iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Experimental History @experimentalhistory.skystack.xyz · 29/09/2026

The Strangest Idea in the World • coming soon to a bookshelf near you

experimental-history.com

The Strangest Idea in the World

coming soon to a bookshelf near you

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A double X is just a category object in the category of X’s is just a monoid object in the bicategory Span(X), what’s the problem?

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Pete Wolfendale @deontologistics.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The full version of my interview with Rahul Samaranayake on his podcast is premiering on Youtube right now for anyone interested in what I've been thinking about AI, computer science, logic, mathematics, and various topics of late: youtu.be/7y2CWU-2_hw?...

youtu.be

Kantian Computationalism | Peter Wolfendale

YouTube video by Rahul Sam

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

trying to add preconditions to a hypothesis generator I am writing at work with horn clauses. I topologically sort the terms and then traverse in order trying to refute a premise or assign then try to solve the consequent and I’m fairly sure I’ve written a horrible prolog implementation

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

me when I was younger: wow set theorists define functions as functional relations, how truly odd! me now: ah yes, a function is precisely a left-adjoint distributor for 2 by lawvere’s theorem, how truly beautiful!

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

have been getting demolished for two weeks by trying to mix linear and non-linear types, benton-style adjunction failed and then I just keep having bad ideas after that point

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

if you think one now only learns to write programs by hand to understand how the computer works more fundamentally, something about the nature of computation, software engineering practices, how to design programs etc. then you might as well just learn (something like) haskell if all else is equal

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A monad is just a one object one morphism category enriched in the bicategory Cat, what’s the problem?

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I didn't realize (or think to look into the notion) that rudy rucker is still alive, and posting about the current world. His books: geometry, relativity and the fourth dimension infinity and the mind the fourth dimension: toward a geometry of higher reality are all utterly marvelous

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

sees everyone talking about rationalist cults behind our terrible present: yeah tell me about it, I simply despise data for progress

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I think this picturing is inadequate to the technical reality, and explaining why might help to clarify why I have different intuitions about what's going on.

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

in the future we will finally have a short and satisfying proof of four colour theorem: by reduction_lemma; cases <;> grind

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francisco varela fan club @paleopragmatist.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

For the evening crew - this one is on Lakatos; the next installment will be on Peirce; then we’ll look at the longer history of V-E+F=2 and how it turned into χ

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Tony Tassell @tonytassell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Big day at the FT - celebrating the 80th birthday of the great Martin Wolf. He has been with the FT for 39 yrs and will be here for a few more years yet. What people might not know is what an incredible colleague he is -so supportive and interested in all colleagues. He wants to hear from everyone

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European Mathematical Society @euromathsoc.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

🎂 Happy 100th birthday to Jean-Pierre Serre! EMS Magazine No. 141 marks his centenary with a new interview by Javier Fresán. “Getting older made me appreciate topics of which I was ignorant (or even did not like) when I was a beginner.” 📖 euromathsoc.org/magazine/iss...

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jeffhelzner.bsky.social @jeffhelzner.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Very apropos

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I hope we are close to a revival of the ideas from the prolog expert systems literature of the 80s which takes into account the topos institute ideas about double categorical view of systems theory + various flavours of ologs etc.

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

shania twain voice: so you spent $15 million to prove navier–stokes

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

find the quoted view here repulsive philistine rubbish that im counting only as evidence that the last remnants of modernist culture will be killed off by illiterate gloaters

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Association for Scottish Literature @asls.org.uk · 31/08/2026

“We cannot run them in a virtual environment […] You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God” —from NEWTON’S WAKE, by @amendlocke.bsky.social (2004) 💙📚 #SF www.hachette.co.uk/titles/ken-m...

hachette.co.uk

Newton’s Wake

'Stylish, witty, and engaging!' - San Diego Union Tribune 'Exciting...Accessible to the average reader as well as the hardcore SF fan. This is a work sure...

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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A great read. I have similar feelings about how AI labs approach progress directly and without nurturing of scientific communities & intuition. The math research community went through the transition the fastest, so it was felt most. Other fields next. 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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ja3k @ja3k.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Daily standup in OpenAI must go crazy "great work on navier stokes. Any update or blockers on the Hodge Conjecture? I told Susan in marketing we'd have it by end of week"

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

imagine if history books were like: 1926 - general electric company solves 5 of german mathematician hilbert’s 23 problems

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

one thing that's really cool is if you are good at coding, you thereby become an expert in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. no additional work needed; you just get to be an expert for free

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Reading Mark Wilson’s Wandering Significance: An Essay On Conceptual Behaviour, and it is just a total treasure thus far

Text screen shot of book reading: “Ur-philosophical currents. Recent philosophical literature is commonly distinguished by the working presumption that an author ought to blast every competing vessel from the harbor before he sails his own skiff in. That is, I should first survey the very long list of the doctrines currently active on our topics of interest and then methodically dispatch them all. Such an odd methodological requirement would scarcely be tolerated in any other subject; I believe its popularity derives largely from the picture of philosophy as custodian of the conceptual (wherein any serious rival can be expected to sink under its own internal incoherence).”

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

My dream is to become a forward-deployed mathematician.

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

a question that interests me about AI in mathematics is if we could ever perform some concrete experiments towards figuring out which particular capacities, if any, make it successful

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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

So it has been MOSTLY true, HITHERTO, that in order to prove a major conjecture you needed to develop insight, tools and understanding that are interesting. 👉 It's not the conjectures we're after, it's the insight, tools and understanding that come with their solution. •15/38

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I am not a logical positivist and think there is a lot wrong with that vision of empiricism … and yet, I do find myself thinking often of the superiority of operational definitions (Turing/James), and being your best bet on not getting hoodwinked by dangerous nonsense

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The labour market is a complex dynamical system which one can’t predict via naive first-order reasoning about how technology will impact particular professions. If one could do this there would be no surprises in what labour economists study or measure

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

you can just do it to feel something

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

will soon have my first lean code in production without ever having managed to get agda in, bittersweet

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

An interesting problem to me in the formalization of category theory (+ related) is one wants to set up some general concept of a limit as a universal cone (or universal element or whatever else), and also there is an unpacked version of the definition which is often nicer to work with

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

mathematics would be interesting to me even if we had an oracle that could solve and explain all problems. Who didn't learn Galois theory and find it utterly beautiful even if the majority of how the subject is developed is figured out, and even if one is only learning a story others already wrote?

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

me long ago: the Karoubi envelope makes sense, it is a abstraction of the fact that any vector bundle has a choice of complement me now: the study of the category of vector bundles makes sense because it is nothing but the Karoubi envelope of the category of free bundles

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

bitter lesson for testing: all of your carefully thought-out and curated bespoke collection of unit tests find less than random fuzzing / property tests with simple properties

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

whenever I imagine a Turing machine, I don’t imagine the head as an arm of a machine marker moving back and forth over the tape, but as a highly industrious beetle scurrying back and forth making minute 0-1 markings

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

starting to worry about this whole constant-exposure-to-incurious-psychopaths-maxxing thing

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

political compass only it’s 2010s tv show visions of the catastrophe: Mr. Robot, Person Of Interest, The Leftovers, Sense8

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The concept of ‘language levels’ from racket is, to me, one of the great unsung ideas in computing. Imagine photoshop with extensible affordances gated to your current skill level, or a coding harness, or R studio, or a browser, or a terminal. To me it would be the welcome anti-philosophy to RTFM

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

joe schmid converting to catholicism for totally stupid reasons to do with supposed miracles has really bothered me more than it should

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

It is clear to me a decent number of the people prognosticating on the ‘end of mathematics’ and ‘the end of coding’ are doing so from resentful positions whereby they are happy to see people they always resented taken down a notch

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

some new books on topics for me to get weird about

Picture of four books, the first three are the series Foundations of Measurement and the fourth is Analogy-Making as Perception

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

russell came up with an important theory of names in which no ordinary name counts as a name, and any genuinely logically proper name ceases to be one exactly when someone decides to introduce a new name for the same designatum which is not immediately known to all speakers

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

every day I read words online obviously written by an LLM and then see that they were written in 2012

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I wonder a lot about The Humanities, Future Of. My degree's in English Literature. I think the way I do about all sorts of things because of it. I also have a strong sense that that whole formation is obsolete, outmoded. Not in a rah-rah triumphalist sort of way - I just think an epoch has passed

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The idea of representation in mathematics as being given by a functor instead of merely group representation captures the notion of a representing a physical system for example, generalizing a model of a logical language

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

the idea in the symmetry book is really nice, a symmetry is nothing but a self-path in a moduli space (e.g. a rotation is a family of squares ending up at the same original square) and such a thing is represented by a map from the homotopic S^1 = B ℤ to the moduli type

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boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

reminding myself this evening what I knew during my phd about chromatic homotopy theory which amounts to understanding that you can present the moduli stack of formal groups as a torsor for Λ(R) = { f(x) = b₀x + b₁x² + b₂x² + ⋯ : b₀ ∈ R^× } Λ -> spec(L) -> M_fg

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