"But late Friday .. OpenAI said it had reached its own agreement with the Pentagon to provide its A.I. for classified systems. OpenAI said it had found a way to put safeguards into its technologies that would somehow prevent the systems from being used in ways that it does not want them to be." 2/2

"Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in a memo to employees this week that “we have long believed that A.I. should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons,” which is the same stance as Anthropic’s." 1/2

You know if you fold a piece of paper and make a cut and unfold it you get a cool shape? What if you do the same fold 10 times before you make the cut?

This is a great idea! I’m a big fan of Powells when I’m in Portland but I always forget about their online store!

YouTube video by SimoMV Plastic Bertrand - Ça Plane Pour Moi (Remastered)

All I can say is: youtu.be/v4if--NgcQg

Resist and Unsubscribe

Deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts, canceled my Amazon prime account, boycotted Amazon and Whole Foods since the inauguration. Was never on X and never will be. Never subscribed to any paid AI service. But I can and should do more, and so should you.

www.resistandunsubscribe.com

Opinion | I Just Returned From China. We Are Not Winning.

Article about the speed with which China is rushing past the US in every aspect of their economy, including (especially) tech. Tracks with my own experiences in Beijing in 2025 seeing the unbelievable depth of talent in the math department at Peking University.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/o...

Opinion | The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way.

Remarkably sane analysis from a conservative economist.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/o...

Find out where politicians stand on crypto Crypto drives American innovation. Keeping crypto in America means securing 4 million jobs over the next 7 years to increase economic mobility. Discover the politicians fighting to keep crypto in Amer...

Ironically, this pro-crypto website is a great resource to identify politicians who want to properly regulate crypto so that you can give them your support. www.standwithcrypto.org/politicians

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The Biggest U.S. Crypto Company Asserts Its Power in Washington

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/t...

Crypto - the currency of choice for criminals and nitwits. The good news is that Republicans and Democrats are united in their regulatory response to this lawless behemoth. The bad news is that they both embrace it.

(1/2)

Credit: David Smead; excerpted from www.jstor.org/stable/25678...

Bruhat intervals that are large hypercubes New paper up on the arXiv! With Nicolas Libedinsky, David Plaza, José Simental, Geordie Williamson, and (unofficially) Adam Zsolt Wagner. A bunch of algebraic combinatorists! And this is a combinat…

Interesting new blog post by Jordan Ellenberg using ML to find large coefficients of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials (and along the way creating a fun new variant of Sudoku): quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2026/01/12/b...

Also: surely there is a no-arbitrage principle that says if you can borrow money now, invest it in equities for some period of time, and make more money than your interest repayments without risk, then someone else would already have done it. But I am not an economist, merely a mathematician ... 2/2

I think the "baby bonds" aspect is an economic red herring. Why not ask: should the government simply invest directly in equities. One answer: we already do, in the form of loans eg to various industries, usually to promote not strictly economic outcomes (eg investments in clean energy) 1/2

Opinion | What I Learned in Venezuela

Article on Venezuela by someone who has actually spent some time there, and seems to care about the lives of the people who live there: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/o...

So I have been boycotting everything Bezos since January; thus when I bought some technical math books recently I got them from AbeBooks ... which turns out to be a subsidiary of Amazon :/
What are better online options (when bricks and mortar -which is my first option - fails)?

Seven mince tarts arranged in a hexagon

Mince tarts made from scratch! (first time ever) The oven smoked a bit, and the fire alarm did go off, but that's the price of haute cuisine ...

Random spanning tree of a map of Australia

As a grumpy old man who grew up on Pascal and C++, I am finally getting around to learning Python, and I am flabbergasted at how awesome it is. Here's a random spanning tree of a map of Australia!

Inconceivable!!

If he does it will be the classiest thing he's done all week ...

Excellent concert yesterday by Ukrainian folk group Kurbasy!

Chicago No Kings Protest!! Biggest crowds I've ever seen.

Inbox zero!!! It has to be close to a decade since the last time! *sobs*

‘One Battle After Another’ Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Rallying Cry

Just saw Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful documentary excuse me film "One Battle After Another" in the cinema. A masterpiece. I hope all the Christmas Adventure Club types on the right see it and wonder how PTA snuck a hidden camera into their country clubs. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/m...

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 ...