Multiple news sites claim the Artemis II launch is real, not an April Fool's joke. Huh. Maybe it is true.

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@dingc/116323658554250041 A closed surfaces equipped with a Riemannian metric always has infinitely many prime¹ closed geodesics. For Finsler metrics the situation is more complicated: in positive genus surfaces the same is true, there are infinitely many prime closed […]

What a blooming onion really looks like.

A blog post I was reading uses the phrase "bucket load" which I was not familiar with. I am aware of "boatload" which means "a lot", so by comparison I'm guessing that "bucket load" means a "small amount".

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/116303214738173173 The orange ping pong bat fungus is gogeous!

I'd like to thank Myst for teaching me to always press every button and never trust books. It has significantly changed my life. #gaming #shitpost

In Mexico we don’t say “he is in trouble”, we say “se lo cargó el payaso”, and I think this is beautiful.

Man, LLMs really drive home the lesson that people differ *greatly* in how much the care whether the statements they make are true.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@BleepingComputer/116295860536457673 whatsapp adds AI-powered message replies so you can automate the boring task of talking to your friends and free up more time to work

People already are using "i saw this video before 2023" as a signature that the video is eligible to be believed. Soon, "this software was developed before 2025" will be the only sign that makes software eligible to be run.

I was looking at a database of groups with isomorphic character tables, that is based on the GAP SmallGroup database that contains all groups of order up to 2000 except those of order 1024. The character table database is in text files, one per group order, and is around 3.9G total. Of those 3 […]

Great blog by Pat Thompson on academic writing: ▶️ https://patthomson.net/2026/03/08/getting-comfortable-with-being-uncomfortable/ "Academic writing is a form of thinking. It’s not the transcription of thoughts already completed, but a process of thinking itself. One of the ways we make […]

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.

I've never liked the autocomplete suggestions — I turned off even the individual-word suggestions in iOS years back, and the phrase suggestions are much more obnoxious than that. Apparently they're even worse than I'd realised, though […]

Michael B. Jordan's father is named Michael A. Jordan!

Why was I so afraid of compiling #emacs from source all these years? Today I found out my office Emacs was compiled with dbus support, so I installed the libdbus header files recompiled and restarted Emacs all in a few minutes. Easy-peasy. (I do actually know why I was reluctant to compile from […]

"Grave Concern About ICM in USA in 2026" Letter to the editor, at the Notices of the AMS by Hendrik De Bie https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202604/202604FullIssue-optimized.pdf at the Notices of the AMS by Hendrik De Bie https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202604/202604FullIssue-optimized.pdf

I appreciate someone took the time to write this. I profoundly disagree with their view, but if I take the spirit of what they're saying as a good faith attempt to raise a mental issue, there's at least a conversation to be had. Let's have it 1/🧵 www.science.org/content/arti... #AcademicChatter

In news about language models I do like: I've been testing speech recognition models and I can report that whisper is actually pretty good, it's better than the microphone on the Gboard Android keyboard and also better than Google Voice Typing (and oddly, those last two are not the same, Gboard […]

Several times a fellow chilango¹ has told me they don't like burritos, only for me to learn upon further inquiry, that they have only had them in the US², and then I have to tell them not to knock burritos until they tried them in Chihuahua or Sonora! It seems that here in Mexico City plenty of […]

From a recommendation letter I just read: "Apparently, people like his research and enjoy his talks." #academicchatter

Firefox ESR (is that the Eric S. Raymond edition? —I hope not) often is very slow to recover when my laptop goes to sleep and wakes up. My workaround is to just turn off the computer: thanks to SSD it boots quickly and Firefox also opens surprisingly fast with all my tabs intact. It takes less […]

RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116204163611415275 It looks like the International Congress of Mathematicians is less serious than the Ig Nobel Prize. 🙁

RE: https://mendeddrum.org/@fanf/116187943534160660 Most sports are at stuff that many non-human animals are way better than humans at, but not long-distance running! This article doesn't mention it, but I've read that having good aim is also something humans are better at than most, if not […]

That Jennifer Hom is a low-dimensional topologist rather than a category theorist or a homological algebraist is strong evidence against nominative determinism.

Hahaha, Google is really struggling lately. Today I tried registering a new card with Google Pay and couldn't because it asked me for a 6 digit code but sent me a 5 digit code! 🙃 But it turns out I can't use Google Pay anyway: when I tried using a card I already had registered I got an error […]

Loved this line from a talk by Vladimir Dotsenko: "Of course, I am assuming that we all agree that to define a category we normally would define objects and morphisms." I would have delivered that line with a dramatic pause and eyebrow raise.

Public service announcement for those writing anonymous referee report in #Emacs #orgmode#emacs (setq org-hyperref-template "") stops Org Mode from adding your name and other identifying characteristics to the exported PDF's metadata.

@sacha There seems to be something wrong with this link that you included in the Emacs Carnival for february: https://jneidel.com/dev/hugo-links/ It points to a blank page titled "AI Usage". You have it under the title "Completion of hugo links in Emacs · jneidel"

New post on M-x apropos Emacs! Exploring large amounts of data with completion. https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/apropos-emacs.html#exploring-data-with-completion Please consider this a last minute entry for the Emacs Carnival, @sacha.

One time at a conference I was introduced to a mathematician, and when I heard his name I immediately recognized it. I said: "Hey! You're the person who read my thesis!" And he replied: "If you know that, then you are the person who read my paper!" #academicchatter

OK, let me get that straight: we took some actual living human brain cells — aka, a brain-in-vat — and went all Descartes Demon on them by making them experience the simulated world of the game ‘Doom’ for ❝research❞ purposes? 😱 www.newscientist.com/article/2517...

Very cool: artist Simon Berger creates portraits by cracking glass with a hammer! https://simonbergerart.com/

Nice plot summary... Google just keeps getting dumber.

Why do I keep seeing people that use #Emacs #orgmode#emacswith an external static website generator, usually Hugo, to make a website? Is there something wrong with the org-publish subsystem that comes with org-mode? It seems to work well to me. Or maybe there's nothing wrong per se with org-publish […]

You've probably heard of the Birthday Paradox, that among 23 people the probability that two share a birthday is more than 50%. This is easy to prove by calculating the complementary that no two of the 23 share a birthday. There are 365 options for the first birthday, then only 364 for the […]

My son just told me he knew a kid whose nickname was Simba, because his uncle killed his father. 😬

Starting writing the introduction paragraph of a blog post after finishing the rest of it, and my muscle memory literally typed "In this paper" before I could stop it

The current release candidate for #emacs 31 feels a little bit snappier to me than Emacs 30.1. Does that match other people's experience? And if so, does anybody know why it feels a little faster?

A logician will point out that ¬A is indeed equivalent to ∀P.(A⇒P). So the two signs really say the same thing.

[AI screaming, void screaming, allcaps, long,] EVERY FUCKING WEBSITE IS FUCKING BROKEN, AND THE MORE A COMPANY IS PROUD OF HOW MUCH AI IT USES THE MORE BROKEN ITS FUCKING WEBSITE IS. I AM FORCED TO USE MICROSOFT OUTLOOK FOR MY WORK EMAIL AND IT CAN'T FUCKING HANDLE ATTACHMENTS NOW. I HAVE BEEN […]

For any prime p there are exactly two non-abelian groups of order p: 1. The Heisenberg group of the field with the p elements, which consists of matrices of the form [1 a c] [0 1 b] [0 0 1] with a, b, c in Fₚ. 2. The semidirect product Z/p² ⋊ Z/p with Z/p acting on Z/p² via a·x := (1+ap)x […]

I compiled #Emacs master to test a pull request that @minad made to embark, and I found my Emacs pretty unusable because org-ql didn't work, but fortunately that turned out to have a one letter fix! I had not realized how much I rely on #orgmode#emacsand org-ql at work.

Wow, I had been running out of patience with Yegge’s uncritical #genai boosterism, but this is epic: “The AI Vampire.” As usual with Yegge, it could have been edited down to half its size, but go read it anyhow. I’m going to adopt that “AI Vampire” phrase and start using it, a lot […]

I've recently seen several papers on the arXiv where all the references say "Equation (#.#)" no matter whether they link to an equation, a lemma, a proposition, a theorem, a corollary, etc. In one case I knew a co-author and asked him about it; he said that did not happen on his own computer […]

# AcademicChatter

I just found this cool talk from EmacsConf 2021 by @asilata about her fancy org setup for courses, which uses org-babel extensively. She has several nice ideas for how to organize things, I particularly liked how she generates assignments with or without solutions depending on whether the […]

I implemented org-babel support for 3 array languages I like a lot: Goal¹, BQN² and growler/k³. These languages are great for data munging so I find it very handy to use them in #orgmode to process data stored in org tables. You can grab my implementations from my Emacs configuration at […]

Why is LaTeX rendering on arXiv abstracts so slow? Are they still using MathJax 2.0?

in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with. this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.