Here's that diagram showing the Hindi naming of the components of elephant caparison you didn't know you needed. (From the highly-recommended www.sahapedia.org/elephant-reg... )

the most unsurprising thing in the world is now every rightwinger, all yhe way up to JD vance, have explicitely defended this and the statements made by those in this group. and that’s by design, every single rightwinger is now an extremist nazi

The fundamental problem with "Sapiens" is that Harari doesn't actually know the scholarship he's haphazardly citing. He's a historian of early modernity - his first book was on Renaissance military memoirs - and I'd bet he had grad students doing most of the research for "Sapiens."

This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

Front page of Scottish newspaper The National today.

He is 13. A 7th grader w/ a pending asylum case. Being held more than 500 miles from home & housed w/ adults. He called his mom crying, & reported that he’s sleeping on concrete w/ an aluminum blanket. How is this anything other than sick & shameful? www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!! The University of Texas-Austin is beginning a process to eliminate the Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies departments in the College of Liberal Arts. This is a grave threat to the educational liberty of students, faculty, staff, and the people of Texas. 1/

I don't think we'll ever get another sentence which sums up everything the New York Times embodies quite like "Some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily kill civilians".

Reposting this in a more constructive matter to simply point out that people who have vocally expressed clear white supremacist, transphobic, sexist, racist, and generally nazistic views, such as David Heinemeier Hansson, are not and never will be internally consistent and operate on cowardice.

They're openly saying they want to sacrifice LGBTQ people and the planet to appease fascists. This is not only a losing strategy, this is morally repugnant. Every single one of these people should be ashamed, but we know they won't because they are amoral sociopaths.

Very interesting post on how the non-profit Feeding America implemented an auction system with its own currency which massively improved allocation of food to food banks. www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-market...

idk if you've seen this south korean editorial that ran a few days ago. google translate version scorched my eyebrows www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion...

@safety.bsky.app is, or is not, inciting violence against members of a protected class a ToS violation?

Names include international students, lecturers and part-time faculty, Judith Butler says: “The consequences of this compliance could be terrible for a lot of people’s lives, most of whom are much more vulnerable than I am. They can suffer deportation, expulsion, job loss, harassment, surveillance"

Where are all the first amendment defenders/cancel culture complainers?

First of all, folks aren't "glorifying violence or harm," they're celebrating the death of a bigot whose words and actions enabled an ongoing climate of permissible violence against marginalized people. Second of all, @safety.bsky.app is complicit in enabling the very violence they're condemning.

Woo!! Coral goes to S&P! eprint.iacr.org/2025/1420 Coral is an amazing system to check over ZKP that a document conforms to a grammar (JSON, C, TOML). Super happy with this work and the amazing work of all the co-authors!

I was walking up Bogd Uul, the Mongolian holy mountain near Ulaan Baatar, with an international Buddhist group, and the Patriarch of Cambodia was walking with a young Mongolian monk. They tried out different languages to see if they had one in common, and settled on Sanskrit.

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Query-Optimal IOPPs for Linear-TIme Encodable Codes (Anubhav Baweja, Pratyush Mishra, Tushar Mopuri, Matan Shtepel) ia.cr/2025/1588

With SEPTA cuts Amtrak is saying it may be forced to cut Keystone Service between Harrisburg, Philly, and NYC: www.inquirer.com/politics/sep... This would significantly impact tourism and business commuters. It would drive up Amtrak prices for anyone who travels between DC, Philly, NYC, and Boston.

The beginning & end of a paper are the easiest to find (both physically and digitally). Hot take: references should be at the end, even after appendices. No one ever: "Gee, isn't it convenient the appendices are at the end, b/c I need to flip back and forth to those all the time!" #AcademicSky

Kind of feel like it should be bigger national news that the poorest major city in the country is being forced to accept devastating service cuts to our public transit system because PA Republicans actively hate Philly and want to cause us pain

Back to actual research… We present a family of space-efficient sumcheck algorithms, and show that they are optimal! 🍹 Joint work with Anubhav, Ale, Elisabetta, @zkproofs.bsky.social, Tushar and Andrew 📚: ia.cr/2025/1473 🧑🏻‍💻: github.com/compsec-epfl...

The UK is about to ban access to Wikipedia, just remember this bill was originally pitched as a means to protect kids from accessing porn.

Time-Space Trade-Offs for Sumcheck (Anubhav Baweja, Alessandro Chiesa, Elisabetta Fedele, Giacomo Fenzi, Pratyush Mishra, Tushar Mopuri, Andrew Zitek-Estrada) ia.cr/2025/1473

The core role of the university in society is the generational transmission of knowledge and rare skills. This has been already long forgotten by administrators who have prioritised rebranding universities as publicly-funded job-training centres in recent decades.

Coral: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge CFG Proofs (Sebastian Angel, Sofía Celi, Elizabeth Margolin, Pratyush Mishra, Martin Sander, Jess Woods) ia.cr/2025/1420

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird. (he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

For the 1st time since the mid-20th c, a major urban US transit network is going to be largely destroyed. Philadelphia’s SEPTA must cut 45% of service, starting NEXT MONTH. 45% is not “waste fraud and abuse.” It’s “would you like to keep your heart or your lungs?” wwww.septa.org/fundingcrisis/

This is hopium of the worst kind that downplay the reality that the elections of 26 and 28 are not a given, and that rule of law does not matter under a fascist government Only the rule of power and traditional law holds no power where this is going.

unsolved millennium prize problems are just evidence that the problems are wrongly priced. if they gradually raise the reward money, eventually the supply and demand will match and a solution will arise. its just economics

It feels significant to note that the grievances driving the fascist right, and significantly so for the tech-fascists, are completely fabricated delusions

The result is cool, but the reporting is a bit hyperbolic…

In memory of Johannes Bronkhorst: elisafreschi.com/2025/07/09/4...

the mayor of Philadelphia makes MORE MONEY than the mayor of NYC (s city of 12+ million) and yet she’s sitting on Twitter negging our city workers instead of hammering out a fair contract

worth noting the pipeline here: * Trump-supporting anons hack Columbia data * Nazi twitter accounts dig around in the data * NYT picks up on Nazi substack posts, publishes Zohran story to damage his campaign * Chris Rufo immediately boosting the story

Michael is an insanely talented compiler developer and certainly top 5 most knowledgeable people in the word re: the Rust compiler. Anyone in the city with an appetite for Rust compiler development should absolutely give him a call.

Shameful capitulation by Penn. Just gross.

This is disgusting.

Incredibly cowardly from Penn: titleixoffice.upenn.edu/about/title-...

Thiel ends up incredibly fucking ignorant and clownish because the slightest amount of social pressure made him petulant and scared. Too petrified to actually explore the arguments and differences of those that gave him pushback. He treats "the woke" as a monolith because he's too scared to look.

PARIS: In the last 20 years, 44ha of Paris car parking has been transformed, making room for wider sidewalks, bikes & buses (15ha), bike racks, EV spots, accessible space, & 2.2K new patios/terraces for outdoor dining. 90% of Paris trips are via walking, biking & transit. V/@villedeparis.bsky.social

it is genuinely incredible that zohran's campaign completely annihilated the democratic commentariat and party cadre mainstreaming of the idea that you need to concede palestine and trans rights to the zionists and republicans to 'gather votes'. lmfaoooo

Incredible evidence for the Great Idiot theory of history though: leaders are just guys and more often than you'd think they're awful vain impulsive guys craving immediate feedback and with a weak understanding of reality, compounded by how their actions warp reality.