It stresses me out sometimes that I get no feedback on recommendation letters. If an applicant gets accepted, was it despite my letter or did my letter help? If an applicant gets rejected, was it my fault? I have no idea. #academicchatter

Scottish terriers look like someone tried to recreate a miniature Schnauzer from memory and vice versa.

Booted outline-minor-mode from my #emacs configuration! Don't get me wrong, I like the outline navigation commands, but you don't need outline-minor-mode 's terrible key bindings to invoke them! I've decided to invoke them through Embark now, I'll take C-. n over C-c @ C-n any day of the week […]

Thanks to GitHub user aikrahguzar for telling me that #emacs 30 added support for outline-minor-mode to eww (and more generally to shr output)! This lead me to learn about the outline-search-function variable that can be used to add support for outlines not based on regexps. I now updated Embark […]

The name of the #Linux distribution I use, #debian#linux12, means "they owed twelve" in Spanish —it's missing an ´ on the i, but I'll give them a pass. Funny name, solid distro.

I'm tired of Americans calling Ivermectin a "horse dewormer". I understand that they are combating other Americans that incorrectly claim it is an effective COVID-19 treatment, but do they have to lean on the "horse" so much? It is also widely taken by humans! The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine […]

The notes by Jared Alper on Stacks and Moduli have developed really well since I last had a look at them a couple of years ago https://sites.math.washington.edu/~jarod/moduli.pdf

Oh, Facebook ads... Their software seems to understand I often look at Springer books, but hasn't noticed the ones I look at are math books. Makes me wonder how good ML really is.

New post on M-x apropos Emacs! May I recommend eww for Emacs's innovative UI? https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/apropos-emacs.html#may-i-recommend-eww-for-emacs-innovative-ui Please consider this as entry for the May edition of the #Emacs Carnival, @sacha#emacs

When people tell me they don't like technology I usually say I'm a huge fan of the printing press... which is how I learned that apparently it only counts as technology if it was invented after you turned 30. And now that I know what technology is, turns out I may also dislike most of it.

Bit the bullet and switched from my old my-lisp directory to the new user-lisp. I think this means I can remove some autoloads for my functions because they will now be provided for me. #emacs

Contemplating binding C-<tab> to tab-next to make #emacs more browser-like. 😬

I'm trying #peertube now (using what I believe is the official Android client) and cannot figure out how to subscribe to notifications for new videos by some account. Am I better off following the PeerTube account here on Mastodon (which I think I know how to do) and just going to the PeerTube […]

"I'd hate for our friendship to ruin our ideological differences"

A master's student of mine wanted to go to a workshop in Canada and applied for a visa. He was rejected for reasons that sound insane to me: they said he didn't have sufficient family ties outside of Canada (his entire family lives in Mexico!); and they said it wasn't clear that he would benefit […]

Feature request for Google Scholar email notifications: notify me about each paper at most once! I get notified once for each coauthor I follow and one more time if its algorithm detects I might be interested.

Should I look into scoring emails with #Emacs #gnus#emacs I think I want to see all emails (emails are all I use GNUS for at the moment), but wouldn't mind seeing the good ones first. What experiences have people had with scoring?

Decided to add imenu support to the excellent Lemmy client lem by @mousebot. This is all it takes: ;; lem-imenu --- imenu support for lem -*- lexical-binding: t; -*- (defun lem-imenu--line-at-point () "Return the current line." (buffer-substring-no-properties (line-beginning-position) […]

When I try to post a comment in my favorite mastodon client, Phanpy, if there is no internet connection, it pops up an error message saying "unable to fetch". I wish that after a couple of attempts, the message switched to "stop trying to make fetch happen".

Why writing with LLM bots misses the struggle, search and refining of the writing process. It's worse than just 'cheating', it's autopilot cognitive stagnation, and a terrible flattening of what each human mind can create. #academia #academicchatter #ai #education > "Faultily faultless, icily […]

Turns out that all that GNU Readline is missing to make shells usable is: "\ep": previous-history "\en": next-history 😛

I don't understand the phrase "happy belated birthday": there doesn't seem to be any way for a birthday to be belated, it just falls on a specified day automatically and nobody can do anything about that.

@byorgey mentioned that he thinks there are some universities that are forcing (or something close to forcing) professors to use LLMs. Does anybody know of some examples of this? #academicchatter #llm

It seems that I've stumbled upon a new triangle center that is not one of the >70k centers listed in Clark Kimberling's ‘Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers’. 🤯 faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/encyclop... Here is how it's defined: 🧵⤵️ •1/8

A colleague asked me to download a paper for him because his university doesn't subscribe to the (well-known!) journal. It seems funny to me that my Mexican university had access and his German university did not. I'm always happy to help my colleagues in less privileged countries, of course. 🙄

Statement from the @AustMS about #icm2026 "To the International Mathematics Union, The Australian Mathematical Society calls upon the IMU to reconsider Philadelphia in the USA as host venue for the 2026 ICM due to potential difficulties for international delegates to obtain visas to attend […]

About half done with grading but fully sick of it, will walk dog as reward for getting through half.

"Obviously it looks AI-esque because I was hired to create a meme, not necessarily a painting [...] it needed to be immediately readable as clearly doctored and fake, because that’s the joke" https://www.avclub.com/devil-wears-prada-2-hires-human-artist-to-make-ai-slop #news #film #artists #ai […]

Language is a powerful drug! Some people have come to believe ChatGPT or Claude is sentient, butas far as I know this never happens with Midjourney, DALL-E, Sora or Nano Banana. (Also, for some reason not Gemini either! Good thing it has no feelings or they'd be so hurt.)

Story Set Up: One day you get a strange envelope in the mail. No obvious significance of the return address, it's just a shipping depot. In the large bubble envelope you find... your childhood journal. An old tattered notebook full of drawings and writings you remember well. Who could have sent […]

New linguistic pet peeve: people pronouncing "vs" as "verse", with one syllable fewer than "versus".

Are you sure you want computer now?

I think the biggest unsolved problem in my #emacs configuration might be what to bind to C-z. Help me out with some inspiration: what do you have bound to C-z?

I expected the programming languages I use to all have the same implementation of cosine on floating point numbers, but I found one where cosine doesn't have a fixed point and instead there's an x such that x and cos(x) differ by the minimum positive float and cos(cos(x)) = x. That cos comes […]

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@SecureOwl/116410267560812026 Mike Sheward discovered many companies, instead of deleting a user's email from their databases, will overwrite it with an email address at deleteduser.com and continue sending emails to them! Sheward registered the domain […]

Elmendorf's theorem is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be equivariant.

The best thing about Teams and Outlook very often expiring my session and needing to sign in again is that they don't give me a notification about it, so I can spend a happy half a day getting on with my actual job before realising I've been missing messages.

Oh crêpe, I doughnut like this sound of this: #emacs taking up extensive amounts of batter. https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1sn9cy4/emacs_taking_up_extensive_amounts_of_batter/

Pro tip: if you don't know why something is happening call it "idiopathic". That's what medical doctors do and it makes them sound really smart.

Today I used Goal¹ to do my taxes. Data files plus an array language repl is definitely my preferred substitute for spreadsheets! The data I needed to use today was in XML files (not CSV, as I would have liked) so I extracted the relevant numbers with regular expressions, which Goal thankfully […]

Whaaaat?!?! https://oeis.org/A394413 #oeis

Very interesting, thank you. So 9/10 of the 10 “most important” triangle centers seem to have an analogue in hyperbolic geometry, and the 1 which doesn't is NOT obviously given by the intersection of 3 lines. This provides for food for thought regarding the question: mathoverflow.net/q/425000/17064

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@oantolin/116358467810174642 Sad noone commented on the off-by-one joke in footnote 2.

We found a Jamaican restaurant in Mexico City! I hadn't had jerk chicken or oxtail in about a decade!

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@Jose_A_Alonso/116381153586884855 Great cautionary example of the dangers of ignoring performance considerations even in type-level programming.

The time it takes to write a joke, from conception to birth, is the jestation period.

Man, conference deadlines are getting ridiculously tight! I was invited to speak at conference today (April 8) and have to accept or decline by March 28. #academicchatter

How did this happen? I tried using a #magit command in #emacs#magitthat failed with some error message about some transient variable not being bound. I decided that was probably because it was introduced in a newer version of transient, so I set package-install-upgrade-built-in to t (the default is […]

In Mexico we say “La verdad no peca, pero incomoda” - and I just realized this teaches us form an early age about cognitive dissonance, in an approachable and funny way. It is beautiful as usual.