@christianp @acciomath No biggie, ta

Hullo benevolent dictator! Any plans to add (get added to) this verification thing?

keybase.io/blog/keybase-proofs

Or rather *seems* to fit: This was a licenced beer for the punk band NOFX. Who got blacklisted everywhere for joking about the Vegas mass shooter onstage, so the brewery added a donation as damage control.

"Late capitalism" is a vague and presumptuous category. But it fits so many marketing campaigns

Why is yoga good, if yoga is good?

gleech.org/why-yoga/

Updated my cheap-ass-browser-security post with new attacks, time savings estimate, snark.

gleech.org/browser/

+ Likely computational disadvantages of value-aware vs amoral systems

AI safety is exciting it involves so many different horribly difficult subproblems:

- Massive pre-paradigmatic mathematical confusion
- Philosophical baggage (can't teach values if you can't agree on them)
- Political economy (arms races to deploy shoddy reckless systems)
- Ordinary software hell implementation error (no one knows how to write safe code)
- Massive regulatory lag
- Massive capabilities : safety funding ratio

Sorry, did I say exciting?

Brilliant: Aldi used wage hikes as a weapon against competiitors

"Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more."

The worst Gettier case ever

gleech.org/libya/

On a half-century-old MOOC

gleech.org/ou/

My voting system is: the candidate who wins in a plurality of all known voting systems wins.

I don't know how many levels of irony I'm on. It might be none. If you don't know, it must be none, right?

The named distributions are the standard library of statistics.

(or just the exponential family?)

"What happened? I feel strange."
"But you always feel strange."
"True."

Good point - I don't mean to imply that either theory was improvised or fabricated. (Though how impressive would THAT have been?)

In fact I think Friedman's theory was so politically successful because it was a pre-hoc bold conjecture of a novel phenomenon.

Lots written about "disaster capitalism" (e.g. [1]), the ability of e.g. neoliberalism to make lucrative lemonade out of deeply incriminating lemons.

This isn't false, but it misses the larger point: you never get new large economic policies outside of a crisis. Keynesianism was disaster socialism, exploiting (or fixing) the Depression. Monetarism was disaster anti-socialism, exploiting (or fixing) stagflation. From the implementer's perspective it's a rescue op.

What's a word for the pain of learning that there is yet another huge field you know nothing about?:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometri

on top of bleeding

Great story - but, Turing fangirl that I am, the bit that jumped out at me was the brilliance of using a double agent to inject looooong known plaintext into your enemy's crypto system.

Show more

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $\pi z^2 \times a$ jokes.

Use $ and $ for inline LaTeX, and $ and $ for display mode.