iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

It's cool that Amazon keep you updated as your stuff approaches but I live in an Internet black hole several miles across and I feel like I know what it's like to be a NASA engineer during reentry.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

This issue of Scientific American from the month before I was born is really good: manuals.plus/m/403838a11aa694845513… (That link did work for me ... eventually.) Articles by Minksy, McCarthy, Evan, Sutherland and Strachey among others.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

Remember the days when Republicans used to blather on about morality? Seems like a distant past. Of course we all knew it was a lie. And so did they.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Is your repo a cassette tape where every edit requires a decision to wait minutes or risk losing your code? Did you actually put in the work to edit your code or just let algorithms like search and replace do your work for you? Was every fact you know about the system you use the product of hard […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

You have to check from time to time: is this the means or is this the end? And if it's someone else's end, know whose. And the answer may vary between people and over time and be a blend. And almost by definition you needn't all agree and that's OK.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

I don't often come across integer sequences that can be defined purely mathematically but which we are unable to compute for sure and so we only have empirical values measured in the lab. The top left corner of the "ground state term symbol" for each element […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

A while back I read volume 1 of the comic BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei. Honestly, I couldn't fully make sense of the story, but I find the art incredible. Every so often I'll go back and linger over a page. The nearest comparison I can think of is Piranesi, but […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Reading news stories over the last decade or so, from all over the political spectrum, there is one overwhelmingly consistent message about the US that really stands out: The US is a desperately poor country and the only way to survive is for everyone to work harder, expect less, direct […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

Is there a word for continuing to watch a TV show just to see how bad it can get? Like Dark Matter.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

I like "shadows" of theorems. Like equality on computable reals isn't decidable but this has nothing to say about IEEE floating point. Except we all know comparing floating point numbers for equality can be somewhat dangerous, and the reasons do in fact relate to the more abstract result.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I think I like Dedekind Cut as much as I like Boards of Canada. dedekindcut.bandcamp.com/album/dede…

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

"Mark III: Can Man Build a Superman?" (Aside: reading a lot of old articles about computing recently I find the use of the term "man" really grating. Not just because of the sexism (different time, yada yada), but also the grandiosity. It's also in the Xerox ad I recently posted.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

Has anyone managed to figure out the windowing model on iPadOS? I've started to try to build some kind of state model in my head but it doesn't make good predictions about what will happen when i do various things with the UI.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Incredible. With a just a bit of remodeling you could fit an entire computer into a Cape Code house back in 1972. (Disappointingly this isn't an interesting computer. In a panic to keep up with the times Xerox bought a second rate computer company SDS and I think this is actually an SDS machine.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Possibly one of the earliest generative language models. By Raymond Lull in the 13th century. Curiously you can follow a path in intellectual history from this work to Lean, say, because it inspired Leibniz (he cited Lull) to think about the mechanical […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Portuguese fried fish was imported to the UK by Jewish immigrants. Portuguese fried fish was imported to Japan by Jesuits. So tempura and fish & chips share history.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

Try to play music from my phone to the car by Bluetooth has a 10% chance of success without rebooting the infotainment system. So I'm smart, I use a USB cable. It works more than 80% of the time and replugging the cable raises that to over 90% I don't […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

I found Williamson's "The Humanoids" an interesting read that frequently made me think of The Forbin Project and Pluribus. It was published in 1949 but had an early version of an AI alignment problem. The machines are intended to enforce peace among humans but […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (referred to as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27…

en.wikipedia.org

Littlewood's law - Wikipedia

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

First thing in the morning I hoped on the exercise bike and played the first video that appeared on YouTube. A POV run alongside Sheffield canal. And half way through I spotted this thing on the water.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

it's sad how humanity has lost the ability to write code to search for things. Whether it's Google, or Apple Music, or eBay, typing in exact substrings of the title of something is no longer guaranteed, or even likely, to find matching entries.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

The thing that makes modern dimmers for lighting complicated is basically what Einstein got his Nobel prize for.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

There's a class of horror movie I think of as Geometric Horror. The first I recall watching is Cube. Backrooms and It Ends are current ones. What are some others?

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

A propos of nothing: I often think of this work of art although I don't think it was on display last time I visited the Tate. It's a map of the US showing only the place names containing the word "Lost". www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/prende…

tate.org.uk

‘Lost‘, Kathy Prendergast, 1999 | Tate

‘Lost‘, Kathy Prendergast, 1999

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

Anyone else have to go through the annoying round of apologies and explanations for how stupid and ignorant their compatriots are any time they talk to their friends and family who live in other countries?

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

Lean is handy for managing structured tasks. Here's how I shop.

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Reposted by Dan Piponi

Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 26/08/2026

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

I regret not publishing more papers. I spotted my trick for computing Laplacians appearing in ML papers recently. blog.sigfpe.com/2011/08/computing-e… This is actually how it is used - simulating stochastic processes […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

The PDP-8 was a game changer. It was so small you could fit one in the back of a VW Beetle.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

This algorithm blows my mind. I'm amazed you can sample trajectories exactly(*) from an SDE like this arxiv.org/pdf/math/0602523 (*) for some value of "exactly"

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

Something I've wondered for a while, but I usually think is a bit crazy to mention, is that one way to formalize Dirac deltas is somewhat like algebraic effects. A Dirac delta is an algebraic effect whose handler finds the limit of the surrounding expression as you apply it to a sequence of […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

I thought Tangerine Dream were pretty excellent in SF tonight; some spiffy visuals too.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

Every couple of years I assess the tablet situation for doing mathematics working and it's still poor. The iPad is amazing as a display device but a non-starter for scribbling mathematics. You simply can't expect to rest your hand on the tablet. My Kindle Scribe and Supernote are both […]

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Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

I've never heard the term "jump drive" outside of FTL spaceship design and yet everyone in Reacher uses the term. I must have been living under a rock all these years. (Yeah, I watch Reacher.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

I was a bit behind the times. I was astonished to find you can just guess an ansatz, shape it with a neural net, and solve ab initio for the full wave function for a ground state of a multi-electron atom, with the energy computed to many decimal places. Small atoms and maybe even molecules on […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Reading some zombie fiction that feels very dated in the way it talks about FEMA and CDC and other branches of government as if they were real things that would have some useful role to play if the zombies happened.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

A large amount of business in the US is basically scams that are obviously scams but the amount of money you expect to recover per hour of disputation is less than the amount you get paid so it's easier to just let them go.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

In the old days hexadecimal was written using FGJKQW, not ABCDEF retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/qu…

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

I do t care what you say, I'd take the opinions of an AI over a Republican any day www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/au…

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

Now this seems like a proper effort at reverse engineering human bodies preview-www.nature.com/articles/s41…

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