Yeah… this code is entirely just a parser for a file format the author invented. Exact same thing could be done as a csv. Sacrificing confugrability for standardization and all that, but… I don’t see the there, there.
Probably the idea is to eventually have these as some sort of public repo where you can merge files from arbitrary projects together? Or inherit from some well known project’s config?
I’m no mathematician (studied up to diff eq, linear algebra, discrete), but from glancing through the paper I do not really have an ability to apply this concept to a problem of my own, though it does seem useful.
Do you think this is something that should be taught generally? In which class would it fit? It feels generally diffeq-ish.
Good question. It's closest to dynamical systems, which usually lives in applied math or physics departments. But that's kind of the problem — it gets taught as theory in one department and never reaches the engineers and clinicians who'd actually use it.
If you've done diffeq and linear algebra you have the prerequisites. Appendix B (page 17 of the paper) is our attempt at making it practical — worked examples rather than proofs. Would be curious if it lands for someone with your background.
We plan to do a follow-up paper that provides a standard format for this math that could be taught across domains. That doesn't belong in this first paper. First priority was to show the pattern and get people thinking about it.
Calculator.app does have history now FWIW, it goes back to 2025 on my device. And you can make the default vertical be a scientific calculator now too.
Also it does some level of symbolic evaluation: sin^-1(cos^-1(tan^-1(tan(cos(sin(9))))))== 9, which is a better result than many standalone calculators.
Also it has a library of built in unit conversations, including live updating currency conversions. You won’t see that on a TI-89!
And I just discovered it actually has a built in 2D/3D graphing ability. Now the question is it allows parametric graphing like the MacOS one…
All that said, obviously the TI-8X family hold a special place in my heart as TI-BASIC was my first language. I just don’t see a reason to use one any more day to day.
I haven't reinstalled it to check how it's implemented, but I want that history visible on the screen. So that I can do 3 calculations, then look up and see the calculations and results, for instance, to copy them down somewhere.
I'd like multitasking too with multiple apps visible at once so I could copy figures easily from one app to another, like the Android I tried in 2020, but obviously that's asking too much of Apple.
Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.
The end result of his vax push has been to reduce the set of government required vaccines down to the same set used by Europe already. Additional vaccination is still available should an individual elect.
Are you of the opinion that the European recommendation is insufficient? Would you petition European healthcare industry that they are requiring too few vaccines? If so, I would expect Europeans to be chronically far more diseased than Americans, do we see that in the data?
They are based on denmark's guidelines, which as you know is a very cold country.
One of the vaccines made strictly optional was for dengue, which is not really a thing in denmark since I think they don't have that many mosquitos due to weather.
However, in the US, mosquitos and tropical weather are common for a large part of the population.
Point being, a huge country with a huge variety of climates and diseases shouldn't follow the lead of a small country with a fairly homogenous weather and disease pattern.
The only outlier is Hepatitis A, which is still recommended in some European countries. On the reverse side, the meningococcal vaccine is commonly scheduled in Europe but not in the US.
Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine" schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it eliminates exemption from lawsuits. If you "choose" a non-routine vaccination, people can then sue pharma for ANY harm, and you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later. RFK's fans (Del Bigtree) have admitted that this is their plan. And if they're NOT routine, they'll probably not be covered by insurance, so you'll have to pay hundreds or thousands to get one. I would still do that, but not many others will.
Electing to get all ZERO optional vaccines actually available to you because of "reasons" isn't much of a choice.
"Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine" schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it eliminates exemption from lawsuits"
Why is this bad? From one of the threads - "There IS scrutiny on vaccines, by the scientific and medical community - your "scrutiny" (as presumably neither a PhD in a relevant field or MD) is not valuable or relevant. There is decades of research that says that currently recommended vaccines are safe and effective."
OK, then there won't be grounds for lawsuits or lawsuits will be easily dismissed.
"you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later" - This logic can be applied to literally any product, be it a medicine, a vaccine, or any consumer good. Somehow pharma companies are able to sell any other drug without going into bankruptcy.
Signal is centralized, hosted on AWS, and through a mixture of legal procedures codified by US law and their bundled gag orders (PR/TT order, SCA warrant, FISA 702, and usage of NSLs) that can be extended for significant lengths of time and, occasionally, in de facto perpetuity, all metadata (who is talking to who, when, from where) can be monitored in real-time without Signal ever being informed. Combined with existing legal procedures for telecoms and VOIP providers for real-time + retrospective location tracking by phone number/associated IMEI/IP address by way of tower connectivity (this framework is required by law [specifically, CALEA] to be implemented by default for all users, not after the fact nor on-request), that's enough data to escalate to standard law enforcement procedures if an incriminating link is found, whereby the phone's internal message history can be dumped either through private (ex.: Cellebrite) or functionally coercive legal means (refusing to decrypt data can get you jail time if you are the subject of an investigation, and deletion of data such as via duress pins etc can get you a destruction of evidence charge), at which point all of your messages can be dumped.
And this all ignores the fact that firmware for basebands and cryptoprocessors (and most other hardware components in all devices) is closed-source, proprietary code, and that Signal piggybacks off of device encryption for at-rest message data instead of reimplementing it in userland. (This feature used to exist and was removed, but can be re-added through the Molly fork.)
I've also known protesters who have also had Signal geoblocked at the site of a protest the moment it was slated to start, forcing members of said protest to fall back to unencrypted methods at crucial times. Being centralized and using US-based cloud infra does a lot to compromise anonymity and security, even if message content isn't immediately readable.
Luckily, Signal is not vulnerable to push notification interception, but if you want a great real-world example of how gag-ordered dragnet metadata surveillance visible to both domestic and foreign governments (by way of international intelligence agreements) can look for massive corporations rendered helpless by this legal framework, that's a great case study to look into. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
Throwing out the accusation of apps being "backdoored" just obscures the real, de facto "backdoors" that are US law.
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