Mark Gritter

I don’t know why but obviously a polynomial is a little man, his coefficients are menswear, his roots are secret menswear and factoring is figuring out whether or not those roots are too cool for this man’s environment but maybe if moved to a hipper place he’d decompose into 3 men or something wacky

Inside of a triacontahedron - a 3d shape made of rhombuses. There are multicoloured patterns on each rhombus.

Inside of a triacontahedron - a 3d shape made of rhombuses. There are multicoloured patterns on each rhombus.

Outside of triacontahedron made with colourful, patterned origami paper on a grey carpet.

Origami Triacontahedron!!!

I learnt a new type of origami module for this and a new type of shape!

The faces are rhombuses. Diagonal lines across the long part of the rhombuses form the edges of an icosahedron. Diagonal lines across the short part of the rhombuses form the edges of a dodecahedron.

sketches of four tiny creatures with polyhedral dice

dice set

A graphic announcing the acquisition of A Dubious Clamor by Marissa Lingen, including author photo.

We are so thrilled to announce another book coming from us next year: A DUBIOUS CLAMOR by @marissalingen.bsky.social! We were delighted by the unusual characters and we think you’re going to love them!

Bluffing in Scrabble It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibit...

arxiv.org/abs/2509.10471
/Bluffing in Scrabble/
Nick Ballard, Timothy Y. Chow

I had a frank conversation with Ed about my skepticism about the current AI bubble, but one of the things I learned is that IT and Security teams are being ask to take responsibility for AI-based systems, and need new tools to do their job well. I'm hoping that's what we can build.

I'm starting a new job today, at a startup called ThirdLaw, building observability tools for AI. The founder Ed Albanese has an impressive record, and I'm working with my friend Luke Hornof again, who I met at my first startup job. It's exciting to join an early-stage startup again!

Two chocolate chips sitting on a white napkin. The left one is a normal circular chip with its point folded over. The right one is much larger and has a hexagonal base, and its point is smoother and does not fold over.

I won! I got the special hexagonal chocolate chip! Does this mean a tour of the magical Guittard factory?

thats why i keep saying we call them nethacklikes now

I read mine this afternoon!

Superintelligence coming soon, but always running 6 months behind current events.

The DARPA AI Cyber Challenge completed, which was a 2-year project to develop AIs that can find security flaws in code

Multiple teams met the benchmarks and won top prizes of $6 million

Unfortunately it's very difficult to find anything about it that doesn't read like marketing spam

This seems like a great organization for our ineffective altruism movement (ineffective-altruism.org) to collaborate with.

"This game's rules is frustrating to players" not as a failure state, but as a fecund site of intentional design / artistic possibility.

I do think people have a hard time with this. It goes against orthodox, deeply held assumptions that friction between rules and players is Bad Design.

1/

We had three presidential terms, one Post-Trump, to back away from the idea that the President can order summary executions against anyone, anywhere in the world.

But drone strikes were too much fun to resist! And once a Democrat started doing them, it became bipartisan which is DC's greatest good.

Something something more information something something less meaning

Greener Minnesota.
Original Minnesota.
Central Minnesota.
Monsoon Minnesota.
Minnesota Down Under.

Tag yourself..

Quilt made of of squares of different blues and greens and brown and whites.

A white, brown, and sky blue quilt.

A multicolored quilt design of smaller squares, on diagonals, forming triangular points.

Quilt made of many small squares, with one larger square on the right side with smaller squares set inside of it.

The power of squares in quilt designs at the Minnesota State Fair

#unitchat #MNStateFairMath #MTBoS #ITeachMath

Pyret The Pyret programming language

1/ Super-excited to release the first complete rewrite to the Pyret home page in 10 years, corresponding to major language improvements! So many cool new things, let me give you a brief tour: ↵
pyret.org

The NSA illegally mass spied on Americans and the CIA conducted a years long, illegal torture program. This isn't ancient history

Interesting how so many projects are now improving docs & error messages "so LLMs can understand." 🤖
Was making them clear for humans not a good enough reason already?

closed meanders of order 4 colored by number of components

closed meanders of order 5 colored by number of components

closed meanders of order 6 colored by number of components

My toxic trait is thinking I'll notice a pattern if I just keep increasing n. 🧮

I'm sure if there's a big market downturn some big endowment is going to be revealed as having done something as stupid as "bet it all on crypto" which I guess I another argument for keeping it all in index funds.

Well... we've been in a pretty abnormally long bull market. In theory endowments are paying for uncorrelated returns and protection in down markets. In practice... nobody knows because it's been too long since a significant down stretch. Early 2000s?

It's a good game! A Hugo finalist!

A photo of a sunset. A blue sky above gives way to a backlit cloud. Rays of light seem to connect two of the clouds.

Sadly I only got the suburban version.

You should read it! it's great!

The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it do...

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

Reminder that the best conference for understanding generative systems, and how people play them, is full of kind people, online and you can go to it.