the first sentence of [[ontology]] is "Not to be confused with Oology, Otology, Oncology, Odontology, Ontogeny, or Deontology." and that's really funny if you think about it

Ruby-crowned kinglet taking cover while still foraging

Happy Sunday! Here's a site I've built because I've been thinking about this and want to see more of it in the world: a space for describing and sharing scholarly skills that I've picked up and nurtured over the years.

Also this is a no AI zone in at least two ways: no talking about it and no using it.

https://critical.computer/

scientists reveal the no

the exact post was "i made coffee 󰸞", where 󰸞 is the Private Use Character U+F0E1E (in Bibi-binary, U+DIHODEHADE) which may render differently (or not at all) depending on which fonts you have installed. we somehow both had the Material Design Icons font installed, so the glyph was both intended and successfully conveyed to me as a bold checkmark, but i wondered what other fonts might be rendering private use characters on my system. after uninstalling MDI, the character was found in the GNU Unifont as KINYA SYLLABLE ET from the ConScript Unicode Registry, which led to Boby.

my friend posted about making coffee and through a convoluted chain of events that led to me learning that Boby Lapointe(!) made up a monosyllabic hexadecimal numeral system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi-binary

https://bsky.app/profile/jacklewis.bsky.social/post/3mykfo4kwh22y

AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

P. K. G. Williams (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard,Smithsonian)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.27251 https://arxiv.org/html/2610.27251

arXiv:2610.27251v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone." There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable --- some can be said to rank among humanity's greatest achievements --- the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known "tragedy of the commons," but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600--1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via "slop spam"). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.

toXiv_bot_toot

Folks, I'll be out of a job at the end of this academic year. If you know of a tenure-track-type opening that might suit me, ping me! (I wouldn't mind hearing about postdocs either.)

@jonmsterling

We have recently become aware that this folk interpretation of Per Martin-Löf’s contrast between Russellian and Tarskian universes is at odds with his original intent—in particular, Martin-Löf actually meant to draw attention to the contrast between open and closed universes, and it seems to have been a coincidence that his exposition was notationally aligned with the choice of implicit vs. explicit decoding.

Is this true? I'm looking at ML84 and it's pretty clear to me that he means to draw attention to implicit vs. explicit decoding, at least in that particular presentation. There's no mention of an eliminator.

Anyway, i think the moral of this story is that we'd better stop writing fan fiction about what Great Man I meant by the Great Man II/Great Man III distinction and start saying what we actually mean... (I am also guilty of this.)

Early career researcher responses to AI in math

Anna Brandenberger, Hanna Mularczyk, Dora Woodruff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40584 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.40584 https://arxiv.org/html/2610.40584

arXiv:2610.40584v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We've heard a lot about AI in math from Fields medalists, AI labs, and established professors. However, the personal stakes are highest for early career researchers. Hoping to provide a platform for graduate students and postdocs to voice their opinions, concerns, and experiences, we wrote and distributed a survey on AI in math.
In this article, we share the responses to our survey. All responses are anonymous, and respondents came from almost $60$ institutions and at least $5$ countries. Our survey included both multiple choice questions and more open-ended free response questions.
If you are a senior mathematician or university administrator reading these survey results, our goal is for you to understand the concerns of the younger generations and use your authority to take action accordingly. If you are an early career mathematician reading these survey results, we hope you find comfort in the knowledge that your experiences are shared by many others. If you are not a mathematician, we hope you come away from this article with a deeper understanding of the goals, values, and concerns of the community.

toXiv_bot_toot

my wretched dinner tonight. might not even take one bite

@ah miaou miaou ouais super

RE: https://mastodon.social/@iris_meredith/116793186588138433

The first half of this essay by @iris_meredith will be personally resonant to anyone who has experienced burnout.

And then the second half says:
"At this point, what the industry needs more than anything is a rest and for the pressure to produce to turn down. We are, for the moment, out of any real innovative ideas, and we've been running down the technological and social infrastructure that we need to support that kind of work. We need, as with any kind of winter, to slow down, do less new work, reinforce social connections and maintain and repair some of the social and technological damage that we've done by building so many new things. This might look like spending more time maintaining projects rather than starting new ones, settling on fewer, more robust technologies to build new things going forward..."

Transposing this to academic research (especially math "in the age of LLMs") is left as an exercise to the reader of this toot ;p

alright i'll stop now y'all know how to use RSS

and another one https://kellett.im/a/reverse-fractions

@Hex If I may: this is not the reason mutual aid exists. The core of Peter Kropotkin's work wasn't merely a refutation of the social darwinist position (in brief, "competition yields the best plausible outcomes"); he was also refuting the romantics like Rousseau who supposed that mutual aid arises from some nebulous universal love. Kropotkin showed that mutual aid is strictly more beneficial to a group as a whole than competition, ergo it must be evolutionarily selected for.

posting this again b/c it’s worth it

TIL that Mozart had a sister who was also a child prodigy but whose music career ended at 17 because it was understood that she was supposed to get married rather than continue performing. She was described as one of the greatest piano players in Europe when she was a kid.

The fact that I didn't even know of her existence until today kinda says it all, doesn't it.

@aparrish Software that not so much "ships" as "washes up to the beach inside of a corked rum bottle".