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Urist

@ Urist @lemmy.ml

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379
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • How, exactly, does one make a living as a mathematician?

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  • Speaking from a pure maths' perspective here: Frankly, a little bit. I think at the university research level, the academically inclined professors might be a bit tired to be sidelined with the applied ones, especially when the latter are applauded for their industrial cooperation (read research investments) and appliances (read private ownership over publicly funded research). My study mates and I joked about applied math being dirty, but in reality it is more the absence of creativity and rigor that is the problem with applied math in my opinion.

    To me, math is all about answering cool questions, sometimes posing even cooler questions in the process. Maybe an appropriate analogy would be whether an artist judges those that make commercials. Exploratory work can take a life of their own that is usually not possible when the format of the answer is predefined. That being said, I do not really judge, I only think that the different expressions are (usually) quite distinct in direction and content. I did not do math for money, though I rely on my mathematical skills for income.

  • How, exactly, does one make a living as a mathematician?

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  • Mathematician here (algebraic topology). Pure maths is pretty much an internship in academia. Applied math is anything between basically physics to actuary and finance. Since pure math is highly academic, though, there is no predefined job path following a degree, which is why the question is as interesting as it is hard to answer.

    In academia, we do weird and wonderful things that only a few peers in the world probably will see and understand, due to the highly specialized fields of study. In industry, anecdotally, we do surprisingly little math and are mostly sought for analytical skills and proficiency in problem solving.

    Sadly, most people that hire us outside of academia do not know much math themselves. I believe there are lots of real problems that could benefit from having a mathematician working on them, but there is just too little understanding of mathematics to identify the need.

  • Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried

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  • Yea, and by pressure you mean giving a big fat fuck you and sail the high seas? 🏴‍☠️

  • Switching to AMD GPU for better gaming performance?

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  • If it is just casual LLM stuff, just get something cheap with enough VRAM. Ollama runs with Vulkan now and on my 6700 XT I can run DeepSeek 7B just fine.

  • China’s low rights model goes global: Beijing's manufacturing dominance is based on weaker protections for workers, communities, and the environment. Not it's exporting that model.

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  • If we are to understand that the Chinese socialism is a process which inherently must navigate through flaws and imperfections of the material conditions it is dealt, then surely we much acknowledge the same of the western struggle.

    We are, and we are analyzing the situation materially and historically in hope to arrive at a real understanding of the internal contradictions of either system. Historically, as you say, the capitalists use their privilege to exploit the rest of the world. When the crisis revolving around the internal contradictions become to great, they decay into fascism.

    📍This is where we currently are with respect to the stages of the western capitalist cycle.

    In reality there is nothing about the enshrinement of individual rights which requires or implies capitalism or imperialism, other than historical snapshot these things have been attached to.

    Well no. Conversely the enshrinement of individual rights requires the absence of capitalism and imperialism, in favour of socialism. I am not saying that communism with Chinese characteristics is the only way to attain this, that would be stupid and contrasting our understanding of material reality.

    I agree that the West is not only as much, but even more powerless to change its own capitalist mode of production due to the material reality. This is even more favouring the line of China in paving a new path for the betterment of all. Give the west a bit deepening of state of crisis, and it will be sure for all we are going to need it.

  • China’s low rights model goes global: Beijing's manufacturing dominance is based on weaker protections for workers, communities, and the environment. Not it's exporting that model.

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  • First of all, the advance of the bourgeois class cannot be separated from the industrial technological revolution in a historical materialist context.

    With regards to

    The dictatorship of the proletariat was a philosophical construct. Not a literalism. Industrialization has improved the material condition of every society that has been through it. It has nothing to do with left or right etc.

    note that (quoting Wikipedia)

    In philosophy, a construct is an object which is ideal, that is, an object of the mind or of thought, meaning that its existence may be said to depend upon a subject's mind.

    You are making a reductionist claim that the form is only ideal, which is untrue. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not ideal, it is material and can be analyzed as such, whether or not you agree on its ideal form.

    The crux of your argument is that the industrial revolution and the bourgeois revolution has developed the productive forces, i.e. capital, and thus improved the material conditions of many people as a result. Even Marx agreed on this issue in the 1800s, remarking the absence of novelty of this idea. What you conveniently ignore is the exploitation that this development has inflicted upon every citizen outside the imperial core.

    The nonsensical wording of

    the petite bourgeoisie has always benefited more

    than the proper haute bourgeoisie, is self explanatory for anyone understanding what the word "petite" means.

    That

    expansion or growth can never be infinite. Once that slows the proletariat is always the first victim of the bourgeoisie

    is also not novel to any socialist worth their salt. However, this is more of a nod in the opposite direction of what you think, towards western countries currently undergoing a state of crisis.

  • China’s low rights model goes global: Beijing's manufacturing dominance is based on weaker protections for workers, communities, and the environment. Not it's exporting that model.

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  • I am not quite sure I agree that proclaiming a resolution to class struggle by taking political control over the means of production is sufficient to resolve internal contradictions. The statement regarding "basic political rights" however seem to imply that this in particular is ensured in liberal democracies, on which I definitely categorically disagree.

    I spend one third of my life at work, one third sleeping and one third making myself ready for either. At work I have no "basic political rights", not because I live in China, but because there is no democratic control over the mode of production in my liberal democracy.

    I think that freedom ultimately necessitates equity, at the very least with regards to opportunities in life. In western countries, you pretty much only have the option to live subservient to the capitalist class. The political freedoms are hollow as long as political power is controlled by capital.

    So what am I saying? That I believe a socialist society is the only one that can give any basic rights, and that in turn one must rephrase the question whether China has attained socialism to whether they are working to attain it. Then the situation of current worker's rights become a question of whom their work serves.

    To the victor goes the spoils, after all. Bear this in mind when you relativize the material conditions of Chinese workers to that of western ones, who historically directly benefitted on the exploitation of the former.

  • China’s low rights model goes global: Beijing's manufacturing dominance is based on weaker protections for workers, communities, and the environment. Not it's exporting that model.

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  • I think the argument is rather that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletariat taking political control over capital. The tankies, so to speak, recognize that this does not resolve all internal contradictions of society nor instantly improve the material conditions of said society.

    What you might agree on is that:

    1. The current world order is capitalist.
    2. China was an extremely poor country that has improved the material conditions for their populace tremendously in a short time span.

    Does this mean that worker's rights are unimportant? No. However, I believe the political leadership prioritizes the development of productive forces over worker's rights at this stage of development.

    I also want to highlight the question of who benefits from this labour. If the proletariat is the class that benefits from their own work and the government has their popular support, is this really the red fash, authoritarian exploitation that the other comments and western media assume it to be?

    This is just my flawed understanding, of course. There are probably many who can give better answers. Looking at the comment section at time of writing, I am not sure such an effort is deserved.

  • Euler's Meme

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  • I would rather take my mathematical memes with adequate proof that functions are well defined, unique and existing 🤢

  • Locked

    TIL Iran Has No Water Left, 28 Million People WITHOUT Water

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  • fascism is always seeking enemies internal and external and "punishing" them

    1. Morality police definitely not hurting anyone. /s
    2. Iran is not in opposition to western imperialism at all, actually, they are surrounded by friends. /s

    That being said, I don't think I would characterize Iran as fascist.

    If you really want to define fascism, you need to understand how it appears:

    Fascism is a counter-revolutionary reactionary movement led by finance capital and a form of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which emerged during periods of economic crisis in imperialist countries. In other words, fascism is capitalism in decay.

    Thus many of its characteristics becomes an aesthetic dependant on the specific material conditions and social superstructure of its origins.

  • Elon Musk says Optimus will 'eliminate poverty' in speech after his $1 trillion pay package was approved

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  • No, we chop them into tiny pieces and eat them. You are not hungry with a billionaire pig in your stomach! 🐷

  • An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit

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  • Geostationary orbit is far higher than low earth orbit and I would assume following earths twilight zone would not be much better. I do not see why you would either, with reaction wheels you could orient the satellites towards the sun regardless of the relative position of the earth, with the caveat that earth may block the sun which is hard to avoid entirely anyways.

    Also, there is not that much cool breeze in space, famously known for not having vast amounts of air (still have IR-radiation to help though).

    Edit: Probably ate the onion, didn't I?

  • Selfhosting Sunday! What's up?

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  • They just made a blog post about the next version fixing a long standing issue with their database management. Should probably improve in the near future.

  • US admiral to retire amid military strikes in Caribbean and tensions with Venezuela

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  • Nelson Mandela voiced his opposition in late January, stating "All that (Mr. Bush) wants is Iraqi oil," and questioning if Bush deliberately undermined the U.N. "because the secretary-general of the United Nations [was] a black man".

    But "oil" is mentioned 43 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

  • What do you get recognised for on Lemmy?

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  • Voyager does, but it is local and only notes down future votes.

  • Radicale - What am I supposed to do?

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  • They have split the doc for installation (i.e. procure binaries) and running as a service. Providing you can do the first, it is the latter linked part that tells you how to set up Radicale.

  • There is no good reason why there is still homelessness and poverty

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  • Pointing out that the rich are acting according to their own material interests is a powerful way to show the (sadly) uneducated masses that they should do the same!

  • My Ultimate Self-hosting Setup

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  • Nice writeup and a fun read! Never thought I would encounter a fellow NixOS and FoundryVTT user in the wild, but I realize the Venn diagram of these kinds of users do have more overlap than I thought.

    With regards to your point about Foundry needing more power than a cheap VPS: I have it working fine on an Oracle cloud free tier VPS (unfortunately not the ARM-cores). That being said, it does want a little more power.

    I am not running it with NixOS though. I am renting a temporary space, so I do not own or want to do too much locally right now, and Oracle OCI was only sort of working with NixOS. I did manage to install it with nixos-infect, but think I messed up the SSH with my reverse proxy and had no way to fall back to a previous version, which begs the question how would you?

    You linked to "NixOS friendly hosters", do those give you access to boot options to recover from such a case? Since I did not have that option I determined the risk of failure too great for setting up NixOS on that particular VPS provider.

    I also note that you use the nix-foundryvtt module and was wondering how your experience with it was. Does your sops define your login to the website such that it fetches the package automatically or do you have to manually install them?

  • "just one more lane bro" has never worked as a long-term solution in the history of ever.

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  • Cars suck for many more reasons other than Braess' paradox, even as it indeed adds to the sucking where applied. Being anti-car should be about more than just misrepresenting facts though, especially when science is in our favor.

    We cannot argue that the car brains deny facts and then do the same in return. That undermines the whole argument.