iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 14h

So Alpöge's complex structure on S^6 was a 100 page paper 40 days ago and then today there's a 100 page paper on the arXiv proving properties about it? I'm exhausted just contemplating it.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 18h

"Ask yourself rather what is the mathematics that lives only inside you and nowhere else. The one that makes you dream, like the music that no-one has ever heard, that wakes you up in the middle of the night, playing itself inside your head, and demanding to be written."

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 19h

The turn against Turnitin in UK HE is gaining momentum, with Cambridge U the latest to cancel its contract over its proposal to use student essays to train AI. I imagine more unis will now follow. TII will surely be going into crisis management now. Good piece on it here wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

wonkhe.com

A supplier shouldn’t be able to rewrite who owns students’ essays

Sam Dickinson looks at Turnitin’s paused plan to put student essays to work on AI – and finds that neither anonymisation nor university regulations answer the copyright question

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Lucy Gaynor @lucyjgaynor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Today, staff @ University of #Edinburgh are striking to protest recently announced cuts - incl. the forced closure of >90 courses. Principal Prof Sir Peter Mathieson accused the union of "weaponising" students. I find this enraging, so: a short (quite personal) thread. www.bbc.com/news/article...

bbc.com

Edinburgh University lecturers begin five-week strike over cuts

Members of the University and Colleges Union are walking out in part of a long-running dispute over job and course cuts.

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Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

cries in 400 jobs threatened at my one (1) small (tiny!) university as part of sector-wide crisis

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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Sorry to double-post – I find this plot clearer. Start of February is apparently when Claude Opus 4.6 was released by Anthropic, and ChatGPT-5.3-Codex was released by OpenAI. The next big release after that was GPT-5.4 by OpenAI at beginning of March.

arXiv submissions in maths since 2022. It shows a steady increase until around Feb 2026, after which the numbers take off dramatically.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It *feels* like the daily arXiv submission numbers are getting oppressively huge and I just checked arxiv.org/stats/monthl... and yuuuuuuuuup. Also note the pandemic.

Graph showing the number of submissions to the arXiv over time since it started in the mid 90s. Starts with what looks like linear growth, but the right half of the graph starts to climb rapidly (with, interestingly, a slowdown during the pandemic)

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Amused this morning that Gabriel Kahane's Villains (4616 Dundee Dr.) and Courtney Barnett's Avant Gardner both mention Uma Thurman ODing in Pulp Fiction.

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Andrew Jacobs (he/him) @drewjakeprof.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

lol at this chart and the disclaimer

A Connect Four style chart labeled "Illustration of the Proportion of the Courses or Talks Offered by the University" with blue circles as "left-leaning" white circles as "most centered" and red circles as "right-leaning." There are many more blue circles. The disclaimer on the side reads "Note: the proportions shown here are purely illustrative and may not correspond to the actual proportions of course of talk offerings."

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Matt Clegg @eyesfront.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My poems. My partner's illustrations. They helped us through Covid. @longbarrowpress.bsky.social turned them into 3 beautiful pamphlets. We're small. No marketing. If they sell, Longbarrow can publish more poets. Share this post & you'll be helping more than us. longbarrowpress.com/featured-poem/

longbarrowpress.com

Featured Poem

Tzu-Jan as Performance Outcome | Matthew Clegg Into every account mail is pinging: ‘we will secure our long-term future by competing on more fronts.’ Let’s find a glade where a thought might grow. …

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I'm a simple man; seeing these enharmonic notes back to back amuses me. (@gabrielkahane.bsky.social's Baltimore, for those keeping score at home. Piano party is easy to get through but harder to make sound good. And singing in tune to the harmonies? 😬)

A bar of sheet music. Lyrics "Luke, I guess, got himself into a fight". Piano part has two notes highlighted, played consecutively by right pinky: and F-sharp, and a G-flat.

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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm probably a dinosaur, but I wish students were allowed more time just to be students: to study, to read, to think, to talk to each other, to have big ideas - maybe even to have fun now & then. I'm not convinced turning unis into training centres is going to fix bigger problems in the jobs market

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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If government believes "math is solved"; if research funders believe "math is solved"; if university administrators believe "math is solved"; if future would-be students believe "math is solved": then it really doesn't matter what the #LLM is capable or not capable of doing. Communicate our value.

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 10/09/2026

Missed opportunity here to use properly evocative Irish vernacular: “with ideas” should be “with notions”, including lingering just ever so slightly too long on the first syllable.

It isn't clear why the company's board made this decision now. One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg's annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return
"with ideas." This year's festival ended on
September 7.

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Grant @syncingsinking.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this proposition that this profit margin is too narrow to contain sufficient tokens to complete a lean formalization

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Smiled to see @eyesfront.bsky.social repost Hopkins shortly after I read this in his latest: The river is pied With the glory of foam -- rain drums scent from hiding. I can't read the word "pied" and not think of skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow, and he's stuck "glory" in there, too.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A good practice document about using the discussion board feature in Blackboard suggests posting questions anonymously as if you were a student could encourage other students to do the same. I had a visceral negative reaction to this and it feels unethical to me. Am I off base?

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🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə) @timhenke.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

We should talk more about what a travesty the bibliography of OpenAI is 16 measly citations for a 165-page paper, of which 5 are just the problem statement. Only 7 are from this century. They failed to cite the method they used. And the guy whom they offered single-authorship & the Millennium Prize

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Juliette Bruce @juliettebruce.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I do not wade into discussions often, but I find the math community rallying around Alpöge, Buckmaster, and Coiculesco troubling. Like it or not by collaborating with Alpöge and using LLMs I think you are stepping outside of academic mathematics and into a PR war between Anthropic and openAI. (1/8)

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Jeremy Noel-Tod @jntod.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This is how, as a scientist, you write an elegant letter to a literary journal

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Could have chatted longer. Love the art in @eyesfront.bsky.social 's new pamphlets (by his partner), and on opening The Living to a random page the first line made me cackle aloud: "I am anxiously contemplating how I might score my haiku for the REF."

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Somehow only discovered this album 3? 5? years ago, but instantly a favorite.

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Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

From river to pond, the heron steps and pauses over a mined world. 'Have You Always Been Here?' Matthew Clegg Three new pamphlets 7 September Longbarrow Press Pre-order here: longbarrowpress.com/featured-poem/

Composite image of three pamphlets by Matthew Clegg, with 'The Living' foremost in the image

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Lissa Harris 🌈🗑️🔥⚔️🐀 @lissaharris.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

theme song for all us reformed doomers riding the struggle bus to a better place m.youtube.com/watch?v=wFrq...

m.youtube.com

Tom Waits - "Come On Up To The House"

YouTube video by Tom Waits

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Talking to Master's student about her thesis and the following question came up: why don't (pure?) maths papers have conclusion sections? I've got some half-baked answers, but also feeling uncertain about what disciplines/genres *do* have conclusions, and how exactly they're used.

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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Woke up to find 57 submissions to the journal overnight. I haven’t looked, but I expect approx. 56 will be AI-written slop. To put these numbers in perspective, we publish 40 papers per year. The volume of garbage is getting unmanageable. #MathSky

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Mike Konczal @mtkonczal.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

BLS this morning, with revised 2Q data: "The labor share, which is the percentage of output that accrues to workers in the form of compensation, was 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the lowest level in the series, which begins in the first quarter of 1947."

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Chris Bertram @crookedfootball.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Thread: British cities in recentish popular song, excluding traditional songs (something I was thinking about on a long drive yesterday), please add and suggest: 1/n

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Coincidentally, my view when I looked over from reading this:

View out a front window, some terraced houses in the background, foreground has a copy of James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State", and a UCU strike armband

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I have lived in this country for 12 years and only just learned they pronounce it saxOFFonist over here. I've switched on over on tomato, on basil, but some things are a bridge too far.

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Gabriel Kahane @gabrielkahane.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I wrote about my kids’ imaginary restaurant, and what it has taught me about the value of play in our lives as artists. gabrielkahane.substack.com/p/garden-noo...

gabrielkahane.substack.com

Garden Noodles

Life lessons from the junior proprietors of an imaginary restaurant

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 31/08/2026

Periodically, our University staff (professional and academic) renegotiates with management our Enterprise Agreement, a key document which lays out work conditions for the next years. Bargaining is currently at an impasse: this is why I'll be, along with my fellow uni staff, on strike tomorrow.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

“Pay us to give every student an equally shitty, dehumanizing experience.” This has always been a EdTech business model. Since the Teaching Machines movement in the 1950s. So now they’re just saying the quiet part out loud.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Satisfying feeling of a proof seeming more complicated than I remembered and worrying it was going to spiral to something messy and unsatisfying (devil of algebra) only to find the cute little picture that makes it easy again (angel of topology/geometry).

A very simple line drawing png make with tikz -- a square representing a torus with a line of slope 2/3 wrapping around it. A shaded band with slope -1 wraps around, too.

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Dr Dave Hitchcock @davehitchcock.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I think the idea that the UK's current schooling system is really excellent and that its exams-driven testing model is 'rigorous' is a perfect example of a country eagerly marking its own homework, using criteria it made up for itself.

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 19/08/2026

anyhow if anybody can point me to anything connecting the "northern clubs/resorts where people took speed and danced to fast, soulful, obscure R&B songs unpopular in London" scene of the Beatles in 1962 to the similarly described Northern Soul scene years later, I'm curious as hell

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I have had two papers simmering forever and will finish eventually (one soon 🤞), and this reminds me of a tension I'm feeling: I don't want to use AI at all on these, but I'm formulating several questions/conjectures. Unsure how I'll feel if someone immediately answers one with AI...

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Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Join us next month for the rescheduled launch of 'The Gleaning', the second poetry collection by Fay Musselwhite. Wednesday 30 September Upstairs at Shakespeare's, 146-148 Gibraltar Street, Sheffield S3 8UB Free entry, all welcome. Book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fay-mussel...

Flyer promoting the launch of 'The Gleaning' by Fay Musselwhite in Sheffield on Wednesday 30 September

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Philosophers often bring up the "principle of charity": a willingness to assume good faith in an interlocutor and treat them accordingly. It's good to do in many circumstances. But it is worth formulating a principle of not being a fucking mark. If not during the rise of fascism, then when? 12/

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Ripping off The Big Lebowski.

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Rabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Men fighting and women ignoring them Mughal, 18th C

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Troyce - Imprison Trump @troyce.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

My own personal philosophy

banner that says "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

"My biggest fear is sounding like an AI" -- MSc student working on their thesis. I am curious about playing with one for research but hate how they've infected *everything*.

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Den M @mousketeer.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Thoughts on the dead singer. Yesterday, my middle aged straight hairy biker son went on one on social media about the dead singer and those eulogising him. He did not hold back. What was unusual was that he took to social media to vent knowing it would attract vile bile. I asked him why.

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Michael Lobel @mlobelart.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Willa Cather figuring out how to completely savage me from 100 years in the past😭

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

It's extremely rare that I see a math paper take history at all seriously. The writing in this paper by Asok, Bachmann and Hopkins is inspiring to me; writing here in part to remember to find time to read it... arxiv.org/abs/2607.26190

arxiv.org

Algebraic vs. analytic: a survey

Given a pair of complex algebraic varieties, we can ask: does every analytic map admit an algebraic representative? Such questions are most interesting when the source and target are non-compact varie...

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