I would agree, but there are still some interactions that require doing the same thing repeatedly in order to make progress (eating rice balls, eavesdropping).
I wonder if that was ever popular, considering the deoptimization effects of try/catch, and given that block scope can also be managed by renaming variables.
Social media has already homogenized our thoughts so much. So many facts and perspectives are presented that it's impossible to construct our own opinions on it all without taking inspiration from others, and the upvote button provides a convenient consensus.
In music, a refrain is a passage that we return to rather than continuing to progress the song. When we hear refrain as a verb, the metaphor tends to focus on the "abstaining from something else" aspect, but here she's focusing on the "repeated passage" aspect. It's not a common use but it basically works.
There are at least two reasonable readings of "anger is eliminated", with one being true if anger is reduced at all, and both being true if anger is reduced to zero.
Without getting into what it means to "trust" Woit or anyone else, whether we're talking about specialists or domain outsiders like myself: if experts disagree, it's up to them to explain why. I can't guess why their superior knowledge has led them to reject the line of argument unless they tell me.
What I meant by "trust" is evidenced by this entire comment section, which is full of laypeople who appear convinced by Woit's arguments but seemingly do not wonder why the physicists in question were never swayed.
Witten has given quite a lot of interviews over the years, but his more mainstream views are unlikely to make it to the front page.
I think mainstream views would deserve attention if they're directly answering these criticisms. If such point by point responses exist, and if they're compelling, then that's what we should be talking about right now.
He's shown us his character as a leader so many times at this point. When he called Vern Unsworth "pedo guy", I didn't know how to square it with my image of him, so I mostly forgot about it. Took a while to realize it's who he is.
It's true, the article doesn't make that claim. We think of primes as being mysterious and out of reach, and we're conditioned to think "mathematical / computational breakthrough" when we read the words "prime number" in a headline, but this is only because we've found all of them that aren't huge enough to be mysterious. Computing prime numbers is trivial as long as you don't mind them being the same ones everybody else already found.
Not sure what you mean by "trivial", I mean a simple prime finding algorithm is easy to write down, but it will be very inefficient, especially for large primes (the very ones you use in cryptography).
Coming up with an efficient prime-finding algorithm like Miller-Rabin* is far from trivial.
* Technically it's just a prime-checking algorithm, but you can just generate random numbers until you've verified one of them is prime.
