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Curious Jon

@jmbroad.bsky.social
173 followers 375 following 266 posts

Librarian, technologist, Special Circumstances Branch. Amateur collector of difficult truths. “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” @jmbroad@mastodon.xyz as well.

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Reposted by Curious Jon
mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 3h
if Elon is spending millions of dollars of his own money to push this message with paid media, what do you think he does to the black box algorithm on his platform that chooses which posts you see and which of your posts are shown to others?
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 17h
The right wing crash out over asian students celebrating at a UT football game reveals that all along the true goal of reactionary colorblindness was never “meritocracy” but resegregation. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...
Color-blind meritocracy was, for many years, a successful rhetorical strategy for undermining antidiscrimination law and excluding Black people from selective schools and prominent positions. That’s why so many former segregationists seemed to suddenly embrace the concept in the 1970s. For them, resegregation—not color-blindness—was always the goal. As long as the success of some immigrants could be used to paint Black students as undeserving, color-blind meritocracy was good. But now many on the right see a new problem: too many Asian Americans in elite spaces. Their success, therefore, must be portrayed as a sinister theft of real (white) Americans’ birthright.

The declining “social trust” that the administration warned against is, of course, not the fault of these students. The problem is bigots like Bo French who cannot accept into their community people who do not share their race and religion, and those who monetize or otherwise profit from that bigotry by spreading it through social media. Like the proverbial child who kills their parents and asks for mercy as an orphan, they are responsible for the problem they are decrying.
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James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · 8h
"But Achilles wanted glory!" No, he didn't. He very explicitly says, "fuck this, I hate Agamemnon, and I'm going home," until Patroclus dies. The entire point of the poem is his rage and grief. Can anyone read a fucking book, holy shit.
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 8h
When I teach Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Politics" to students, one of the several things they always react against is the claim that politics is a practical knowledge acquired over generations, i.e. within a family, not a techne acquired at university by smart law or econ students.
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Claire Connelly @claireconnelly.bsky.social · 8h
New Delhi is a tinder box. The Modi government is essentially shutting down roads, rail, metro, and cellphone networks, and deploying police and military personnel in response to protests calling for the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...
amnesty.org
India: Delhi police must facilitate right to peaceful protest amid lockdown-like restrictions in capital
Responding to the sweeping and disproportionate restrictions imposed by the Delhi Police and the Government of India ahead of planned protests in the capital on Saturday 10 October, Aakar Patel, Chair...
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 8h
India is on fire. My thoughts are with the Cockroaches trying to reclaim their power from Modi's illiberal regime. Democracy is a power that can be reclaimed by every generation, and sometimes it must.
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Ruha Benjamin @ruha9.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
The concern is that people take photos of slides and circulate content that puts orgs in the crosshairs of this repressive administration.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 8h
It's later than you think
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 8h
Yeah but diesel tho
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Dante Atkins @danteatkins.bsky.social · 17h
It's not hard. Both Yglesias moderates and Khanna leftists give MAGA politicians legitimacy because they want MAGA's base. Ossoff simply does not give a shit about the MAGA base, which allows him to speak with fierce clarity about MAGA politicians. He is willing to bet on an anti-MAGA majority.
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Tim Newman @tnewmsblues.bsky.social · 15h
Perhaps worth noting, in this context, that Bezos went on Fox News to tell its audience (and AI pushback is bipartisan, by the way): "you're not going to need to have a two-earner income household" if we let AI accelerate, in his vision. www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-a...
businessinsider.com
Jeff Bezos says AI could power a return to single-earner households as it turbocharges productivity
Bezos, the world's third wealthiest person, said more families will need only one parent to work and people will work for three days per week.
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Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
“Someone with a 1-hr car commute needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work. On the other hand, if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.” #CityMakingMath 50 reasons for more walkable streets.
fastcompany.com
50 Reasons Why Everyone Should Want More Walkable Streets
From making you live longer to making cities more resilient: If you want a reason to make your city more walkable, it's in here.
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Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
NEW: The Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Donald Trump has turned its Civil Rights Division’s mission on its head, a federal judge said in a decision blocking the administration from demanding states’ unredacted voter rolls. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
democracydocket.com
Judge rebukes Trump administration for perverting mission of DOJ’s ‘crown jewel’
Read more here.
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 15h
“This concept demeans us both.”
O'BAGEL IS COMING TO PRINCETON
O'BAGEL
Since 1995
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The Associated Press @apnews.com · 15h
BREAKING: A missile struck a passenger terminal at an airport in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh and wounded many, an official says.
bit.ly
The airport in the Saudi capital has been attacked again, officials say
The airport in Saudi Arabia's capital has been attacked again, according to two regional officials. They say the Riyadh airport has been evacuated and air traffic has stopped.
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Gretchen Felker-Martin PRE ORDER CHIMERA 2.16.27 🍉 @scumbelievable.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Yes... YES
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The truth is there IS something wrong with you, AND there’s something wrong with everyone else (not always the same things). When art doesn’t work for me, I remind myself it’s a miracle art works at all for anyone.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
de gustibus non disputandum est
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Kevin 🚀 @astro-kevin.com · 10/04/2026
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton is excellent on this. Once in power, he describes a radicalizing “one-way ratchet” as a fascist regime has to keep motivating its base by engaging in ever more extreme policies, like addicts needing higher doses to get the same high. It’s a death cult.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
ya i mean i do genuinely think that one of hegseth's goals is to drive people appalled by barbarity out of the military, because the long term plan is to make the military shoot at us, and the same guys who object to this won't do that either.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
(As a good Gen Xer, I don’t become the Joker.)
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Colonel Kurtz as portrayed by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now
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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
“Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.” Sun-ha Hong of UNC-Chapel Hill says the Silicon Valley hype machine systematically “borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present.” The cost, he argues, is a planetary-scale drain on our alternatives.
techpolicy.press
Tech Hype is Cannibalizing the Future
Every day, we are told that we live in the future—but hype is eating the future and leaving us the bones," writes Sun-ha Hong.
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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The Hague is far too good for Stephen Miller
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Rusty Foster @rusty.todayintabs.com · 09/10/2026
You think a depressed person could make this?
Nikita Bier O @nikitabier
X.com
Hello computer.
Decompile and distill Grand Theft Auto.
Make the game set in my hometown -- use Google Earth to reconstruct it in pixel-perfect detail.
Make the character me and have my spawn point be in the mansion I always look at on Zillow.
Review my chat memory and make every mission about my hopes and dreams.
Make it playable online so my friends can join.
When you're done, sell all my video games on Ebay and use that money to fund tokens for my next game.
11:25 AM • 10/8/26 • 153K Views
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Honestly, reading this summoned the “Jesus wept” scene from Hellraiser to mind. I’ll think about why later maybe or in therapy probably.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
All his friends are crying in their own personalized versions of “Grand Theft Auto: Random Exurb Edition”
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 09/10/2026
Ossoff: "I think Pete Hegseth is frankly a deeply unwell person who seems to relish this kind of brutality all the while he's running a department that is falling into chaos. The guy cannot run the military competently and is spending his time with this kind of obscene medieval spectacle."
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Mac It Look Like An Accident @macrogers.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Okay so we have a number now: the Onion is officially 6 months ahead of reality.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Sling Blade Runner
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 09/10/2026
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 09/10/2026
jesus christ i have never heard a democratic talk this bluntly about an opponent
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
The Dead Zone Of Interest
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
This sounds a lot like “Let us do *one* more capitalism bro, just one more and then we’ll be good socialists bro, I swear.”
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 09/10/2026
This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 08/10/2026
I had a colonoscopy yesterday and of course I wrote about the experience. Come read why my colonoscopy was not bad at all, why I encourage those of you putting it off to actually schedule it if you can, and what a teddy bear has to do with the whole experience: whatever.scalzi.com/2026/10/08/c...
whatever.scalzi.com
Colonoscopy Post-Mortem
First, so as not to bury the lede: It went great, there’s nothing in my colon they are the least bit concerned about, and I don’t have to come back for another colonoscopy for a decade,…
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Cryptocurrencies have even fewer prosocial uses than AI, so this counts as a win in my book.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
AI and cryptocurrencies are going to fight, and I suspect crypto is going to lose. The main question is whether the collapse is fast (invalidation of underlying mathematics & blockchain corruption) or slow (unsustainable theft and sabotage via agentic swarm attacks on software stacks and networks)
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
AI seems destined to become the “leaded gasoline” of our era
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I hope you saved enough for a second box to send to the insurers
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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Thus spake the techbro billionaire philosopher-king
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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The editorial board of the Philadelphia @inquirer.com becomes the first at a major newspaper to endorse (sorta) Trump's impeachment. share.inquirer.com/BnINC5 "A clear and present danger to the republic... the case against Trump is strong... the time has come to again contemplate his impeachment."
share.inquirer.com
The Case for Impeachment: What would the founders do? | Editorial
The list of the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors is breathtaking.
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
One must imagine Donnie Darko laughing
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micchiato 🎋 @micchiato.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
“the administration didn’t just resurrect the statue of a slave owner and place it in a prime location in the nation’s capital; they spent a striking amount of money to do it …. the National Park Service … paid $527,226 … to build a base on which to place the sculpture, which had been … in storage”
motherjones.com
Trump resurrected the statue of a slave owner. Its pedestal cost taxpayers $527K.
Contracting documents obtained by Mother Jones indicate the price was nearly double the government's estimate.
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
If care about free markets, you not only get more from center-left Dems than the party of Trump, you get more *from professed democratic socialists* like Mamdani than you do from the party of Trump. Those who deny this only think of it as an anti-left cultural totem and not a real policy agenda.
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Cathy Gellis @cathygellis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
This appears to be political violence.
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crumb @crumb.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998...
ihoggan 
 I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought for a few days that I had actually solved it. But it's supposedly proven here - problem 180. I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight. There's no Lean proof for this one so I'm digesting the paper. On the surface it looks like an approach I considered 24 years ago and abandoned. 
I revisited the problem this summer, along with my partial solutions, when the previous round of stunning proofs came out. Several hours of work with Fable simply convinced me it wasn't yet solvable and reinforced how hard of a problem it was. 
 WheelsAtLarge
I have very little understanding of higher math, so I ask you: Was the proof due to a type of brute-force solution that could be solved had you gained enough information from reading others' work, or was it more like a proof that was sparked by an insight that came once a clue on how to solve it was put forward? I guess my question is: Was the problem proven by using a collection of everyone's work, or was it due to a brand-new insight? 
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jboggan
 Hi I'm still digesting the proof and translating a bit from the dual case back to the primal in which I most commonly thought about it. I don't think it was a brute force proof in the sense that it combined every possible paper and commentary. It's rather odd because I feel like most of the work on the conjecture was focused on an induction proof based around graph reductions, and this proof avoided those issues entirely by offering a concrete constructive proof of finding a Hamiltonian cycle. Rather, it explicitly selected the edges not in the Hamiltonian cycle, which is in line with previous attempts via the dual. 
The "oho" insight for this is actually f**ing wild, it involves a complex valued exponential sum on the edges. I've seen a lot of clever counting arguments before in graph theory but this is the first time I've seen complex roots and annihilating terms like this, the symbolic manipulation tricks in this look like things out of quantum physics. I don't understand where this trick originated, I need to really digest this. 



jboggan
 I went back to that Fable chat and showed it this new preprint. It coded up the new constructive algorithm and ran it against the existing test suite, that looks good at least. 
It has been super helpful in delineating where the crucial concept came from. The proof is rather simple as graph theory proofs go, but it does seem to use some constructions that would only seem obvious if you had serious physics experience with partition function and calculating energy states that cancel out. It's not a wholly alien bolt from the heavens, but I can also see how there hasn't been a human being with the broad theoretical physics knowledge combined with the deep graph theory experience in planar graphs to come up with this idea. I don't know, I'm looking for precedents of this formulation and some old papers of Penrose counting the number of edge colorings of this same graph type are coming up, the line of argument at least rhymes. But I agree with the thought that this sort of progress should not be siloed inside those companies. I propose a tax so that every slop cannon Al video pays for another hour of compute time for advancing mathematics. 
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Curious Jon @jmbroad.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
My first colonoscopy at age 50 discovered a cancer that had already metastasized. I assure you that colonoscopy prep is much, much easier than emergency surgery, colostomy, liver resection, colostomy reversal, microwave ablation, radiation treatment, chemotherapy, etc. Do not delay.
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