We Shouldn’t Have Billionaires, Mamdani Says

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/n...

Good. Nice to hear some politician say it. By any measure, the existence of billionaires is a massive failure of economics and tax policy. Not even counting their corrosive effect on democracy, and Caligula-levels of personal crassness.

Opinion | The Supreme Court Fails to See Transgender Teens

I think you should read this www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/o...

🚨🚨The White House is pissed off about this ad so you know what to do, share it everywhere! ICE is disappearing people just because of the color of their skin! No Warrant! No Due Process! This is not who we are as Americans! #MAGAKidnappers want an all white America, fuck that‼️

Legendre transform when <x,y>=0?

I think it's literally impossible to have a civilization without a basic level of trust between citizens, and saner healthier civilizations have more trust. I don't know about you, but my default assumption when I meet anyone IRL is that they are fundamentally decent. I find I am rarely wrong.

I mean, he's against it for all the wrong reasons, but he's also against it for a few of the right reasons ...

Hawley Breaks With Republicans to Oppose a Major Crypto Bill

How is it possible that Josh Hawley is on the right side and Dick Durbin is on the wrong side with respect to the GENIUS act? Broken clocks etc. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/b...

Maybe one of the worst aspects of this act is its "bipartisan" support, including from senators such as Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff and Cory Booker. If you're a democrat in Illinois, California or New Jersey, call your senator and make your disapproval loud and clear!!

Crytpo: There's just no legit use case for it. But, man, are these bros lobbied up. Our looonnnggg take on why private digital currencies and the blockchain are an accident going out to happen.

It's not the absolute worst thing the government is trying to do right now, but it might be close. The "GENIUS" act uses your tax dollars to guarantee and underwrite criminal activity, grift, Ponzi schemes and outright fraud. Write your senator!!! econjared.substack.com/p/crytpo-the...

Mine too!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%... :D

I wrote a fun little paper using triangulations to give a new construction of simple ReLU networks to compute arbitrary PL functions, and using hyperbolic geometry to (lower) bound the complexity of the construction.

Hmm; my take is that many industry "leaders" (e.g. venture capitalists like Andreessen) have explicitly taken a big bet that AGI will replace the need for the academy, to their personal benefit. lexfridman.com/marc-andrees...

Carl Sagan on sensible military spending and climate change.

Christmas came early this year!!! :D

Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia Wikipedia is facing another threat.

Time to make another donation to Wikipedia. www.theverge.com/news/656720/...

Lol, "intruder quadrilaterals" ...

Trump Administration Seeks Artists for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Statues Those selected would receive up to $200,000 to create one of the 250 sculptures, which will be paid for in part with canceled grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Let's Make America Große Again (Please oh please let Jeff Koons do the statue of Norman Rockwell …) www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/a...

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought:
- 1.65 million deaths from AIDS
- 500,000 from lack of vaccines
- 550,000 from lack of food aid
- 290,000 from malaria
- 310,000 from TB

Bravo sir. Johnny Blue Jeans has my vote for president.

A lot can happen in five months. 🇺🇸

So I walked away. Which I now regret. If I see him again I'll offer to read the Book of Mormon, entirely, without prejudice, if he'll do the same with a book that I propose. I'm thinking "The Wind in the Willows". I can't be against random people on the street giving out book recommendations. [2/2]

Oof. I got stopped by a Mormon teenager outside Powell’s books this morning; he asked me if I’ve read the Book of Mormon, and told me it will “change my life”. I asked him how many books he has read in his life (total). He said “ten”. [1/2]

NYC is a bit far, but next time you're performing in Chicago ...!

Instead of BPTT algorithm for backprop in a RNN, treat RNN as cellular automaton. Each time increment do one local compute of the RNN *and* one local compute of backprop. This simultaneously adjusts weights and gradient computations at each node, and is as cheap as backprop in an acyclic network.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Announcement Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Announcement

My favorite online comic SMBC ended their relationship with a company that ran ads on the site and their shop. So I became a patron on patreon at the princely level of ... $1 per month. I'm embarrassed it took me so long; you should do it too. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/announ...

James Harrison, Whose Antibodies Helped Millions, Dies at 88 James Harrison earned the nickname “The Man With the Golden Arm” because his blood had a rare antibody that may have helped more than two million babies in Australia.

As someone who personally hates needles: this man is a hero.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/o...

OK - Amazon Prime canceled! And I think I might just boycott Amazon for the foreseeable future too!

OK I should cancel mine too!

WGT 2025 Oberlin College is hosting the 42nd Annual Workshop in Geometric Topology from June 12 to June 14 The workshop programming begins at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 12, and ends at noon on Saturday, June ...

Zippers at Oberlin! Hope to see you there! sites.google.com/oberlin.edu/...