I maintain affiliations with functor.systems and with alternate Git instances at code.functor.systems (@q9i) and forgejo.mit.edu (@ananthv), both of which are Forgejo-based
I'm Ananth. I used to write code in TypeScript (and, before that, JavaScript—oh, the horror!), Python, and R. I suspect this will give me an ample supply of security vulnerabilities to fix. I later discovered Haskell and realized that it is the one true language (this is a mathematically proven fact). Programming in Haskell (or theorizing, in this case) has the added benefit of giving you whitepapers for free. Learning Haskell has taught me to make sense of philosophical tautologies regarding the current state of the universe, like:
"A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"
—Saunders MacLane
In order to remain sane when not writing Haskell, I am continuously configuring and optimizing my NixOS system. This allows me to continue theorizing about monadic software deployment as I complete what should be trivial system tasks.
You see that? Yes, that thing above. That's my operating system. All of it. It's supposed to be directed and acyclic, but that's really hard to tell given the enormous amount of feature bloat cluttering up the graph. As you can imagine, maintaining this—and aggressively Nixifying existing software—consumes the vast majority of my time at the moment (see below to confirm this).
I also believe that software should work well out-of-the-box, be updated regularly to support bleeding-edge features, and still allow for additional customization. Promoting user control over software and enabling free software distribution are key to achieving these goals. I support software that meets the following three pillars of freedom:
- "Free" (gratis) as in "free beer" 🍺
- "Free" (libre) as in "free speech" 💬
- "Free" (decentralized) as in "open source" 🌐
When I'm not trying to understand category theory, the basis of modern mathematics, or mathematical applications in computer science, I'm likely exploring mathematical economics and related fields, especially social choice theory and optimal taxation theory. I'm also quite interested in linguistics and computational linguistics in particular.
- 🔭 I’m currently working on QuasarOS, a (*)nix-based distro with some custom experimental hacks
- 📚 I’m currently reading Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski, Category Theory in Analytical Mechanics by Viktoria Keusch, the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, and Topoi: The Categorical Analysis of Logic by Robert Goldblatt
- 🌱 Feel free to contribute to any of my projects
- ❓ I’m looking for help redesigning Proto, a language-learning application
- 💬 Ask me to explain what a monad is, why most voting systems are wrong, or how the Hamiltonian is superior to the Lagrangian (hint: it has to do with phase space)
- 📫 My email is [email protected] (encrypt your message with my PGP key if possible—you can use free software like Thunderbird to do this)
- ⚡ Fun fact: Functors preserve isomorphisms, which means that if we can represent a branch of mathematics as a category (which we almost always can, given the abstractness of category theory), we can transform it to another branch of mathematics (represented as a category as well) and equality of objects (up to isomorphism) is unchanged. This is one of the fundamental ways that category theory unifies all of mathematics (See also the only actual application of category theory to a comprehensible mathematical problem with (somewhat) practical rammifications).
Below is a collection of banners associated with my profile, in no particular order:
Above left: licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 by the Artist Collective Superflex. Middle: licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the Free Software Foundation. No changes were made to either of the above images.
Below: licensed under CC BY-ND 3.0 by the Free Software Foundation. No changes or additions were made to this image.
