iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

NZ First running Elliot Ikilei proves that they are the crackpot party

Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

This advanced understanding of air currents was then combined with other natural phenomena: sun, moon, stars, wind, ocean currents and swells, birds and clouds. The result was a system for navigating the ocean across great distances thousands of years before European explorers would later arrive.

A picture of master navigator Hekenukumai Busby with his waka (ship) Te Aurere. He built this ship himself and used it to travel the ocean via traditional navigation in his life and taught many others to do the same.

A drawing from Captain Cook's crew of a Māori waka (ship) with its triangular sail extended. This is a war canoe, so it's not built for travelling long distances.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Rereata Makiha recorded over 100 terms for different kinds of wind based on whether it can move a ship, the different kinds of trees it could bend, wind that hits from one side or the other or both, even the “playful wind” that moves leaves on the forest floor or trash down the sidewalk has a name.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

When asked by scientists “How did Māori know about the jetstreams when they had no tools to measure it?” Rereata Makiha responded with “We have an instrument, it’s called the Kuaka” By watching Kuaka migrating to Siberia Māori observed the jetstream without ever having to go up there themselves.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

By studying migratory birds, Polynesian people would scout for islands over thousands of kilometres. In “Pathway of the Birds” Andrew Crowe explains the Pipiwharauroa (Shining Cuckoo) flies thousands of miles over open ocean and may have helped ancient navigators plot a path between the islands.

The cover to Andrew Crowe's "Pathway of the Birds". It has a waka hourua (double-hulled canoe) on the front cover.

A pipiwharauroa (shining cuckoo). It's a small bird with a short beak, zebra stripes on its belly and an iridescent green back.

A migratory map for the pipiwharauroa. It shows paths from New Zealand, northwest to the Solomon Islands east of Papua New Guinea. The path extends further westward towards Australia also, where it continues further north to Papua New Guinea.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Coastlines and mountains stimulate cloud production making islands easier to spot over great distances. New Zealand was discovered by Kuramarotini, wife to navigator Kupe who first spotted the cloud formation above the islands and who named New Zealand “Aotearoa” (the land of the long white cloud)

An image of an island atoll on a clear day with each island having a small cloud island of its own overhead

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The Avatar Aang movie includes this very cool nod to traditional polynesian navigation in this scene where Tagah uses airbending to navigate the ocean But how would an air bender translate their knowledge into navigation? Are there any examples of Indigenous people studying air currents?

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

My mentor told me once: "The guy who throws the bomb doesn't make it over the line" It's good practice to kill with kindness sometimes, it turns out.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

This was the first place I was thinking of going lol.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

I think there’s a visit to Teotihuacán on the itinerary at some point? I’ll look forward to it

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

I’m headed to Mexico city in a few hours. Suggestions welcome lol. We’ll see how much I’m able to transfer my French skills across in a few days 🤔. dw I have low expectations 😂.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Any half decent video compression should be able to handle that fairly easily right

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

It's funny that everyone who has *ever* programmed, knows how important attention to detail is. Hours wasted because you made a typo, forgot to add a character, etc. The tiniest thing you literally don't notice is wrong, and your program screams at you and dies. This is a universal experience.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I cannot imagine learning how to tie my shoes without a pair of chopsticks

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

It’s cool how taking an image of the moon at half-moon phase is arguably better than a full moon because the full moon doesn’t show the shadows in the craters so well.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I’m not, but I should probably look around for courses. So far I’m just self-studying, for about 90 mins a day.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

I look forward to learning about this (Spanish is next lol)

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

*similar to te reo than to English

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

There's also something about the way French handles plurals that seems more similar to te reo than to French in my mind. I think it's that both languages mark the plural on the possessive and not just the noun as in English. In Mãori it's more like "mys shoe" but in french it would be "mys shoes".

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

An obvious example is that te reo has the a/o category system, which splits nouns into classes similarly to gender. Another example is that te reo has a kind of verb-adverb agreement such that if you passivise one you have to do the same to the other, and there are many similar things in French.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

There are more similarities between te reo Mãori and French than I would have expected

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Foil would probably be sufficient. Like a faraday cage. The point is to block the phone from sending or receiving any kinds of signals.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

"If anyone builds it everyone dies" but the "it" is colonialism

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

C Thi Nguyen has a paper called "Transparency is Surveillance" which is about how forcing expert decisions to be made in an explainable, transparent way can have worse results. Sometimes vibes are just expertise in a trenchcoat. Other times it can be unconscious bias, but there is no free lunch.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

(Often, but of course not always). We have steered students away from other professors but it’s all word of mouth. My supervisors are both high powered academics and excellent supervisors. They both take supervising their students very seriously and have a similar mentorship philosophy.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I honestly just got lucky. I made the decision based on not a lot of information, mostly vibe. Talking to their students if you can (I wasn’t able to) is certainly recommended. Also perhaps it’s good to be willing to trade things off. Often the really high powered academics are bad supervisors.

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Kosta Derpanis @csprofkgd.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Looking for a PhD program? It all starts with great supervision. Choose wisely. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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bhyravajjula.bsky.social @bhyravajjula.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines? We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713 🧵👇

"so much depends / upon / a whitespace: Why Whitespace Matters for Poets and LLMs" by Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, Maria Antoniak

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Hana-Rawhiti accepting the Time Magazine award in NYC is a great example of how the world is really not paying attention to the NZ govt at all. They can go lose in their Oxford Union debates and kiss up to Trump all they like but they won’t get anywhere near that kind of attention.

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Craig Renney @clrenney.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

#nzpol Labour is proposing to create a Capital Gains Tax on property - excluding farms and the family home. That income will help make GP visits free for the majority of people. Is that a better policy than continuing tax-free profits on, say, someone's seventh property? Absolutely. A🧵

labour.org.nz

Release: Targeted tax to grow the economy and fund free doctor’s visits

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Anni Jyn @annijyn.com · 24/10/2025

my 17yo niece is part of a choir that won an international championship earlier this week, just casually singing at the montserrat benedictine monastery she has had a hard start to life and when i was 17 looking after her we would sing phantom of the opera over and over (even the organ parts)

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

A more progressive Labour would be better for everyone not just in terms of policy outcomes but also electability

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Totally, it's the opposite. The money was there so it would make more money. Now it's going to cover for $2.9 billion dollars in budget deficits that they created by giving tax breaks to landlords and tax cuts to the wealthy.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

I grew up visiting my friends and family nearly always unannounced unless it was for some kind of occasion. I wish we would all drop by each others places more often. In my family, if you just drive past it’s considered rude if you don’t say hi. Maybe it’s too much for some but I liked it.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

If you’re my friend and I’m inviting you over I probably enjoy spending time with you so I don’t mind if you come however early.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

"Take no notice of my twice blinking"

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Imagine one of the kindest humans who ever lived, who had love and compassion in her heart for all of God’s creations alike being asked for her last words and her choice was to point right at you like “I don’t like that guy”

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I wonder what it felt like for Elon to be publicly rebuked by Dr Jane Goodall from beyond the grave

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

hate to say it but people like sina and i who’ve been around more than 5 minutes have been warning about the direction TPM’s been travelling in since at least 2023. it’s a highly divisive party, especially within māori society itself. solidarity with eru www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

rnz.co.nz

Toitū Te Tiriti's Eru Kapa-Kingi rules out starting rival political party after split from Te Pāti Māori

The activist hopes the split will spur Te Pāti Māori into creating genuine change from the inside.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

All of the rhetoric about people pushing Māori down peoples throats in the media etc leads down this same road

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

They are, and they're also fun. I think that people don't assign much value to actually knowing which dialect they speak. Consequently most people speak a mish-mash (which is what standard kinda is) and otherwise don't think about it much.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Also it's not like I'm going to be able to cover every dialect, so I'm aware that only some people are going to be interested. I'm mostly wondering if I'm somehow excluding people by assuming they wouldn't be interested.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

I think this is common sense, and also what a fair number of people recommend. But I think that on some level the issue is availability of resources. There just aren't a lot of dialect level language resources generally, so it makes sense to start with the stuff that's more voluminous.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

But I'm going to be using these to learn myself and I don't speak a lot so it actually might be possible to make a resource that would work for most people.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Are you talking about OpenAI or ChatGPT 😂

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I feel pretty vindicated fwiw. Not by their paper, but by the present state of the field.

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Caleb Moses @mathematiguy.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

It’s true. If anything it should be considered a big backpedal compared to their previous statements.

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