That blackbox being their entire moat, I would assume they'd never want to open-source any function. Mathematica as a front-end has innumerable frustrating bugs, but its CAS is top-notch. Especially combined with something like Rubi for integration, for me nothing comes close to Mathematica for algebraic computations.
Many built-in functions are open source too. Use the "PrintDefinitions" ResourceFunction to see the code of functions that are implemented in Wolfram Language itself.
Yes, it is all proprietary, but there are still ways to inspect most of the WL-implemented functions since the system does not go to extreme pains to keep them hidden from introspection. It is not unlike Maple in that sense.
This is mindblowingly beautiful! Thanks for making this. Many a times, I open YouTube, get overwhelmed by repeated recommendations that I had already decided not to watch, and eventually close without watching much. Now that this site puts it into 40 different genres, I can decide which one am I in the mood for and keep surfing to others if I don't feel like it! Brilliant app.
Good advice! I’ve literally never consciously looked at that recommendation page thus avoid shorts mostly too.
(I couldn’t be trusted with TikTok so I have to be careful with shorts etc).
With TikTok I avoided it for years then one week when sick I installed it and within a couple hours it had an algorithm for me that was crazy addictive.
I started messing with it and looked up and 4 hours had gone by and it felt like minutes.
It's a numbers game in the end. Law of large numbers at play again. The noise drops with more tries.
I suppose the corporate culture thinking is exactly opposite to this with metrics like efficiency, productivity etc. You cannot afford to try a lot and look stupider.
Efficiency, metrics, and willingness to look stupid works when nobody has much future power over you. If you can just refresh to a new pool, that is fine but if it is the same pool, it has consequences.
I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many questions one time and because of that the PM thought he struggled to grasp concepts.
Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to just staying quiet and hoping for the best.
All these feel good articles are very ideal in nature, I feel. Not to be the doomsayer, but without a solid backup of resources (be it money, power or some such thing), I find it hard to imagine to be this 'careless' towards returns. World indeed feels like a Red Queen race.
A couple of other people have expressed similar sentiments here, and I think it's the truth. You have to be in a position to give before you can sustain it reliably and/or reap the benefits from it.
Often though, this position is highly subjective and mental in nature. A homeless man could willingly give his food away, and still somehow be fine with that, if he believes that things will be fine regardless somehow (perhaps he has an alternative source of food, or sincerely doesn't think that skipping food once will set him back forever). At the other hand, someone with a difficult and tedious job that pays well may not feel like they have the time or energy to give without necessarily receiving anything in return, even though they may objectively be in a much better overall position for it.
I guess altruism necessarily requires some other essential basic needs to be in abundance first before it can overflow.
This is pretty typical of life in small villages across southeast Asia, especially towns along the coast have fish/cashew nuts lady as opposed to the yogurt lady. She was the local news representative and also the beacon of acceptable levels of capitalism -- would price her products with just enough margin for her to enjoy her simple life.
1. For a site visited by millions, a header element (perhaps h2, h3, h4) followed by a paragraph has such less spacing, it looks weird and hard to read.
2. There is an interesting question at the end [0]: Can you reactivate my deleted account? I was quite interested because if the could, then they never really deleted the data. The page doesn't answer that question satisfactorily at all!
I don’t see what’s unclear about that account deletion page to be honest. It reads clearly to me that the account has been deleted and if you want to use the same email again, you can create an entirely new account using the same email, but it doesn’t reactivate the account.
If you’re in California, the move is to file a CCPA Delete request. IANAL but it seems illegal to process that request and allow account to be resurrected.
Nice article! The upshot is that the boom of Chinese commodity prices in the mid-2010s is what stopped poor countries from catching up. That's a high level answer, but there's more nuance to it. In many places, I firmly believe the poor governance added with unnecessary bureaucracy is how half the countries lose sight on development. The prime example is India and to some extent Brazil.
Brazil is a prime example of what the lack of revolutions ousting old elites create in colonised countries.
There was no revolution for independence which kept the same families of land owners in the elites through it, after there was no revolution to phase out the monarchy in favour of the Republic, and the same entrenched elites managed to keep going since their local power was already settled. All of this is late 19th century.
Push this through the 20th century, and the same elites wanted to keep their power which was mostly based on agriculture production or mining: coffee, sugar cane, cattle, gold, iron ore, manganese. Any divergence of public policy investment away from these was met with hard pushback.
Industrialisation really only started in Brazil in the 1940s, it was rapid and captured by the same groups, just barely 20 odd years into the process the military dictatorship took over power and maintained the process of corporatism into the same elites (since most of those were supportive of the junta). Another 20 years of dictatorship left a corrupt political body, with the amnesty for the junta many members of the dictatorship party went back into normal political life under democratic rule with predictable outcomes to whom they would favour.
There never was a revolution such as land reform to distribute power in rural areas to more people, no industrial revolution to tear down agriculture/extractivism-based elites grip on power, and with corruption there's always the tilting of the scales towards the old elites with deep connections throughout all the layers of the State in new ventures.
Many issues with Brazil's high corruption stem from these roots, "coronelismo" [0] is still present even in large state capital cities.
"Poor governance" tends to be an easy catchall term to shift blame on for economic failures, but reality is, like you said, a lot more nuanced. India's socialist government looks justifiably horrible and inefficient when looked at through a rational economist's glasses, but what many don't realize is that its main priority for most of its existence has been stabilizing regions and preventing balkanization, which it has achieved significantly, sadly having to fall back to political nationalism (another catchall term the author of this article himself uses to push some blame) and socialist federal overreach to achieve it. We tend to be quick to notice failures but God knows how many circumstances we have dodged that were too close to disruptive civil war without recognizing it.
I probably don't understand your point, but if the result of having the prevention of balkanisation as the overriding goal is a "horrible and inefficient" government, why is it a good goal? If India had fractured into its component states (and you seem to imply that this has often been a strong threat), would the people have been poorer? It's rare that independent states ever want to rejoin their historical country of origin.
That's a good question but preferably left unanswered, because trying to find the answer could easily lead to some very, very bad outcomes.
Sub-Saharan Africa is an example of what happens when you allow balkanization through arbitrarily-drawn territorial lines (and all territorial lines are always inherently arbitrary enough to not please everyone). Perpetual war, misery, stagnation.
To be fair, I understand why 'preventing balkanization' is a target, but I'm not sure it's a correct one. By de-federalizing a bit, even temporarily, for a few decades, India might have fared a bit better overall. But I understand why they chose not to, it is a very dangerous choice that can end very poorly.
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