iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 1h

What about running it through a bandsaw and then running its pages through a scanner?

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 1h

I don't think there's a right or wrong first thing to see. If you really want students to see that there's a multilinear alternating function that produces one smaller to encode information about a more complicated object, then why not? Why not start with determinants, traces, and other characters?

110

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 4h

The determinant is a beautiful function!

110

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Ah, I think I see - it expects introduction first?

100

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

#PretextGang #PretextPlus - I don't understand worksheets! I'm seeing that pretext.plus doesn't like a task within an exercise. But I thought the documentation for exercise allows for tasks? (Am I just the world's worst documentation reader?!)

pretext.plus

PreTeXt.Plus | Author accessible mathematical documents in your browser

PreTeXt.Plus is a service that supports the authoring and sharing of PreTeXt documents using only a web browser.

100

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Look at those big green eyes! or big green Spidery-Thingies!

010

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

They sold me a machine to drink my coffee for me, then I had to buy their caffeine injectables to get the same buzz, but it shaved 12 minutes off my morning routine which I use to earn 381 extra cents for my employer. At the end of the year I'll get a bag of gourmet coffee beans for my hard work.

2349

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

They didn't do the ball and chain part of tenure well enough I guess!

110

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they) @katjathieme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

OMG! *mind blown, slowly and inefficiently*

1343

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Ooooh, very exciting! Are you expatriating or just keeping the option open?

120

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

There's a lot to be learned by loitering in the right places

000

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Any particular spots you are excited to eat at?

120

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Amazing! My PR is like 20 total on the Olympic bar. I think to increment I need to create little 1/4lb plates

020

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Yaaaaaaaay! May you continue to find forgotten money

010

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

Hey folks, what's a good thing that's happened in your life lately?

870

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

RNNs are way easier to understand than brains. The don't modify and moderate their own hardware/circuitry, and they aren't multimodal info processors 🫠 I'm way more scared of babies and how fast they learn multimodally while deleting almost as many neural links as they make!

100

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 09/10/2026

I spent a year at NSF (in CISE/IIS/robust intelligence, if the alphabet soup means anything) and I learned that there are lots of questions that cog neuro/comp neuro/cog sci/behaviorists/etc don't agree on about what the brain is up to even if they (sometimes) try to model it the same way!

100

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 08/10/2026

I think cognitive science says you can model a brain that way for some purposes (like what some labs do to reconstruct vision from brain activity), but I don't think they'd say (necessarily) that that's what a brain is.

110

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 08/10/2026

Truly maddening. I'm glad you took the time to learn. Any time you want to talk math, tap me in. It's my literal favorite thing to do ever

030

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 08/10/2026

I know!! It was my job to explain this to Senate staffers in 2022 when ChatGPT blew up and it was so weird how many people wanted to believe it was more! Like, no! The "more" is the human interaction layer that flatters your ego, that's *IT*

170

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 08/10/2026

Yep! And a little bit of "this word is most likely to be 3 words away from this other word"(for different distances between words).

170

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Nalini Joshi @monsoon0.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Here’s a bombshell for those considering the impact of the recent dump of mathematical papers by OpenAI: why the semantic translation of a mathematical text into Lean code by an AI may neither be reliable nor faithful 👉🏼 arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

arxiv.org

Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs

Autoformalisation is increasingly used to verify mathematical texts, including those generated by AI, as in OpenAI's announced proof of blow-up of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. In this pro...

34220

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Petra Schwer @petraschwer.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This.

071

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 07/10/2026

Same but relations get to go to the middle school dance and things get awkward as they start to interact

020

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 07/10/2026

They're just the FOIL of products of generators of ______ (groups, modules, vector spaces...) where the relations come along and get to know each other

000

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

They hounded Aaron Swartz to death for downloading papers from jstor but society is now supposed to just accept mass theft because this thing can write that TPS report *for* you. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_S...

en.wikipedia.org

Aaron Swartz - Wikipedia

111635551

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 07/10/2026

The announcement was awful. They want to fund industry partnerships with an emphasis on industry and defund "traditional institutes of higher learning" So long, grad students?

020

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 07/10/2026

The enemy is OpenAI. Maybe colleagues and bureaucrats are also enemies that OpenAI has recruited to their pursuits. But OpenAI could just... not be like this. It's a choice to try to use math results to boost their IPO and create more value for billionaires.

1110

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 06/10/2026

😬😬😬 I feel like, in addition to the crime of calling that research-backed, it's also taking away the fun part of being a professor (and possibly the things that make a professor effective). It would be like designing a machine to drink coffee for me to save time: I don't get enjoyment or caffeine!

010

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 06/10/2026

The book description says that it is research backed, but it looks like it's all anecdotal?

110

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 05/10/2026

Let’s do a giveaway! I have 1 copy each of the Turkish & Portuguese (Brazilian) translations of me & @lollardfish.bsky.social’s THE BRIGHT AGES. If you’re in US, respond below with which one you want, what you want me to write in it, and I’ll pick people to send them to. Share widely! #medievalsky

21911

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 06/10/2026

Wow! I would love to give the Turkish translation to my brother-in-law. He would love the book especially because it includes more than just Europe. I guess I'd want you to write, "For Suleyman, a bright guy"

100

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 06/10/2026

My advisor told me "the Snake Lemma is just Tor for the proletariat" almost 20 years ago and I'm still not sure if it's the most profound thing I've ever heard or nonsense

130

Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup) @courtneygibbons.phd · 06/10/2026

It's My Turn. I did not have time for a complicated (but exciting) personal life while on the tenure track. Not one married former baseball player in sight! Nor did I get to teach the Snake Lemma.

4102

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Elizabeth Anne, PhD @lacksauthority.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

never the wrong time for this classic

Screenshot of a tweet by @RobbtKraft reading “scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"”

56120123571

Reposted by Dr. Courtney Gibbons (she/her/xlookup)

Anil Dash @anildash.com · 05/10/2026

Exactly this. And in fact, many models *have* been created this way, and decades of prior machine learning systems *were* created this way, consensually. These things are choices! People are STILL working this way! It’s not just that a better world is possible — it already EXISTS. We can nurture it.

171756473