I can hear a calculus tutor outside of my office at the coffee shop and I so want to join.

The mathematician and podcaster Demian Goos has been obsessed with the story of set theory’s birth for years. Last March, he found a letter from 1873 that was thought to have been destroyed during the Second World War. It rewrites the story he thought he knew. www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-...

Is it just me?

I've always loved this stuff! Great visuals, as always. 👏

Certainly a lot of handwaving, but it's easy to imagine the coding model improvement trend line colliding with the run it on an ASIC trend line and really changing what software is.

My coauthor Dave Perkinson made this diagram to explain the binomial theorem and I think it's the perfect distillation. Here's our draft book, Discrete Structures, if you want more: kyleormsby.github.io/files/113spr... 🧮

Display an album that was important to you when you were nineteen.

Anybody use Google Chat for work, through Workspace? Tt's about the same as Slack for our needs and bundled in. Would love to hear pros and cons from anyone who's actually used it in anger. 🙏

Striking paper from researchers at Anthropic using a randomised control trial to look at the effects of AI use on skills acquisition. TL:DR ‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.’ www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Still seeing this even though I've turned off all "Smart" features in Gmail

JFC AWS, all I needed to do was change my fucking password and an hour later, after fixing your permissions fuck-up, I have a new password.

This was the first thing I looked to change in Claude Code.

In the first of our new series of curiosity-driven essays, Qualia, @nattyover.bsky.social asks particle physicists whether the field is facing a profound crisis. www.quantamagazine.org/is-particle-...

Not sure I think there should be SMS/email 2FA if I sign in with a passkey...

HAHA NO I DIDN"T TAKE DOWN PRODUCTION TONIGHT WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Better Futures Club is a new idea that we're starting in Portland, Oregon 📆 First meetup: Thursday, January 15, 2026 Ruby hack night, programming languages design theory and practice, and an imagination of STEM and liberal arts building together Join us! #PDX betterfutures.club

@eudoxia.bsky.social thanks for the syntax hightlighting issue writeup! borretti.me/article/1pas... I left some screenshots and a screenrec on the support ticket page, but now I'm not seeing my post. Hopefully it's addressed soon.

I think the thing that gets me about the Just In Time Software article commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-t... is that... he just recreated Google Keep. Odds are he had access to exactly the functionality he wanted, and more; you can share a note with others. We've used it as a shared grocery list for years.

Mathematics is, at its core, an art. This is on full display in Quanta’s Year in Review math round-up: www.quantamagazine.org/the-year-in-...

duckdb is the best db

For technical things I've been happy with Claude, but for personal things I've been trying out Gemini and if anything, I've been impressed by the speed, which really does help to make a better UX.

@thinkingelixir.com if you end up talking to anyone from the early open-source Erlang days, ask them about Erlang's response to and plan for Y2K! That was maybe the biggest Nothing Burger I've ever experienced.

In the late 1830s, Karl Weierstrass dropped out of university. He is said to have spent his school years drinking and fencing. Decades later, he published a function that threatened everything mathematicians thought they understood about calculus. www.quantamagazine.org/the-jagged-m...

@michristofides.com what's the largest instance of Postgres you've seen? I'm doing some initial research on moving a data warehouse from Vertica to something else. We'd def need an analytical extension for a >150TB database, very much a read-heavy workload.

@brainlid.bsky.social on a recent @thinkingelixir.com episode you talked about your prompts for planning and then implementing (I forget exactly which episode), do you have those anywhere you could share? I'd be curious to see them. Thanks!

I'm working with Python for the first time in my career and I can't imagine getting all of these projects set up without mise.jdx.dev Everyone seems to do things differently, even indentation! 😱

I have an LG DualUp monitor and I'd like to split it into 2 displays (which it supports) www.lg.com/us/monitors/... but I can only do 1 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI, and the color profile when on HDMI is terrible.

@firefox.com add all the AI you want, just give us a global off switch. I want a single setting that will disable all AI features. Thanks!

Some of the most important problems in network science, it turns out, are equivalent to problems in descriptive set theory, a field dedicated to sorting through infinity. Joseph Howlett reports: www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-bridge...

Nice to see Google takes color schemes seriously #solarized @ethanschoonover.com

The coolest thing going on today: Jim Sanborn's private archive for his work on Kryptos is being auctioned... last day! www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot...

Love seeing Oregon in Quanta Magazine!

This was a great article www.paradedb.com/blog/hybrid-...

Love to email security@ and get an automatic reply: You have reached an unmonitored emailbox. Please follow the instructions below to submit your findings. [link to hackerone]

It... it was DNS.

dbt seems to be mostly String Programming. Not the kind of macros I had hoped for.

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

Ikea, why did you call this the lustigt when LÖDRUNNR was right there?

As the field of mathematics advances to include increasingly mind-bending objects, the simple act of counting gets more and more complicated. www.quantamagazine.org/new-math-rev...

bluesky i'm begging you for passkey support. i get logged out SO MUCH and 2FA over email is so tedious.

The New York Times Learning Network is going to be publishing four lessons over the next four weeks on Tuesdays, based on my Math, Revealed series from a few months ago. Here's the first installment: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/l...

👏👏 @firefox.com you just saved me from a suss site:

thoughtbot.com/blog/git-safe works... ON WINDOWS 🤯

OK NOBODY BID AGAINST ME www.rrauction.com/jim-sanborn-...

Neither Home Depot nor eBay understand how people use passkeys. I have passkeys set up with both: eBay never presents me with the option, Home Depot doesn't trigger 1Password, only the browser-stored option (I'm guessing... no other site acts that way)

Is there a good, plain 'ol CSS formatter out there, especially one that's NOT based on JS? I don't love pulling those tools into my projects, would prefer a statically compiled tool.

LOL AI is so intelligent

Wrote some dlang.org today, just a little pling plang plong, but still fun. I could see liking this lang.

The mathematician Lingrui Ge recently helped find a new way to understand the solutions of almost-periodic functions, important equations that appear in quantum physics. The work has helped cement an intriguing connection between number theory and physics. www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-...

My daughter came home from her first day of 4th grade yesterday having learned about the Hailstone Sequence. It took me a bit to remember it's "real" name, the Collatz Conjecture. I wish I were in 4th grade again.