheWhetstoneOfWitte/page/n237/mode/2up)
(I also wrote a blog post a couple of years back explaining what it says if you are interested: https://blog.plover.com/math/recorde.html)
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/498/026/431/331/805/original/158c32b11eece353.png

2024-04-22 16:19:13

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@npub1c9m…9xjd Is it perhaps when a group of people throws someone in the air, then catches them again, repeatedly?

2024-04-22 16:11:34

All numbers are finite, but some numbers are more finite than others.

2024-04-21 17:08:19

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@npub1c9m…9xjd no problem, your statement was sufficiently helpful

2024-04-21 16:25:42

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@npub1c9m…9xjd The bit I was missing is that the inverses are also matrices over Z.
Thanks!

2024-04-21 16:10:55

What does SL(2, Z) mean? Z isn't a field, and the matrices over Z don't form a group.

2024-04-18 19:21:38

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@npub1upk…tcwy I feel pretty much the same way, but all the same I'm eagerly hoping that whatever replaces it will be better.

2024-04-07 20:46:25

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@npub1knz…c73p It's interesting that it starts at M in the middle and follows the circle of fifths downwards. A Western version would most likely have gone in the reverse order.

2024-03-13 13:42:52

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@npub1upk…tcwy hey, I thought of one that might be (b) but might be different: it was designed to work under resource constraints that made sense historically but that no longer apply (and may be forgotten).
Examples:
1. Horrible sendmail.cf syntax was designed to be parsred very quickly on slow 1970's hardware with not-fully-developed-yet 1970's parsing technology.
2. C90 standard requires that externally-visible identifiers (e.g. library functions like printf and malloc) must have nanes that are all unique in the first 6 characters, for compatibility with then-existing linkers that ran in highly memory-constrained environments.

2024-03-13 13:36:19

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@npub1upk…tcwy Your list fills me with the happy envy of wishing I had written it myself. Thanks for being in my world;!

2024-02-16 20:26:27

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@npub1upk…tcwy I don't know, but I looked a little. The string `HEAD` (upper case) does not appear in the Monotone docs. “current heads” appears once, “current head” not at all. I couldn't find the Monotone jargon for “the branch I have checked out in the current workspace”.
But I think it seems clear that Monotone is the source of the name of `.git/refs/heads`.

2024-02-16 20:09:42

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@npub1upk…tcwy I was going to reply that you should check the Monotone docs. Git was stongly influenced by Monotone (and not at all by CVS / SVN, which Linus despised.) So a plausible answer to any question of the form “Where does Git get this terminology” is “Maybe from Monotone?” And I think that does seem to be the case here. https://www.monotone.ca/docs/Branches.html#Heads-and-merging

2024-02-05 18:24:38

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@npub1upk…tcwy I have a problem similar to #3 also, except my problem seems to be that stash _does_ promise to stash the index and the working tree separately, but then it usually doesn't restore them properly. I'm not sure what the underlying issue is and I haven't made time to look into it.

2023-12-19 14:14:25

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@npub1upk…tcwy I've always been baffled that GNU didn't lean heavily into an Info to HTML converter when web browsers started to become common, around 1995. It seems to me that the completely dropped the ball there.
Like everyone else, I didn't want to use the awful info browser they supplied.
But what if those stub man pages had said “or visit http://www.gnu.org/info/emacs/ for full details"? Then maybe something would have happened?

2023-12-13 22:12:58

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@npub1upk…tcwy I have a tool for the same purpose, but the output is much more stripped down. I use it dozens of times a day and I don't know how anyone gets along without it.
Brief description here: https://www.plover.com/misc/stop-merging/slide019.html
Current implementation: https://github.com/mjdominus/git-util/blob/master/bin/git-vee

2023-12-12 14:42:22

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@npub1upk…tcwy Are those little devil horns on Git?

2023-11-21 13:42:33

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@npub1upk…tcwy "a branch is a chain of development that contains commits that aren't on any other branch" — I'm not sure I like this, because it seems to me to exclude some very common use cases. What is happening when I do `git checkout -b new-topic main`? It doesn't seem to be described by your rubric there because `new-topic` doesn't contain commits that aren't on any other branch.

2023-08-30 17:07:33

@npub1upk…tcwy I loved your cartoon about people who make programming easier and I was proud to see a little of myself in each of them. Something to work harder on!
Also, I keep looking at it and thinking (happily) about what a positive person you are and how, if I had been doing that cartoon, it would have been the sour apple of “nine people who make programming harder”. This would not have been an improvement. Also it has been done many times before.
Thanks for being you.