Okay, clearly I still have a lot to learn about home networking. Not being able to block websites by hostname make sense to me after reading a bit about it, but I thought I'd be able to block a specific IP address? It looks like Netgear routers don't typically let you do that.

Please welcome Google's Open Source efforts to Blue Sky at @opensource.google!

There are once again predictions on manifold.markets about the upcoming MIT Mystery Hunt (full disclosure: I don't actually know much about how manifold.markets works)

Glassblowing is super fun! I glassblew(?) this lil bird on vacation in Santa Fe.

Today was the last day of JMM and I’m glad I had the chance to go as well as present. I spent most of the day at the applied category theory session.

@typst.app got a mention at the special session on applied category theory at #jmm2026 today. One of the presentations was beautifully rendered in it. I’ve played around with it only a bit but can attest to the fact that is amazing (and concise).

I learned of this amusing paper at the special session on applied category theory today: arxiv.org/abs/2203.16351

This is also true of Math StackExchange: data.stackexchange.com/math/query/e... I remember when I first asked ChatGPT to prove a theorem and it did poorly. LLMs have gotten much better at writing correct proofs since then. I have to wonder how math professors deal with this as they assign homework

I bought these two dice today at JMM

…and of course I accidentally left my water bottle somewhere at the convention center 🫠 may go hunting for it tomorrow.

meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2026... This one was about how Benford-ness is more likely to appear in music when considering numbers in base 8.

meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2026... At this talk right now. They used Python code to analyze musical waveforms. Used this Python library: librosa.org

PL feed

PL list

There’s a mathematical art exhibit here!

Mentioned during this talk (gift article, from 1996)

I recognized someone I knew at an undergrad REU, 13 years ago, solely by their face then checked their badge. I said hi. The math world is small and JMM is big relative to it.

Zootopia 2 is a fantastic movie. I wasn't expecting it match how good the first one was. I'd also forgotten that Shakira is in these movies and how much I liked Try Everything by her.

There aren't enough #jmm2026 hashtags on here. There are a couple of talks I liked today: meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2026... meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2026...

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

Wow, Scale AI put together a benchmark for AI performance for solving puzzle hunts: scale.com/leaderboard/... Dataset includes Puzzled Pint, CRUMS (which I co-built the website for in an earlier iteration of), and the MIT Mystery Hunt. They aren't good at solving puzzles (yet anyways)

@bcherny.bsky.social stopped posting on Bluesky, so here's a link to his threads post. www.threads.com/@boris_chern...

Any hobby electronics folks know of an individually addressable flexible LED strip with 125 LEDs / meter (ie same as 8mm lego inter-stud spacing)? This feels like something with an obvious marker that should exist but all the ws2812 / neopixel strips I can find are at pretty weird intervals.

I'm asking ChatGPT to create artistic images of a Turing machine and of a distributed system... and it chose to theme them in steampunk without me even asking? I guess whatever profile that it's created of me by now, it thinks that I like the steampunk aesthetic (which isn't incorrect)?

I also like that last.fm shows your listen counts per year:

last.fm's year end reports are finally out: January is the way it is because we were in and out on the hospital a lot with the birth of our first child and playing music to calm him down.

Noam? I hardly know ‘em

I'm image searching Turing machines while putting together some slides on distributed computability, and came across this blog post all about building a Turing machine in an Excel spreadsheet (along with the spreadsheet itself for download): www.felienne.com/archives/2974 Wild.

As expected, at least one other member of my MIT mystery hunt team is *also* attending JMM, after polling our Discord server inquiring about it. Small world!

Welcome to the Public Domain, THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD (1930) 🚂 💪 Choo Choo Choo! We all learned about perseverance & trying from this iconic train. She thought she could, and she did 🥹 Learn more ➡️ blog.archive.org/public-domai... #PublicDomainDay #CopyrightFree

I’ll be at JMM next week right here in DC. If anyone’s going and interested in chatting over a coffee or something, hit me up! #mathsky

The toddler walked (yes, walked) into the bathroom, where the light was off, closed the door on himself, then proceeded to cry after realizing he was in the dark and not in our sight 🤣. Poor baby.

While doing some housekeeping of my online footprint I thought I'd look at what the wayback machine has for me. This was apparently something I did lmao: web.archive.org/web/20100302... I have no idea what was going through my dumb, 18-year-old college freshman mind. I'd tell him not to do that.

Look, it's okay to be anti-AI for ideological reasons. And in my case, I remain anti-AI for creative pursuits like art and writing, no matter how more "productive" it may be. And I remain anti-AI in medicine and law due to the high stakes. But let's not mix up ideology with the data on utility.

We spent this evening watching the second and (half of) the third Knives Out movies. Apparently we had watched the second one shortly after it was released at the end of 2022, but I have zero recollection of it, which is weird. Great movies though! Anyways, good riddance to 2025 and happy 2026!

Metric - Gimme Sympathy

I am fixing my notebook situation right now after literal years of disorganization. I have a 100 billion notebooks and no clear way of using which notebook for what. Random scribbles everywhere. I came across this one while cleaning up. Completely forgot about it:

I may have gotten certain family members of mine into (anonymous) blogging of their own after gushing about blogging 😆

Raspberry Pis and Flipper Zeros are banned at the NYC mayoral inauguration: blog.adafruit.com/2025/12/30/n...

This looks fun

I wrote whatever I learned about single-sideband modulation after getting sucked into the math when trying to understand it: www.vikramsaraph.com/blog/2025/12... Signal processing is a fascinating subject. So many places where interesting math has direct, real-world applications.

I went to the Henry Ford Museum today, not at all expecting to find this math exhibit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathema...

Another year where I fill out a bracket for the college football bowl games with my in laws where I only vaguely know what I'm doing. They are football fanatics.

I easily met my New Year’s resolution this year. I once again acquire a bike and took it on a few rides. I’m so glad to have gotten into biking again. Here are Vikram’s top 3 New Year’s resolution candidates for 2026

A little late to say this, but I had a couple of coworkers give their condolences/ask how I was doing after the Brown shooting. I was fine, but simple gestures like this matter.

Announcing atproto.science! #ATproto has huge potential for supporting new ways of doing research, so we started @atproto.science to help bring together researchers, build community, and explore what's possible when science meets cutting-edge open social network protocols! 🧪 >

last.fm is like the only app that waits for the actual year end for its year in review

With enough coercion I think I got ChatGPT to spit out the derivation for SSB modulation via inverse Fourier transform that I was looking for: chatgpt.com/share/694a0b... It made several mistakes along the way. Forcing it to prove it this way makes it make a lot more sense to me