Evan Patterson

Yikes. A great opportunity for folks to switch to zulip.com.

In the wake of the brutal killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, my thoughts on how America's government and tech elites have allied to reject the idea that their behavior should be constrained in any way:

www.epatters.org/post/tech-an...

Community – Topos Institute Topos and those around us

Call for Applications: 2026 Summer RAs

This year there are two tracks for Summer RAs: a research track and an engineering track. Positions are available for 8-10 weeks each, starting in June and ending in August.

For more details, see our website: topos.institute/community/jo...

You're right. Good thing we have double categories instead.

Automerge (automerge.org) is great, and so is the Ink & Switch team!

When DHS was created following 9/11, critics argued that because DHS had no clear purpose—we already had a DoD—it would just become a weapon against the enemies of the state. The criticism was correct then and it's correct now. Abolish DHS.

Portrait of man wearing glasses with caption: Fernando Pérez​ Associate Professor of Statistics, UC Berkeley; Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Delighted and proud to speak on Friday at the Berkeley #StandUpForScience march. 📢🔭🧑‍🔬🥼🔬🧪📡🛰️🌎

Science and education are under attack, but standing together we can resist ✊

Huge thanks to the organizing team for the opportunity to speak!

www.standup4scienceberkeley.com

I keep wondering this too!

Thank you to Eric Gilliam for profiling Topos in FreakTakes! Brendan discusses our mission of collective modelling, highlights projects like CatColab and safeguarded AI research with ARIA, and announces an exciting operations role at our Oxford office.

🎉 Announcing CatColab 0.2: Wren!

CatColab is a structured model editor for visualizing complex systems with domain-specific logics.

Since October, we've implemented:

- Users & permissions
- Enhanced docs
- New theories (e.g. Discrete exterior calculus, causal loop diagrams)
- and more!

Tech, oligopoly, and oligarchy: my thoughts on the state of the tech industry and its influence on society in the U.S.

www.epatters.org/post/tech-an...

Nothing original here, but I aim to be clear-eyed going into the new year.

The whole thread is worth reading, but this figure caught my eye. The explosion of special issues in for-profit open access megajournals suggests a growing, or at least more overt, culture of favor trading in scientific publishing.

Lukewarm take: description lists are a fun and underappreciated HTML element, and they should have been included in the Markdown spec.

A unital magma: ncatlab.org/nlab/show/un...

What an album!

A nice touch is that the interface seems to have two different toolbars providing redundant formatting features. Form follows function.

Absolutely. The big tech firms love to create the impression of invincibility, but they're not. They long ago ceased to have any vision or mission and their products are visibly rotting. They can and should be taken on by small, motivated groups who share a purpose.

I'm excited about a new tool we're building at Topos Institute.

CatColab is a collaborative environment for modeling in domain-specific categorical logics: https://catcolab.org/

Read more in our blog post here: https://topos.site/blog/2024-10-02-introducing-catcolab/