I have a degree in math and a degree in cs. I fucking love nonsense.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If you subscribe to classical logic (i.e., propositonal or first order logic) this is not true. Proof by contradiction is one of the more common classical logic inference rules that lets you prove negated statements and more specifically can be used to prove nonexistence statements in the first order case. People go so far as to call the proof by contradiction rule “not-introduction” because it allows you to prove negated things.

    Here’s a wiki page that also disagrees and talks more specifically about this “principle”: source (note the seven separate sources on various logicians/philosophers rejecting this “principle” as well).

    If you’re talking about some other system of logic or some particular existential claim (e.g. existence of god or something else), then I’ve got not clue. But this is definitely not a rule of classical logic.


  • Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne is a classic OS textbook. Andrew Tanenbaum has some OS books too. I really liked his OS Design and Implementation book but I’m pretty sure that one is super outdated by now. I have not read his newer one but it is called Modern Operating Systems iirc.





  • Machine learning techniques are often thought of as fancy function approximation tools (i.e. for regression and classification problems). They are tools that receive a set of values and spit out some discrete or possibly continuous prediction value.

    One use case is that there are a lot of really hard+important problems within CS that we can’t solve efficiently exactly (lookup TSP, SOP, SAT and so on) but that we can solve using heuristics or approximations in reasonable time. Often the accuracy of the heuristic even determines the efficiency of our solution.

    Additionally, sometimes we want predictions for other reasons. For example, software that relies on user preference, that predicts home values, that predicts the safety of an engineering plan, that predicts the likelihood that a person has cancer, that predicts the likelihood that an object in a video frame is a human etc.

    These tools have legitamite and important use cases it’s just that a lot of the hype now is centered around the dumbest possible uses and a bunch of idiots trying to make money regardless of any associated ethical concerns or consequences.