iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 08/10/2026

If we continue to name things after paper authors then future mathematics will look like: Using the OpenAI transcendence property we show that OpenAI vectors in an Anthropic bundle on an OpenAI manifold when Anthropic-induced by an OpenAI-homomorphism are always Anthropic-OpenAI in the critical […]

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

It's an ESP32 device with maybe 8 MB RAM, Bluetooth and WiFi, microSD support and is very hackable which is why I can run an open source reader app crosspointreader.com

crosspointreader.com

Read without limits.

Open source e-reader software for ESP32 e-ink devices, built by the community.

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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 · 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 · 03/10/2026

@RefurioAnachro I used to listen to the older stuff and then I went off it, but now I've just listened to Dark Jovian I'll be checking out more of his "late" stuff. (The way you phrased it, it seemed like he'd died.)

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

@robinhouston Academia is like capitalism but it uses credit instead of money. This is where we find out whether people care more about the products produced by the system or the system itself.

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

@robinhouston I'm with Buzzard. I think asking OpenAI to withhold what it has proved is borderline evil. It's like the Catholic Church hiding the liturgy behind Latin.

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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

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Dan Piponi @dpiponi.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

@futurebird In a way this paper answers why it's hard: arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0205005 (I hope I'm interpreting that correctly. I think it's similar enough to the puzzle I know as "Rush Hour" for the theory to carry over.)

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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 · 22/09/2026

@brouhaha I've been running singed since I gave up my cryogenically cooled AMD in 2000.

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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

@pervognsen I didn't know about that! This suggests a slightly stronger intellectual connection to modern work than I originally thought.

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

The last wheel was actually a device with physical wheels on a shared axis.

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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 · 10/09/2026

@pozorvlak I think the original question was phrased badly. They should be asking for open balls in the space of initial conditions and forces that all lead to a singularity. An isolated point has no physical significance. It's still interesting as mathematics, but not *that* interesting. (I […]

mathstodon.xyz

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

Meanwhile trying to get the driveway lights working again after a software update...

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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 · 05/09/2026

@robinhouston We're going to see a spectrum of views around here but personally I think this is a positive.

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

I think the book is slightly marred by the large parapsychology thread, which to me reads like magic shoehorned into sci-fi. But it's worth remembering that even Turing talked about needing telepathy-proof rooms for the Turing test.

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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 · 03/09/2026

@davidsuculum I enjoyed the first. Haven't looked at the second. Easy to see people not liking Antimemetics, but I liked it so much that as soon as I finished the ebook I bought the hardback!

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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

I'm still not seeing a lot of publicity about this. Up to now the published AI proofs I've seen are things I thought were just curiosities in branches of mathematics I didn't care about. But to me this new result really is huge about something fundamental. It reminds me of the work on exotic […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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

@SnoopJ but eBay! I've already declared that I want to hand over my money so why make me leave in despair

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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 · 01/09/2026

@dimpase I recommend the Tate Modern to everyone visiting London but, unsurprisingly, it's not to everyone's taste. I love this piece, and also the fact that the Tate only has a copy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Oak_Tree

en.wikipedia.org

An Oak Tree - Wikipedia

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