A while back I heard Steve Yegge talking about agentic coding and he's super, super excited about it. But I'm not convinced that agentic coding or vibe coding truly is something new. In fact, I think something else got there first. Forty years ago, in fact: spreadsheets. My little post about […]

Math hivemind: I'm looking for something on the mathematics of kumihimo braiding. The version I know of has a disk with 8 slots, and you start with 7 strings in slots. You take one of the strings, pull it out of its slot, and put it into the empty one, and repeat. It's a super simple way to […]

Achievement unlocked: I have ridden a bicycle with square wheels. This is from earlier this week at our department's "block party" for our majors and interested students. I'm proud (and a bit intimidated TBH) to work in the same department as Stan Wagon, the […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

A great post from The Absent-Minded Professor: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/keep-thinking?publication_id=634571&post_id=174291502 I really like the ideas of instruments versus devices and productive versus parasitic friction, and so on.

A colleague of mine is in a band called Math Emergency. They're playing this Sunday! https://www.amsterdambarandhall.com/events/amsterdam-presents-math-emergency-w/ Sadly, it's their last concert ever -- one of the members is moving out of town, so they're disbanding. But maybe they'll reband […]

added a cheat sheet to the official Git website https://git-scm.com/cheat-sheet

where this came from is that I made a Git cheat sheet a while back at https://wizardzines.com/git-cheat-sheet.pdf and then I found out that the folks who make the official Git website are super open to contributions and thought "... wait, the website doesn't have a cheat sheet, I could just […]

Oooh, it's triple square day! 9/16/25 (or some permutation thereof) https://www.npr.org/2025/09/16/nx-s1-5535545/pythagorean-triple-square-day-9-16-25

@kickingvegas : did you see my posts about my casual-eww prototype? https://github.com/dandrake/casual-eww Thoughts? Should I make a PR?

“Human Resources is neither human nor a resource.” (said by a very frustrated former supervisor of mine 😂) #WorkOrSchoolWittyRemarks #HashTagGames @hashtaggames

#macalester College has a Kofi Annan Ping Pong Table.

Yikes, weird coincidence: a week ago I saved an article on AI voice clones and the risk for scams, disinformation, and so on. This morning I get to reading it. The lede is a description of someone narrating a PSA...except, of course, it's actually a voice clone of that person. The person? […]

@kickingvegas I vibe-coded a casual eww menu: https://github.com/dandrake/casual-eww It seems like the menu options could be curated a bit better, but for the moment, this works and is useful. @kickingvegas, take a look. If you'd like to incorporate it into your casual-suite, you are free to […]

Trump has called his political opponents "vermin" and "lunatics." Trump declined to call the MN governor after the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman in May 2025. Trump elected not to fly the flag at half staff following the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017. Trump […]

A great editorial from Eugenia Cheng. The line that really struck me is "It shouldn’t be called sexist to help people overcome sexism, and it shouldn’t be called racist to help people overcome racism" […]

Today at Macalester's convocation, one of the speakers mentioned the Andrea Gibson poem "What Sucks About the Afterlife" and oh my, it is a lovely, lovely poem: https://breathoffreedompoetry.substack.com/p/what-sucks-about-the-afterlife-andrea "On Earth, everyone loved butterflies, but I […]

I love the little frisson of cognitive dissonance when I find myself editing my .vimrc with emacs, or my init.el with vim. #vim #emacs

@kickingvegas I'd love to see a casual-eww transient menu. I find myself browsing a bit now and then with eww and never remember the basic keys. Back, forward, copying a link to the current page, copying the link at point...just those would be great. Maybe also some page navigation? Just […]

The Minnesota State Fair is going on, and it's a tradition there to find the craziest food that is either (1) fried, or (2) served on a stick. (Or both.) Some great math folks -- in particular, Chris Danielson of https://talkingmathwithkids.com/ -- started […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

My first OEIS entry: https://oeis.org/A387361

Hilbert/Russell Inn

Via the SeqFan mailing list: David Radcliffe wants to resurrect the Encyclopedia of Combinatoric Structures and is looking for collaborators. https://codeberg.org/Radcliffe/encyclopedia-of-combinatorial-structures

I just moved (back) to #stpaulmn and the #twincities#stpaulmn and thought I'd read some books on the history of the area. Asked Claude for suggestions. It hallucinated some results and I asked it be more careful....and it showed a sort of self-awareness: "Rather than risk providing more inaccurate […]

After you've learned Discrete Mathematics with Ducks.... https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Ducks-Sarah-Marie-Belcastro/dp/1466504994 ...you can, it seems, learn Bayesian analysis with dogs. #math #dogs #ducks

I'm looking to actually start paying for an AI service, and want to know which one to sign up for. As a college educator, as a software developer, computer scientist (kinda), I think it's my professional responsibility to keep up with the capabilities of AI. So I'm contemplating signing up for […]

If you think a quarter of a billion laptops added to landfill in the coming months is a bad idea, please see how you can help via @Endof10

When I saw this sign advertising one-sided paper, I was really hoping that it would be next to a bin full of Mobius strips. Alas, it seems the paper they're providing actually has *two* sides...sigh. 🤔 😀 #topology #math #reducerepairreuserecycle

Where I am right now... #seattle #worldcon2025

First world problem, super-nerdy-programmer edition: I am spending a lot of time learning Racket, and enjoying the hell out of it. It's amazing! I love it! But I have a work project where I'm writing JavaScript. Overall, of course, the syntax is so different that my brain handles it. But I […]

Google's Gemini now can make "storybooks" -- which seems obvious enough if you can do image, text, and video generation. I tried it with a story about how pi can equal 4: https://g.co/gemini/share/dde44319723f Not too bad, though many of the graphics are not so good -- misaligned, or too much […]

Google's Gemini said its image generation is now much better, and suggested a "make a vintage postcard" prompt to test it out. I tried it, with my own modifications...and the results were not as good as I would have hoped. In particular, it seems like since […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

🧵1/N This looks exactly the kind of coding / programming / computer science book I really love: https://themagicofcode.com/ The Magic of Code, by Samuel Arbeson. "an introduction to the wonders and weirdness of computation". As a former tech industry code monkey, and now college CS teacher […]

In lispy languages, you have prefix notation. Mostly this doesn't bother me, except for inequalities: (< a b) My little pea-brain thinks visually and wants the pointy end pointing to the smaller number -- or, equivalently, the alligator eating the larger number. But prefix notation makes it […]

I'm mostly posting this as a way to help myself remember, but: I have been using the venerable `less` Unix utility for over a quarter century (!) but just today I learned you can view multiple files with it! less file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt Use `:n` and `:p` to go to the next/previous file […]

Culture changes how you see the world: https://www.science.org/content/article/culture-literally-changes-how-we-see-world Remember "the dress"? Well, eventually some researchers figured out the exact neurological processes underlying the differences in perception, and those are related to the […]

I did a postdoc and some lecturing at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and really liked it there -- so I'm especially disappointed to hear about arXiv postings that include hidden AI prompts to generate better reviews of the paper […]

I was today years old when I realized the little joke about the naming of the Racket programming language: Racket is a Scheme dialect. Both "scheme" and "racket" can refer to some kind of underhanded activity -- running a racket, racketeering, scheming, plotting, and so on. Also, I found this: […]

I was today years old when I realized the little joke about the naming of the Racket programming language: Racket is a Scheme dialect. Both "scheme" and "racket" can refer to some kind of underhanded activity -- running a racket, racketeering, scheming, plotting, and so on. Also, I found this: […]

So my research area in math is combinatorics, and my name is Drake...so how on earth did I not discover "Discrete Mathematics With Ducks" by sarah-marie belcastro until just now??! 🤔🦆 http://www.toroidalsnark.net/dmwd.html I need that book. #math #books #discretemath #combinatorics #ducks

I like math and I like effective democracy, so I support ranked-choice voting. It's not the best (but, of course, Arrow's Theorem can be summarized as "there is no best": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) So I'm happy to see New York adopt ranked-choice voting, and […]

Came across Seymour Papert's "Teaching Children Thinking" essay: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5835 It captures almost exactly my philosophy of education, teaching, computing, and so on. I want to quote so much of it! Here's just one: "The purpose of this essay is to present a grander […]

Oh wow, I just learned what Lisp's "car" and "cdr" stand for! From this video: https://youtu.be/2MYzvQ1v8Ww?si=rAvzDxtoIYadh6Xh&t=93 It's from an IBM 7090 or 7094 computer, if I'm hearing Sussman correctly. Each instruction had two parts: an address part, and a decrement part. Those got put […]

Just finished "Titan" by Stephen Baxter. The premise is, they find signs of potential life on Titan, and end up sending a crewed mission to Titan....in a Space Shuttle. But what shocked me was how accurate Baxter, writing in the mid 90s, absolutely nails the geopolitical situation of the 21st […]

I don't know exactly where I stand on the spectrum going from "AI is just a stochastic parrot / blurry JPG of the web" to "the Singularity imminent and AGI will spur an amazing utopia...or dystopia!". But it seems like some folks think they have "awakened their ChatGPTs" […]

So I recently got a Macbook for use at work, and decided to learn a bit more about zsh, the default shell. Things escalated quickly. Yesterday I switched all my Linux machines to zsh. Today I submitted a patch to the zsh developers that adds some configurability to one of the default prompts […]

I'm experimenting with Racket, and the experience has spurred me to write an essay about a complaint I have about programming language tutorials: https://ddrake.prose.sh/why_i_hate_programming_language_intro_tutorials When I am looking at some new-to-me programming language, I always want to […]

🧵3/N And hence, we get the classic joke about the Buddhist monk ordering a hot dog: make me one with everything. Of course, the flaw in the joke is, (1) unless it's a vegetarian hot dog, the monk probably wouldn't be ordering it, and (2) the monk is already one with everything. And so are you […]

🧵1/N tl;dr did not foresee a discussion of event sourcing in computer architecture to allow me to understand deep Buddhist philosophy... I'm reading "Geek Sublime" by Vikram Chandra: https://www.vikramchandra.co This also gives you insight into the notion of dependent co-arising! The state […]

Whoa, Terry Tao on the Lex Friedman podcast: https://lexfridman.com/terence-tao @tao so many things to think about!