Cries in discrete state space.

This. Honestly, a good antidote to feeling bad about any aspect of life (work, politics, food, basic infrastructure, etc) is to remember how much worse it was when I lived in the UK. It has been almost 7 years that I left, but the effect hasn't faded: the remembrance always cheers me up!

Truly horrendous, but important reading. Amazingly telling that this is filed under the “Opinion” section.

I encourage you to read this by @nickkristof.bsky.social, not only because it is important to understand the systematic terror our government is indirectly supporting, but also because it is a model of investigative journalism, moral clarity, and effective writing. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

Early Christmas... The @frame.work laptops for our group members @invcomplexity.skewed.de arrived last week!

JFC, can't you just configure the OS to do what you want?

This is a good point: if you will use a machine to write code you don't understand, why does it have to be Python? medium.com/@NMitchem/if...

This paper makes an interesting claim about the identifiably of multivariate effects in ecological models. But unfortunately, its characterization of our recent work (arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937) is very misleading. 1/2

Every few months there's a new review on a same old sub-topic of network science. Soon we will need a review of network science reviews. If we build its network, we have the network science of science of network reviews. And then we write a review of network science of science of network reviews.

Sebastian Kusch discussed how we can disentangle communities and ranking and proposed SBM models with ranking parameters, closing with a take way “poem” #complenet2026

Regarding the ignorance excuse (“it's a norm in the field”), here's what Richard Feynman had to say about basic honesty in science:

New blog post: "Higher orders need higher standards" skewed.de/lab/posts/hi... I discuss our current work disentangling misconceptions around "higher-order" networks: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937 Explainer thread for the paper here: bsky.app/profile/tiag...

This may say more about the quality of human reviewers in that conference than the quality of LLMs.... Also, want to get good scores? Just write a positive review that echos what is claimed in the abstract.

The idea of writing extremely customized software using LLMs is a curious one. It may seem like a liberating prospect at first, but it's actually another instance of cloud computing: i.e. your software stack is *written* by the cloud. isene.org/2026/05/Audi...

Social media was better when it had a “dislike” button.

The tech giants are hypocrites for opportunistically just ignoring copyright at a massive scale just because it allows them to train LLMs. But so is anyone that characterizes copyright infringement as “stealing”, exactly like the MPAA, RIAA, and friends did in the 2000s.

So, if one tries again to determine if the difference between replicable and not replicable is itself not scientifically replicable, one may reach the conclusion that it is in fact replicable?

This bothers me a lot. I get it that potato chips, mcnuggets, and beef jerky, etc are super unhealthy. But is it because they are “ultraprocessed,” or because they are fatty, salty, etc?

A stunning visualization born from a collaboration with @manlius.bsky.social : 55,486 galaxies and 29,555 streamlines tracing how matter flows across our local universe, built on data from the CosmicFlows-4 project. Article in the first reply 👇

This mug should be awarded to every academic who served as department chair.

Dutch film-maker Jan van IJken condensed 4 weeks of development in a salamander embryo (Mesotriton alpestris) into a 6 minute video, presented here sped up to 1 minute. You can see gastrulation at ~the 10s mark, forming the gut, then limbs & in a moment, the heart just *begins* beating.

This is an important read if you want to understand Palantir’s modus operandi and how silicon valley has accomplished near total corporate capture of government.

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

A model is only useful to the extent it is right in some way. But being right is often not a binary or one-dimensional assessment.

Absolutely. A single confabulated reference is enough for me to reject a paper as a reviewer or editor. This is only a problem if we let it be a problem.

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

In the meantime, we're apparently happy to refer to a single individual as "they".

Why have we coined "Popesplaining" when "Pontificating" is right there!?

Raising a glass to @tiago.skewed.de ‘s amazing @graph-tool.skewed.de which just allowed us to extract all of India’s OSM road network’s ~260 million edges into a smashing largest connected component of ~130 million edges. C++ and graph-tool. Hope we can publish and cite our global analysis soon!🙏🙏🙏🙏

In Latin America the anti-corruption mantle is worn by the far right, hypocritically, as always, but successfully. It was worn by the military dictatorship of the 70s, as well as Bolsonaro. The latter was only elected because they jailed Lula for “corruption”. Lawfare is a double edged sword.

“AI” will never beat actual human creativity. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lUC...

I can make it from my office at the @goetheuni.bsky.social to the flight gate in Frankfurt Airport in 45 mins, in normal stride. Less if I'm a hurry.

Why is there no guillotine emoji?

What Israel is doing to Lebanon is obscene, carpet bombing civilians, massacring people in their hundreds, total disregard for human life. Truly plumbing the depths of evil. The single greatest source of violence and instability in the region and it's not even close.

More than 500 people arrested at Palestine Action protest in London

On Martin Nowak, the evolution of cooperation, Jeffrey Epstein, and the corruption of mathematicians. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2026/04/10/n...

The paper's framing: Human violent conflict has been explained by different theories in different places and times, including cultural identities. Chimps have violence but don't have cultural identity, so maybe cultural identity isn't so important to human conflict! Illogical Darwinist slop.

Finally a version of chess that I can master! rowan441.github.io/1dchess/ches...

The only reason why this does not overlap perfectly with "right" vs "left" is because the left is completely inexistent in US party politics, so people lack the vocabulary to even articulate it. Remember: if you oppose concentration of wealth and power, you are left wing. This is what it means.

Absolutely disgusting, criminal.

Chuck Schumer: ‘The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran’ https://theonion.com/chuck-schumer-the-american-people-deserve-a-president-1835697625/

Reminder that it's incorrect and misleading to say that graph models encode “pairwise” interactions. Graphs have been used for decades to model multivariate interactions, and in fact *generalize* what can be modeled with hypergraphs. More: skewed.de/lab/posts/hi... And: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Good slide for a lecture on non-identifiability.

Trump is responsible for the most convincing argument in favor a nuclear deterrent ever made. If Iran does not perform nuclear tests in short time frame, it will be shocking. Say goodbye to nuclear nonproliferation in the middle east.

Sharif University in Tehran was just bombed Founded in 1965, it is one the most elite science and engineering institutions in the world. Alumni include the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win the Fields Medal Here is the list of other alumni en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Holy shit. This is like if a foreign country bombed MIT. Sharif University is the top science and engineering institution in Iran, and one of the top in the world. Absolutely unconscionable www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblo...

TRUMP: "I'm gonna fuckin' blow up all the fuckers! I wanna use all the bombs before I die! Helter skelter! Helter skelter! Race war! Race war! Fuck Easter and fuck you, too!" NEWS: "Trump promises to strengthen military in early morning Easter greeting."

Here are a couple of examples. Lung cancer survival rates for EGFR+ mutated Lung cancer.

Heads up GitHub users. You have less than a month left to opt out of "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training". "On April 24 we'll start using GitHub Copilot interaction data for AI model training unless you opt out." github.com/settings/cop...