I've just started www.audible.com/pd/On-Xi-Jin... So far it's excellent as was his last book The Avoidable War

A new paper with Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gomez-Serrano, and Adam Zsolt Wagner: "Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale" arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864. Further discussion is at terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/m...

Last night we gathered community builders to ideate on how we can rebuild Vancouver’s once-thriving meetup scene. 🥳 What resources can we pool for the betterment of the ecosystem? 🤔 It was a total blast and we are collating our findings and planning Stage 2. 📈 If you’re an organizer, REACH OUT 🤝

Looking back at my son's kindergarten notebook and laughing at his answer to "How was your weekend?" ... "I made 16,384 triangles" Claude figured out what he was talking about. Quadtree triangles. Divide a triangle in 4, 7 times: 4^7=16,384

Wicked fox

Huge Lion's Mane Jellyfish we found on the beach near Port Hardy this summer

And I thought I was taking tmux too far youtu.be/6V3KnjiBuhU?...

Polyglot Conference was quite good today. Nice to meet people from a wide variety of backgrounds doing cool stuff in Vancouver www.polyglotsoftware.com

Polyglot Conference Vancouver 2024: Real Talk About AI, Industry Hubris, and the Art of Unconferencing The recent Polyglot Conference in Vancouver was a unique experience, focused on genuine discussions rather than traditional presentations. Attendees engaged in insightful conversations about AI's…

Continuing on the #PolyglotConf post I made yesterday, here's a bit of a summary of - IME - seemed like the prominent conversations. I'd be curious what your take is on the industry hubris around AI. compositecode.blog/2025/10/13/p...

Wrote a post yesterday about predictions in AI from a session at #PolyglotConf in Vancouver. It's 22 predictions, I'd like to know what predictions you have too - whether doom & gloom or if you've got a rosier outlook. compositecode.blog/2025/10/12/t...

The #polyglotunconf afterparty was held at the False Creek Yacht Club. The organizers did a great job at making the weather nice 😎 Had a good time connecting with some very interesting folks. This is a great conf for bringing together people from many different walks of computing life.

Just finished #polyglotunconf 🎉 300 people showed up and collaboratively created a multi track conference. I went to sessions on building an eng team post-AI, LoFi software, self-hosting, and managing context in enterprise. Met a TON of new people. Now off to the afterparty 🍻

2026 Polyglot early bird tickets www.polyglotsoftware.com

There's a group of Polyglot Unconference folk wanting to gather for food and drinks tonight before the conference tomorrow. If you're interested, look in our shared doc for "pre-party" in the schedule

www.amazon.ca/Rise-Machine... is an excellent and timely read

Respect youtu.be/VaeI9YgE1o8?...

My son was showing me a bunch of dragon characters in a game and asking me to rank them to find the one I like the least. None of his. These. Zoom in

it's time for coffee when I start typing 'rm x y' when I intended 'rg x y'

One month till Polyglot www.eventbrite.ca/e/polyglot-s...

Pricy paperback

The Lean project is looking for someone to work on a documentation tool for math/technical communication. This is likely to be very influential, so a chance for someone with the right skills to have great impact. See the announcement here: leanprover.zulipchat.com#narrow/chann...

I wonder how much the anti-AI bias here has been amplified by AI engagement-biased recommender systems

This paper is pretty exciting. Near-zero-carbon steel production costs only 36% more than steel from a blast furnace (under reasonable electricity price assumptions); a carbon tax like the one in the EU is already enough to make it cost-competitive. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy Hi Tim, We're running www.polyglotsoftware.com again on Oct 11th and would love to see you there again. Your effort to De-BigTech would probably make for lively and interesting discussion session

Going to Polyglot Conf on October 11th in Vancouver BC. Join us! I'll be taking the train, if anybody is inclined to join me, ping me! www.polyglotsoftware.com

On naming

West coast specialty: a chainsaw museum

"Scale laws" aka "something I can't unsee"

Cat on a 7 day paddle board trip

Rainbows in the fog

@jennybryan.bsky.social Hey Jenny, if you're in town on Oct 11th and not conferenced out after useR and posit::conf, you'd probably enjoy www.polyglotsoftware.com Should be lots of local DS/ML people you know there

YVR Devs: CascadiaJS is soon. Sept 18-19 down in Seattle. It's a great conference with strong ties to Vancouver. It's been held here in the past and the organizers attend and help promote our local conferences. 1/n

@adron.bsky.social hey! Can lure you back up to YVR for another Polyglot. Oct 11th this time www.polyglotsoftware.com

Polyglot Unconference is back. Saturday Oct 11th. Would love to see you there. Old faces, help spread the word. www.polyglotsoftware.com

Random question from my son: why do we get goosebumps when cold when it seems like goosebumps increase the surface area of our skin and would make us colder? (answer: think about what we evolved from)