Your car is spying on you, and sends the data [location, acceleration, etc] (potentially every few seconds) using its built-in SIMs. True of all new cars starting in 2018. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

SODA 2027 CFP (www.siam.org/conferences-...) absurdly encourages using a citation style (to avoid using etal) that is in contradiction to *all* writing manuals: sarielhp.org/misc/blog/26... .

Behold the new avatar... bsky.app/profile/cs-c...

Go tell it to cities in europe....

OpenAI is doing an IPO and their technology is impressive. But is it useful? I still have serious doubts about their long term viability compared to say google. I am also wondering if small models might be able to do most targeted tasks equally well, undercutting the whole craze for data centers.

Mathematicians rank the hardness of a problem, and thus its importance, by how long it was open and how many people tried to solve it. Its a very strange norm if you think about it....

Wow. That is big.

Assume you have a discrete distribution, with i having probability p_i, for i=1,..., n, and you have access to a uniform distribution (say on [0,1]). How do you sample from this distribution in constant time? A: The alias method... sarielhp.org/misc/blog/26...

Wordle like game, but for arbitrary long words: sarielhp.org/misc/blog/26...

There are two computers connected by two wires to each other (via two ports). For example, A1<->B1 and A2<->B2 means that port 1 of A and B are connected by a wire, as well as port 2 of both computers. Alternatively, A1<->B2 and A2<->B1. The two computers are perfectly synchronized.

Gemini suggested "Declarative Programmer" as a title for somebody who just programs using Gemini (it is really possible using gemini-cli nowadays). Other suggestions are "Declarative Programmer" and "Gemineer".

📚 New in arXiv cs.CG: The Prophet and the Voronoi Diagram

www.theverge.com/science/9187... What a miserable time we've created for ourselves.

Former NSF theory program director Peter Brass guest posts on the state of the foundation.

It is amazing that you can generate code that generates the following image, by just chatting with an AI agent (gemini-cli in this case)... sarielhp.org/misc/blog/26...

The Dunning-Kruger-LLM effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their own abilities since they asked an LLM to explain the domain to them.

They are eating the gold bunnies!

They are eating the ducks, they are eating the goldfish... www.oxfordstudent.com/2026/02/20/p...

📚 New in arXiv cs.CG: Separator for $c$-Packed Segments and Curves

Words fail... www.nytimes.com/2026/04/05/u...

Tesla way of not paying his hotel bill... www.iflscience.com/nikola-tesla...

Still uses computers to verify 4-coloring, but still seems like a major step forward on this problem - especially the algorithmic part. At 94 pages, it is not short and simple...

📚 New in arXiv cs.CG: Engineering Fully Dynamic Convex Hulls

Rooted trees, not rotted trees.

AI strikes again... www.fox13now.com/news/local-n...

From a paper I am reading...

📚 New in arXiv cs.CG: Separators for intersection graphs of spheres

Demonstrating a one-dimensional linear equation... (Written by gemini-cli). sarielhp.org/misc/blog/26...

A tip about making a first version of a talk quickly for an existing paper. Copy the LaTeX source to a new directory. Start gemini-cli (or claudecode or opencode or whatever AI CLI tool you have) in this directory. Then tell it to read the paper, and generate a Quarto presentation.

QED. Case closed.

Its pi day, so here is another "oh really?" about pi. If you pick two random integer numbers in [-N,..., N], the probability they are relatively prime is 6/π^2.

In the competition between Grammarly and PaperPal, in terms of who gives better writing advice, Gemini is the clear winner.

I put the source of my presentation from last week on github. An example of how to generate a quarto presentation using latex math/biblatex/etc. The presentation is essentially a markdown file, so its easy to start using it... github.com/sarielhp/bey...

The end result of this stupidity is people citing papers without any author's info, and numerical citation style results in unreadable paper with random numbers. And all because some puritan somewhere can not sleep because they are worried that someone got tiny more credit than they are due.

A while back, we realized that one can (1+ε)-approximate the Hausdorff distance between point sets in ℝ^d, in linear time. Unfortunately, this was already done implicitly in a remark in a published old paper. So, we updated the arXiv version: arxiv.org/html/1409.74...

I updated some slides of an old talk, now using Quarto (and reveal.js), and the animations are pretty impressive. Looks great, and easier to make than Beamer (no slow compilations). The lack of easy macros is a bit annoying, but overall, good experience. sarielhp.org/talks/26/03_bp

War is nature's way of teaching Americans geography.

To give credit where credit is due, the AI agentic tools do simplify the code when they migrate it from one programming language to another, but unfortunately, into incorrect code.

No. Silly spell checker. Cardinality is not carnality, despite how much mathematicians wish it was...

Updated Chernoff inequality cheat sheet. sarielhp.org/p/notes/16/c...

I am impressed with google's antigravity (AI agent editor). I was able to modfiy ipe to add a feature I wanted, and it worked. Previously, I tried to do it myself and failed (too rusty on QT programming).

The dark forest had a better answer...

You can now use ipe in the browser! ipe-web.otfried.org/index.html

📚 New in arXiv cs.CG: Graph-Based Nearest-Neighbor Search without the Spread