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ohsonice's comments

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

Cool! I found it a little unintuitive that after each stroke, it reset to the pointer tool. I would've expected to be able to draw more lines without pressing 'X' each time.

Also, as a mathematician, I would love some Unicode support for greek letters and super/sub-scripts. Something similar to https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/. I tried to just draw the text I wanted but the first point I brought up made this more difficult.

ETA: If you hold 'X' or '7' then it remains in the tool you chose. This makes sense.

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: From scratch: reverse-mode automatic differentiation (in Python)

I don't think it makes sense to the same degree. Simple compositions of elementary functions, e.g. exp(x^2), do not have indefinite integrals.

Autodiff provides benefit since differentiation can be expensive numerically while easier symbolically. Integration is, in some ways, the opposite. Integrals with no symbolic representation can be estimated with quadrature methods.

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression

I definitely think that we shouldn't be criminalizing drugs. I've had some good experiences and some bad experiences on both LSD and mushrooms and believe that they could be beneficial in medical settings under the right supervision. That being said, people are still going to have bad reactions sometimes. I would think that the benefits are better than the risks, especially compared to our current approach to medicating away depression.

My current view is that I can reach similar states of joy and grounding (including oxytocin release) through meditation, yoga, exercise, play, community, etc. I have been in groups where everyone is partaking in psychedelics - I choose not to and still have wonderful experiences. I think that the drugs taught me how to get to those states but there are not the only way.

The conspiracy theorist in me does not think that "the Man" wants us to be grounded and open in general, including through means of drugs.

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: Julialang Antipatterns

I actually was able to solve this for myself. As often happens, I went to ask for help on Slack but first wanted to understand the problem better. Turns out, our old IT director (who was not loved in the dept because he was constantly taking away permissions) decided to make life 'easy' for us by creating a bash script that created the sbatch file for us. Debugging this file showed that it did not work correctly when using local installs. I was able to simply write my own sbatch file.

I submitted the fix to the IT team but I don't even know if anyone has the permissions to get in and fix it right now.

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: Julialang Antipatterns

Thanks for the reply! Yes I've pushed for it to get updated but haven't seen any results due to IT turnover. Always excited to hear more performance improvements, yay :) shout out to the Julia dev team for doing great, intentional work.

They supposedly have the HPC setup so you can install your own version locally and submit it to the cluster but nothing happens when I do that (job is called successful after 1sec, no print statements do anything, no save statements, etc). I may take your suggestion to work with the Julia slack team, thanks.

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: Julia as a CLI Calculator

I've been using Julia as my CLI calculator for a few years now - cool to see this post! While teaching an online Linear Algebra class, I would use Julia to construct examples and quickly solve them. The syntax sugar of all the functional idioms make it very fun and easy to express more complicated ideas. This is a cool introduction- I was not aware (or had forgotten) about function chaining. Really curious about using more of Latexify as well :)

On an unrelated note, (as a mathematician) I have started using Maple a lot more as my analytic computational helper. Never really gave it the time of day in years past - it is quite powerful and intuitive. Funny note: I recently copied and pasted output of a Maple command into my Julia code and it was syntactically correct!

ohsonice | 5 years ago | on: Julialang Antipatterns

Appreciate this post. I remember when I first started using Julia, I wanted to type every argument to every function because I thought static typing made me hip. Ran into a lot of problems with my types not being wide enough, etc. and had no performance impact.

Also, good to know about the NamedTuple. I've been away from Julia for about a year and am starting to get back into some development with it.

On another note, I just found out today that my department's HPC is still running Julia 0.4 and since we are in between IT people are not going to update it. Considering rewriting my project in Fortran or C++, waiting for the day when Julia is a first-class language

ohsonice | 6 years ago | on: Matlab vs. Julia vs. Python

My (math graduate school) perspective:

MATLAB is adored in academia for a number of reasons. It is easy to make readable small scripts for in-class examples. The debugging feature/IDE is easy to navigate. The school pays for the licenses; there is no overhead work to compile or download packages (unless you want to do something 'fancy').

I took a ML course that was taught in Python. All my Numerical Analysis and Modeling courses relied on MATLAB for examples and homework. I (as a programmer outside of just the math world) picked Julia for research. Now I do much more theoretical research, as I did not enjoy mixing coding and mathematics.

A fellow student, developing PDE solvers in FORTRAN was told by a mentor to get it to work in MATLAB first and then move on to faster languages.

Happy to answer any questions :)

ohsonice | 8 years ago | on: The Incredible Growth of Python

Grad student at a math department here- I see python used in tons or research applications with fellow students studying math, engineering, stats, etc. But in my experience Matlab still reigns king in math academia, especially in classroom environments.
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