Hello fediverse, I need a job! I'm what you may call an unorthodox candidate. I don't have a college degree, certifications, or a resume that matches my real interests, and I'm principled. However, I'm also one of those people that constantly beats the odds and, when correct conditions are met, I seriously excel.
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#GetFediHired #FediHire #FOSSJobs #Hiring #remotework #lua #work #it #humanity #solarpunk #career #careerchange #coding #P2P #FOSS #climatechange #nonprofit #ecology #PNW #Oregon

Monocles, a #Conversations_im fork, is now making heavy use of LLM-generated code. Including its cryptography.

Meanwhile it hasn't backported critical security fixes that landed in Conversations (and other forks) over a year ago.

Use this information however you like.

In other news: Conversations is currently free of charge on both F-Droid and Google Play.

#XMPP #Jabber #Monocles

Poll

Do you guys ever think about how, if widespread knowledge of math and everything it enabled became a serious threat to imperial power, a campaign might ensue to convince everyone either that math was solved or at least that the empire was so superior in its capabilities that one could never hope to wield this knowledge against it? I think about that sometimes.

#math #mathematics #USpol #politics #science #technology #imperialism

RE: https://mastodon.social/@vtrlx/117016505751960618

It started with my spouse asking me if I knew HTML, and ended with me learning something fascinating about Mastodon's user base.

https://vtrlx.ca/w/2026-08-02-mastodons-programmers.html

Media Bias/Fact Check updated their about page to include some cherry-picked results from our study. They show our count of its popularity without including a link to the source, presumably because our study is critical. They do this immediately after linking to studies that use and praise MBFC.

In other words, the misinformation dataset guy spun our study and didn't bother to cite their source.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/about/

Happy #Lughnasadh everyone! While not something I harvested, today seems appropriate to share this picture I took with #mosstodon and #mushtodon.

#Lughnasa #Lúnasa #paganism #NeoPaganism #harvest #nature #fungi

"""
Many anarchists today are terrified of being seen as 'irresponsible.' The wider liberal-left culture frames politics through the lens of compliance, safety, and harm-minimisation. Anything that challenges institutional frameworks is seen as reckless. Anything that disrupts political normalcy is dangerous. Anything that undermines parliamentary leftism is indirectly 'helping the Right.'

This creates a paralysing moral landscape where the worst sin an anarchist can commit is not supporting the status quo loudly enough. The fear of being blamed for a right-wing victory becomes so overwhelming that many stop imagining politics outside the narrow horizon of elections. The fear of being accused of 'not caring' about marginalised communities becomes a weapon used to silence radical politics.
"""

From the interesting text "The Liberal Capture of Anarchism" by a group called The Polar Bl@st, as reprinted by the Anarchist Communist Group:

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2026/07/22/the-liberal-capture-of-anarchism/

#anarchism #socialism #communism #radical

If I ever need to do something clever, I just imagine what a smart person would do and then do that. I hope you find this helpful.

#humor #intelligence #LifeHack #logic

Since Detexify is now #AI slop, I have updated my one-pager of advice for learning mathematics to recommend The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List (https://tug.ctan.org/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-a4.pdf) for finding symbols. This is kind of a bad solution, since Detexify solved the problem of knowing how to draw the symbol without knowing its name with a very appropriate use of traditional image recognition. It is absurd that there is no #FLOSS tool I can recommend instead. If no one builds it first, it'll go on my list of things to do.

My one-pager: https://aten.cool/one_pager.html
Sloppified Detexify: https://detexify.kirelabs.org/#/about

#NoAI #LLM #math #mathematics #Tex #LaTeX #TeXLaTeX #MachineLearning #ImageRecognition #NeuralNetworks

This screenshot is from a form that I had to fill out in order to apply for #NSF math research funding through CU Boulder when I was there. It seems that there is a list of forbidden (or at least discouraged) countries when it comes to collaborating. Now that I don't expect any funding from the United States, I would be interested in collaborating with more people from these countries. I'm particularly interested in #Cuba and #Venezuela since I'd like to improve my Spanish.

#CUBoulder #academia #research #math #mathematics #China #HongKong #Iran #Myanmar #Burma #NorthKorea #Russia #Sudan #Ukraine

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@simon_jf/116997614756810127

"How a thesis project became a modern, AI-assisted rebuild. […]
In 2026, AI-assisted coding made the rewrite feel small enough to actually do. Detexify Next is a modern TypeScript/Svelte/macOS rebuild, vibe-coded over two evenings"

Is there no escape from the onslaught of slop?

Do you find it annoying when socks don't even last a single decade before getting holes in them? I used to sew them back together, but I recently realized that I don't need to. Socks tend to get thinner as they age and develop holes in different places. By wearing two socks on a single foot, the holes in each one are covered by the other and the overall thickness is correct.

My partner has listened to me boast about this discovery one too many times, so I thought I should share it with Mastodon instead.

#mending #sewing #clothing #socks

Sitting at desktop computer: "That's enough Mastodon for now, time to do something else."

Opens phone: "Let's check out Mastodon really quick."

#Mastodon #internet #humor

The library reorganization I started last year is complete! As a part of this, I have posted the #Lua library catalog tool I wrote on #Codeberg. It's my first repo on Codeberg and my first Lua work posted online.

https://codeberg.org/caten/LibraryCatalog

Original post about this:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@caten/115104150510637662

Unlike in my original post about this, I went with pure #Lua rather than #Python + #JSON + #Librewolf as a viewer.

#math #academia #mathematics #library #research #programming #LuaLang

A student was telling me, they haven’t read some papers I asked them to read because it takes them a very long time.

Well, let me tell you: it took me 20 days (with 2-4 hours per day) to read a single large paper in my field, to understand the multiple years of work that went into it with its many implications for my own research and for the broader field. 20 days. And it was worth it.

There are no shortcuts.

#academia

Great news! #debian has a new GR to ban LLMs: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002

@davidgerard

#noai #fuckai #fuck_ai

Before I wrote https://aten.cool/leaving_university_2026.html (in which I express great reservation about continuing to work for universities) I thought I would take a more conservative approach to "leaving" academia in favor of homesteading. I considered teaching at lower-ranked local colleges part-time and obtaining some institutional affiliation. I reached out to the most logical place explaining that I was in the area for personal reasons and so on, and would like to affiliate and perhaps seek part-time employment at some point. Whoever answers such emails told me that I should keep using my CU Boulder student email. I replied explaining I was not a student (which I clearly explained before) and was ignored. Maybe it was a chatbot, but it seems that even lending an email address to a visiting research mathematician is a bridge too far for colleges here.

#academia #math #mathematics #LLM #university #CUBoulder #Boulder #homesteading #capitalism

Man, Austria is gonna be so embarrassed when someone explains what job the neo-Nazis like to do.

#news #politics #Austria #Germany #EUpol #Europe #fascism #police #Nazi #NeoNazi

New pre-print: Stop using Media Bias/Fact Check in research.

https://theluddite.org/post/stop-using-mbfc.html

This project began as a post about a year ago, in which we followed the provenance of the data from a study about misinformation until, at the bottom, we found Media Bias/Fact Check. Upon further examination, it turned out that Media Bias/Fact Check is just some guy quantifying the vibes, and upon him, totally unwittingly, there rests a surprising amount of academic research.