iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

They must have thought it was a bomb

Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

It's ages since I last built a robot. The hardware looks much as it did 10 years ago. But the software is a world apart.

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

Hoping you enjoy my artisanal long division. All handcrafted, no calculators, computers or adding machines (apart from the 20,000,000,000 operations it took to render it on my iPad and the countless millions more to whiz it round the world to you.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

I love this nano sized ebook reader that makes a standard Kindle look enormous. XTEINC X4 Classic. Great for grabbing a quick distraction-free read in moments of downtime.

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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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 09/09/2026

Glad I only wasted an hour or two trying to fix the unfixable...

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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 · 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 · 29/08/2026

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

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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 · 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 · 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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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

My British friends may be wondering if I identified that correctly, it looks pretty different to an urban London fox, say. Apparently British foxes are closer to dogs than California foxes. From "Phylogeny of Recent Canidae" by JAN ZRZAVY & VERA RICÁNKOVÁ

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

The fox has taken to sleeping in our back yard. (Thankfully it seems to be using somewhere else as its toilet.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

I don't think this is a spherical cow joke from Borges but I think we can retcon it as one.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

As I've mentioned before, I love Colossus: The Forbin Project. Anyway, I found the April 1969 issue of American Cinematographer on eBay so I thought I'd get it. I wasn't expecting much beyond the standard stuff everyone has on their blog about this movie. So I […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

From Dragon Magazine #152, one month before the 90s.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026

Interesting to see a family member apparently cited in a hallucinated reference. arxiv.org/abs/2607.12111

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

RIP Sam Neill, one of the elite club of actors who have delivered the lecture on how to get from A to B by bending spacetime.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

@SnoopJ "Meat planet" makes me think this. Close, actually.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

I really enjoyed the movie Sirāt though don't expect a story or plot - or to come away feeling buoyant and uplifted. What I'm curious about is the strange parallel with Sorcerer down to both having an electronic soundtrack by Berlin composers. I do like […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

A colleague CnC milled me a copy of YBC 7289 - the Babylonian tablet from 1800-1700 BC that records the square root of 2 to about 6 decimal places (but sexagesimal). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YBC_7289

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

This was the dismal state of humanity before we had spellcheckers.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

I really enjoyed this article (translated by Safari): caad.club/aventuras-y-bases-de-datos It fills in some gaps in my knowledge about the lineage of some British adventure games. What I wondered is if everyone independently invented bytecode to […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

We could use the same technique to "interpolate" functions from the left and get another Gamma. And we can get a basis function by multiplying the left and right ones together and wonder how this relates to sinc. It's just Euler's famous reflection formula! […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

But there's a fix: the wall goes like n^-x so you can interpret this as saying that to fit a function you need to provide an extra clue - the long range behaviour to the left. We'd like a basis function to be bounded so just knock off the n^-x. And surprise […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

So I wondered what happens if you try to do a one-sided fit using Lagrange interpolation to fit (0,1), (1, 0), (2, 0), ... It's not quite as interesting. You get a function that fails to allow you to extrapolate at all because it blows up as you go from 0 […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

I was tinkering with some mathematics. Something I've mentioned before is that if you try to fit a polynomial y=f(x) to an equally spaced points all the way along the real line ...(-1,x[-1]),(0,x[0]),(1,x[1]),... you end up rediscovering the sinc filter. In […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

I really enjoyed Hartnett's book on Lean - the Proof in the Code. It was fun having watched all this unfold from the sidelines but wanting a more detailed narrative about what was going on. It has the usual issue in pop-sci that some statements inside my […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

There's a piece missing from the document [1] I wrote on differential forms. The representation of forms I use doesn't give a unique representation of a field. I'm missing an equivalence relation. I'm not going to fix the document now, but thinking about this […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/06/2026

People have fond memories of stories and characters so they don't like when I say this. But now I have a quote about Miyamoto saying it I can just point there.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026

I enjoyed the metaness of the moment as I sat down in Pret à Manger, King's Cross station, surrounded by Pottermania, to sip my cappuccino and start my new book which coincidentally started at King's Cross station with the protagonist surrounded by Pottermania. (Slow Horses, if you were wondering.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

The British Library is always worth a visit. Here's a typewritten document by Alan Turing: "I propose to investigate the question as to whether it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour. It is usually assumed without argument that it is not possible..."

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

This house caught my interest so I thought I'd photograph it. Turns out it's rubber coated. Makes good weatherproofing apparently. www.e-architect.com/england/black-r…

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

Another photo of the power station alongside a publicity still from Doctor Who. Not much has changed in over 50 years.

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

Next to Dungeness nuclear power station is a lighthouse from the top of which is a great view of the local train service. They have steam and internal combustion engines, but what's less obvious is that this is a 15 inch gauge railway. These are miniature […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

British train scheduling seems to be so incredibly bad this visit. In all my time living in London I never knew it to be so consistently bad. The only train I took that actually left on time was the train to Bristol - but half the train was missing so […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

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