Ben Brubaker

it's insane that my country's current position is that, if we don't like the leader of a sovereign nation, not only do we get to kill them we get to pick their successor

White House In Turmoil: Trump Just Fired The Cloaked Man He Appointed To Secretary Of The Hook

And the sequel — truly one of the better story arcs of Trump's first term:

"Special Envoy for the Shield" as a job title sounds approximately as plausible as "Secretary of the Hook:"

the kind of thing that gets played at a war crimes trial

The debate was about what to do about the scenario described in Arunachaleswaran et al. There really is disagreement about that! I'm not going to get into a protracted argument here. Suffice it to say I was reporting the perspectives of the researchers I talked to, not creating anything.

How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes? | Quanta Magazine Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

Did you know that infinity comes in different "sizes"? "Bigger" and "smaller" descriptions of infinity exist!

Seems paradoxical, right? How can an endless concept ever have a defined size?

I helped visualize a story describing this. Check it out here!

www.quantamagazine.org/how-can-infi...

In my recent story about failure modes of algorithmic pricing, I quoted @jasonhartline.bsky.social arguing that the specific example I focused on shouldn't count as algorithmic collusion. Here's a blog post in which he makes that argument in more detail, for those who are curious about this debate:

Like with using children as bait and eating at a restaurant then kidnapping the people who prepared it, ICE is routinely breaking taboos that have been part of human civilization since before recorded history.

A New Complexity Theory for the Quantum Age | Quanta Magazine Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

How can we make sense of computational problems that we don’t even have the language to describe? I spoke to @henryyuen.bsky.social about what’s missing from the standard approach to quantum complexity theory — read more in @quantamagazine.bsky.social!

My favorite is:

There once was a man from Paree
Whose limericks stopped at line three.
When asked why this was

IMO much better than the better known "stopped at line two" version. So viscerally frustrating!

This is a scheduled pogrom

in case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today

This video filmed by Ben Luhmann shows the moment a federal agent sprayed chemical irritants directly into a man's face in south Minneapolis.

Three agents already had the man pinned to the ground when a fourth agent walked up and sprayed the irritants.

Why There’s No Single Best Way To Store Information | Quanta Magazine The math of data structures helps us understand how different storage systems come with different trade-offs between resources such as time and memory.

What can computer science can tell us about the best way to store stuff? A partial answer in this short explainer about data structures — my latest for @quantamagazine.bsky.social

Honden of Infinite Rage {2}{R} • Legendary Enchantment — Shrine • At the beginning of your upkeep, Honden of Infinite Rage deals damage to any target equal to the number of Shrines you control. • Eternal Masters (EMA) #134 •...

indeed, hence the gauge invariance! But also this:

A joke Magic: the Gathering card called "Honda of Infinite Range," using the art of the real card "Honden of Infinite Rage" with a red Honda Fit edited in. The flavor text is a quantum field theory joke about infinite range being the result of gauge invariance.

While I'm on the subject, I just rediscovered this thing I made shortly after buying my Fit in 2017. Is there an audience for Honda Fit x MTG x Quantum Field Theory content? We will find out!

Me in 2017, seated in the back of a red Honda fit with the back seats down.

Living in NYC now I no longer drive, so Little Buddy now lives with my brother in LA. But before that, he ferried me across the country five times!

(and yes, that is another red Honda Fit to the right)

I love how local resistance to ICE thugs has highlighted (among many other more important things) that the Honda Fit is the best car of all time.

ICE are thug scum.

one very obvious best-practice for living with people who are different from you is: do not shoot them in the face

Emily Heller lives near 33rd and Portland and said she woke up to a commotion outside her home. She said she saw a car blocking traffic on Portland Avenue that appeared to be part of a protest against federal law enforcement operations. Heller said she heard ICE agents telling the driver, a woman, to “get out of here.” “She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” Heller said. Heller said it appeared the woman then accelerated and traveled about 100 feet before striking a utility pole and some other vehicles. She could be seen slumped over inside her car.

Absolutely horrific details about an ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

A witness says a woman was trying to drive away from an ICE operation and the ICE agent "reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times."

Bovino was there.

www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Speaking of Plato — the latest from the stalwart defenders of western civilization against the excesses of woke postmodernism!

Distinct AI Models Seem To Converge On How They Encode Reality | Quanta Magazine Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular “Platonic” way to represent the world.

New story by me in @quantamagazine.bsky.social unpacking the provocatively named "Platonic representation hypothesis." In what sense, and to what degree, are different AI models are growing more similar?

Thank you so much!

We have two job openings at Quanta, for a math writer and a senior editor! More info below:

Per Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, brigands in 14th-century France would routinely surround towns and threaten to attack unless they were both paid off and absolved of their sins by the local clergy.

I love to read Quanta Magazine articles, not only for the information, but also for the writing, chock full of potential pull quotes, which in this one include a mathematician calling something a “classic banger of a theorem”

TBH I like the photos of the scientists/maths doers. We aren't photogenic

I want us to hang on to the fact that the people who were murdered were just civilians out in boats, most likely fishermen, who had never even heard the sketchy conclusions of American officials for which they were executed, much less had a chance to defend themselves.

‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard | Quanta Magazine Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent.

What does counting pigeons have to do with Turing machines? More than you might think. In @quantamagazine.bsky.social, my latest foray into the wild world of meta-complexity, this time through the lens of mathematical logic: