iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jeremy Diamond ☕️ @dmnd.me · 04/10/2026

Lmao arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00732

An Abundance of Katherines*
The Game Theory of Baby Naming
Katy Blumer-Kate Donahue',
Katie Fritz', Kate Ivanovich', Katherine Lee', Katie Luo', Cathy Meng', and Katie Van Koevering
'Cornell University†

Abstract
In this paper, we study the highly competitive arena of baby naming. Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a name based solely on its "uniqueness"), we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world. We then extend our investigation with numerical experiments, as well as analysis of large language model tools. We conclude by discussing avenues for future research.

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maddi <— @quasimaddi.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Look, I'm just gonna come out and say it. I think Sluggo's hat looks fine

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In the short run stock trading is a zero sum game, played against vicious sharks with infinite resources who make the rules themselves. And they've created a whole industry devoted to convincing people that this is a normal, sane thing to do!

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I don't bake enough (according to my family)

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Joseph Hewitt @gearheadrpg.com · 25/09/2026

The model of most of these content platforms- webcomic platforms, YouTube, various streaming things- is to push risk onto the creators and keep rewards for the platform. It's endless spec work where maybe you'll get paid someday.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There are so many. EXORDIA by Seth Dickinson is an absolutely bonkers first contact alien invasion story that goes through everything from Kurdish history to information theory. It's wonderful.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Happy National cheeseburger day to all that celebrate

20 slices of American Cheese artfully stacked between two sesame seed buns

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"The issue the mathematical community faces: ... how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place." terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a...

terrytao.wordpress.com

A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The new season of Reacher started seriously diverging from the book around episode four and while I try not to be a "the book was better" 🤓 guy, I am going to say that I definitely question many of these changes, and the circus that is episode 7 is just like not good.

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 03/09/2026

Convincing young people that America is poor & no one can afford anything & everyone is living paycheck to paycheck & their economic future is doomed ... IS NOT GOING TO LEAD TO MORE PROGRESSIVE POLICY. People who feel anxious & under threat do not respond with openness & generosity! Look it up!

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Some day I will make it to the two non-contiguous states

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Cubes_Art @cubesart.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This is the FTO (face-turning octahedron) twisty puzzle. It’s now an official WCA event And I think it’s lovely. Here, I’ve solved it to a pattern that is striped when viewed from 4 vertices, and concentric squares from 2 vertices.

I imagine other folks have done this pattern, but I just had to try it. I don't know what to call it... Stripes? I don't think it's octahedron-in-an-octahedron. One thing I really like about this pattern is that (I think) there's a sort of parity to the colors. l've learned that this puzzle has two classes of colors - blue/red/ purple/yellow and white/gray/orange/green. If you notice here, the blue & red pieces are swapped and so are the yellow and purple pieces (as a permutation, this is two disjoint 2-cycles).
These colors form a tetrahedron on the octahedron (no two are adjacent). There is a dual tetrahedron formed by the other four colors! But those colors are not swapped in pairs; the three white triangles moved to the gray face, the gray triangles to the orange face, the orange triangles to the green face, and the green triangles to the white face (as a permutation, this a 4-cycle!).

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Andy Hall @testtubegames.com · 19/08/2026

Finally, something at a mass scale we can easily see. Well, uh, not "see" exactly, but, ah, well. Hm. As we go up the orders of magnitude now, things are gonna get big fast...

Collectible card titled One Cubic mm of Air.
Image of the edge of a ruler with a translucent white cube on it.
Text: Look around you, and with any luck, you'll find a cubic millimeter of air. Hopefully, many.
The mass is listed as 1.2 x 10^-9 kg.
It's listed as being card 23 of 32, and common.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

If you ever find yourself driving north from Milwaukee, the amazing restrooms at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan are worth a stop

A heavily decorated toilet and tile wall in an classic Roman motif. Titled above "Celebrating another conquest"

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Howie Hua @howiehua.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Since a new school year is coming up, I thought I'd share my first mathematical activity I do in my courses.

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Joshua Bowman @thalesdisciple.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Working on an A.I. policy for my calculus classes. Decided to be upfront about the current situation with LLMs and to give a heartfelt explanation for why the course still matters.

Al policy

Context

Artificial Intelligence, or "A.l.," Is a broad term used to refer to several different kinds of technologies. The kind most relevant to this class are Large Language Models (LLMs), which use mathematics to analyze large amounts of human-produced text and then generate new text that simulates what a human might write in response to prompts or questions. Some examples of LLMs are OpenAl's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

Current LLMs can provide a solution to any calculus problem I give you. So why should we work on them, you might ask? Here's the thing: for the most part, the problems were already solved anyway. Calculus as a subject is nearly 400 years old. It has reached into virtually every modern scientific and economic field. And while I would like to believe that I have crafted a few new problems with some small amount of originality tailored to this class, for the most part I have curated a collection of exercises drawn from my years of teaching calculus. Those exercises come from textbooks, workshops, friends, and other fields of study, as well as my own invention.
And they nearly all have known solutions, often with fairly standard approaches.
Before A.I. became widely available, you could find those solutions in another textbook, or from a friend's notes, or through a repository on the internet.

The point of this class is not necessarily to solve problems that have never been solved before. It is for you to develop habits of thinking that are used by mathematicians, scientists, and policymakers-to develop a sort of mental toolbox that can be applied to new problems. If along the way you happen to find a new way of solving one of the class exercises, that's great! I am constantly learning new things from my students. But you will be bereft of discovery if you rely on a LLM for solutions to the calculus problems before you. Here I mean the discovery of having your own realizations, crystallizing your own internal understanding, claiming the knowledge in a way that cannot be taken away from you.
That ownership is what I want for you, and that is what the course is built around.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I did a ride on my birthday to celebrate turning an age. I cramped so bad I could hardly walk. The next day my friends invited me to bike to the top of a mountain to drink beers. I couldn't really refuse that, and somehow I made it (same amount of climbing but only 8 miles 💀). Anyway, still alive.

Ride With GPS map of a bike ride going 50 miles with 1,525 feet of elevation gain over 4:07 hours

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Erica Henderson @ericafails.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Final Destination truly rewired the brains of an entire generation

A fucking giant truck trailer covered in propane tanks piled 4 high

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Mike Rothschild @rothschildmd.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

LA County confirmed that SoCal Edison's unused transmission tower started the Eaton Fire, which destroyed much of Altadena. The tower had been dormant since the 70's, but was left up anyway. It energized in the high wind and sent molten metal into dry brush underneath. www.cnn.com/2026/08/04/u...

cnn.com

Southern California Edison equipment blamed for 2025 Eaton fire in Los Angeles | CNN

Sparks from an idle transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison caused the 2025 Eaton fire in the Los Angeles area that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,400 homes and businesses, ...

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I love to buy the weird stuff at my local Grocery Outlet but some things I just can't

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

My GI: We can't schedule your colonoscopy for two days after your birthday because then you won't be able to eat vegetables on your Birthday 🎂 Me: I don't think that's going to be a problem

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Kameron Hurley @kameronhurley.com · 29/06/2026

AND ALSO #booksky amzn.to/4b2iESb

one last job, bad mothers, lost lvoe, intergenerational trauma, lots of dead babies, body horror, friends to enemies to lovers to enemies

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Lore Sjöberg @loresjoberg.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Guy At Drive-Thru: “We have Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero…” 7th Century Mathematician Brahmagupta: “Coke WHAT?”

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Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪 @telescoper.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Whichever of the purple dots you look at turns more purple.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

It wasn't totally necessary to save 32g of weight on my camping hammock, but it was very satisfying to learn how to make locked brummel splices in dyneema cord

Orange dyneema cord "dogbone" weighing 5 grams

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

It looks like @travisholcombe.bsky.social isn't really updating here (yet?), but if you missed his always great FREAKS ONLY show on KCRW, he just launched an internet radio station freaksonly.fm like it's 2001. Hell yeah.

freaksonly.fm

FREAKS ONLY FM | Internet Radio from Los Angeles

FREAKS ONLY FM is an internet radio station curated by Travis Holcombe, broadcasting from Los Angeles. Punk, funk, disco, and post-punk. Listen live 24/7.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

So much for a fan-only presale to avoid scalper-bots

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

When youtube appeared 20 years ago, I never would have guessed that it heralded the return of the transfer of knowledge by the oral tradition. I'd say it's not all bad, definitely a lot of people making dishwasher repair videos would never have written a clear detailed how-to article instead.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I clicked on a video titled "no sew haversack from old jeans" expecting something clever. Instead it's just all they steps you'd do with sewing except using a HOT GLUE gun instead of sewing the seams. 💀

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

King Gizzard and Lizard Sizzler - a chicken fajita platter (gizzards optional) with microtonal bananas foster for dessert

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michael lutz @ztul.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

i remember learning "there is no silver bullet" in my cs classes and it's bleakly hilarious that all tech speculation now is "what if we made a silver bullet? we will add the line 'you are the silver bullet' to claude's code"

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I love delicious, minimally processed, whole foods like potato chips

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Henry Segerman @henryseg.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

New video, on mechanisms that illustrate the duality between the cube and the octahedron! Here's one of them: a linkage with fabric panels designed by Sabetta Matsumoto. Full video at youtu.be/T9BNMLFHXUw

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Lars Doucet @larsiusprime.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Here’s all the parking lots in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These kind of maps are surprisingly simple to make. Here’s how:

A 3D cityscape view of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, with all the parking lots highlighted in red. There is an enormous amount of parking lots covering a significant portion of the entire downtown area.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Oh man, opened an ebook today with this in the front matter and it took me all the way back to 1988 - none of my friends ever seemed to read a book with a cover since everyone had a relative who worked in retail who rescued "destroyed" paperbacks

That "if this book doesn't have a cover" message that was in all mass market paperbacks but it's on a kindle ebook

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They Might Be Giants @tmbg.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Our new LP The World Is to Dig is everywhere 4/14, but grab your headphones and tuck in for the weekend because you can download it NOW. It’s a fundraiser for our studio work! Help sustain our project and hear all 18 new song before the rest of the world does! Exclusively at TMBGshop.com.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

My kid's parkour coach has interesting taste in music, today we came into practice and this was playing thesnakecharmer1.bandcamp.com/album/bagpip... Yes, the Christmas album, yes it's April.

thesnakecharmer1.bandcamp.com

Bagpipes Are Coming to Town!, by The Snake Charmer

6 track album

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Are Nanaimo Bar trending? The Blue Jays are serving them in helmets with a sundae, so they should be. They are possibly Canada's second best dessert.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

I am going to treat myself this week and hit "Unsubscribe" or "Report SPAM" on basically everything that lands in my inbox that is not from a human I know.

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

It's like super refreshing to get this sort of old school spam.

Screenshot of an email reading:

Dear John,

I am interested in Investing in your country United States.
Please provide me with your private email address for priority detailed mail.

Yours faithfully,
Michael

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The Onion @theonion.com · 17/03/2026

Unemployed Man Considers Going Back To School To Become AI theonion.com/unemployed-man-conside…

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Oh no. Ball x Pit is now available on mobile phones

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Lately, I've been relaxing by printing and hand-painting models of my local mountains made with TouchTerrain touchterrain.geol.iastate.edu these are very satisfying to make and extremely cool looking in person - and chonky 8"x8"x2" and weigh nearly a pound each.

A 3D terrain model of Condor Peak in the Angeles National Forest

A 3D model of Eaton Canyon in the Angeles National Forest

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I play ukulele, does that count as a small overlap?

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John May @3j0hn.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Thanks to 3D printing, my sons and I can now instantiate all the stupid jokes that pop into our heads

A 1x1 cube stand holding a joke 1x1x1 puzzle cube, and a 0x0 cube stand holding nothing

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 12/01/2026

Reading "Blueprints" by Marcus du Sautoy, and while I am not a fan so far this did jump out at me: "Mathematics is far from being just a list of all the true statements we can discover about numbers. Mathematicians are storytellers [...] Not every story that it’s possible to tell is worth telling."

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