iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 01/11/2025

What the hell... Is there any distinction between the different papers? Like a majority are surely not showing any intellectual independence, right?

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 21/09/2025

Lol brings back memories. I do still actually check it occasionally, but never even make eye contact with the crazies. Occasionally it reminds me of a paper I wanted to read though

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Ayliean @ayliean.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

Okay, now I’ve found their “Bagpipe Practice Room” I think Scotrail might just be having us on!

A cupboard in a train vestibule labelled “Stay Out, Bagpipe Practice Room”

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 30/08/2025

(I found a call due very soon promoting internationalisation to recruit someone from outside Europe with less than 2 years on the post-PhD clock but not sure I can come up with a candidate quick enough)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 30/08/2025

Anyone in the math GR / geometric analysis communiy know anyone who's in need of a postdoc around 1 year from now and would be interested in coming to the frozen wastelands of the north? (And has/will have a non-Euro PhD)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 11/08/2025

I asked ChatGPT if it knew who I am based off of our chats. The answer was (obviously) yes 😅

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Horatio Pornviewer @stuntbirdarmy.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

If kids’ schools trained them for work based on what everyone thought the hot new technology was going to be, both my kids would have spent the past several years learning about the blockchain. This is why schools don’t attempt to do workplace training: life is pretty long.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 10/08/2025

A last little bit of swedish summer yesterday Guitar and some beers, spotted some berries, and then made a little spiky friend

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 01/08/2025

Some kind of joke related to observing/measuring the back of the poster?

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 01/08/2025

A friend is currently advertising a PhD position in harmonic analysis (Melbourne + Chennai*): lashi-bandara.github.io/toc/supervis... Pass it on if you know anyone who might be interested. * Position is joint between Deakin University IIT-Madras, with 3 years in Melbourne and 1 year in Chennai

lashi-bandara.github.io

PhD Project - Kato Square Root Problem on Riemannian Spaces - Lashi Bandara

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Al Yankovic @alyankovic.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 16/06/2025

I say "attempt" because admittedly, I still don't really understand it all too well but seems we can prove stuff about it. We were however able to show that the quantity arises as the value of a reduced Hamiltonian for the Einstein equations, which I think is kind of neat

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 16/06/2025

Recently, we (with Mattias Dahl and Klaus Kröncke) gave a definition of a new geometric "mass-like" invariant for asymptotically (locally) hyperbolic manifolds, which we've found satisfies some interesting properties. This paper is our attempt to understand it a little better.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 14/06/2025

I'm told that when I was really little, I was running into the motion sensor to open the door of a store before arriving customers triggered it When I was visibly upset for being too slow, a group stepped back and let the door close again so I could "open it" for them -- it was the band Wet Wet Wet

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 14/06/2025

Seems arXiv now uses AI to try to convince you that you're misclassifying your own paper's subject area 🙃

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 24/05/2025

[Disclaimer: Not any kind of expert, so I'm probably missing things but the gist is roughly right I think 😅 ]

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 24/05/2025

The amusing thing is that there *is* an etymological connection here... And of course some variation of calling townspeople "burgers" exists in almost all European languages. It's where "bourgeois" comes from even. And connected to place names like Hamburg, Edinburgh, Strasbourg, etc. (I think)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 24/05/2025

Can any physicist explain this idea of boundedness of the Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action in the context of this paper? (Purely from a GR/geometric perspective, no path integrals) arxiv.org/abs/2505.13600

arxiv.org

Constraints are not enough

The Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action is well-known to be unbounded below and thus to raise many questions regarding the definition of the gravitational path integral. A variety of works since the lat...

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 11/05/2025

Not only is this true, there are 33 whole-ass mentions of this in the script and each one is freaking hilarious whills.nu/4/sw4.html#h...

She hands him a dish, and he grunts an embarrassed reply.
BERU (CONT'D)
Luke, you've hardly touched
your dinner. Have some bum-bum
extract. It's very mild.
OWEN
(to Luke)
The force of the Bogan is strong,
and if you don't feel you can
make it, you probably won't.
LUKE
I've never even been past this
planet...and I never thought I'd
be going alone.
Suddenly I feel very small --
and well...desperate.

LUKE
Because a terrible thing happened.
During one of his lessons a young
PADAWAN-JEDI, a boy named Darklighter,
came to know the evil half of the
force, and fell victim to the spell
of the dreaded Bogan. He ran away
from his instructor and taught the
evil ways of the Bogan Force to a
clan of Sith pirates, who then
spread untold misery throughout
the systems. They became the per-
sonal bodyguards of the Emperor.
The Jedi were hunted down by these
deadly Sith knights. With every
Jedi death, contact with the Ashla
grows weaker, and the force of the
Bogan grows more powerful.

LUKE
No, no, there's a debris chute.
It's the Bogan force making you
feel that way. Don't give up
hope...fight it!
HAN
It's no use, it's no use.
The giant hinge bolts on the blast-shield door begin to pop
as the force of the Sith knights grows stronger. Luke fires
off a rapid series of shots and half-drags Han to the small
grate in the wall.
LUKE
Well, we're going anyway. Think
of good things. Drive the Bogan
from your mind.

18. INT. REBEL SPACEFIGHTER - COCKPIT CORRIDOR
Deak Starkiller cuts down several troops who make a fren-
zied, suicidal charge with laser swords.
TROOPS
The Bogan! The Bogan!
They are no match for the incredibly agile young Jedi. For
an eerie moment, all is deathly quiet as a huge darker figure
appears in the sub-hallway. The remaining stormtroopers bow
low toward the doorway. An awesome, seven-foot BLACK KNIGHT
OF THE SITH makes his way into the blinding light of the cock-
pit area. This is LORD DARTH VADER, right hand to the MASTER
OF THE SITH. His sinister face is partially obscured by his
flowing black robes and grotesque breath mask, which are in
sharp contrast to the fascist white armored suits of the
Imperial stormtroopers. The troops instinctively back away
from the imposing warrior.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 09/05/2025

Just got some art done by Alexandr Elichev for my latest homebrew Frosthaven class and wanted to share it somewhere :)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 02/05/2025

How normal is it to write words correctly, but write the letters in the wrong order? Sometimes when I write fast, I fill in the letters the wrong way. Eg. When writing "Letter" in the middle of a sentence I might write the "ett" then the "L" in front of them and then the "er" ... it feels weird

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 29/04/2025

Yeh, it's not even the AI that's the problem -- I actually *do* even think that we aren't that far from being able to generate tools to help prove things. But they seem to think that essentially papermilling is a goal...

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 28/04/2025

How can you look at a shift to quantity over quality seen in other fields, and think "math really needs to do this too"

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 28/04/2025

Well this can fuck right off www.theregister.com/2025/04/27/d...

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Senator Chris Van Hollen @vanhollen.senate.gov · 18/04/2025

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

Photo of Senator Chris Van Hollen with Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 17/04/2025

de Sitter xkcd.com/3077

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

The Mary Rose Museum @maryrosemuseum.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 06/04/2025

Nah but as soon as i started to slightly open it, the pressure blew the lid clean off 😅 But yeh the ceiling, walls, and myself was soaked

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 06/04/2025

Haha i did something similar and it completely mangled the metal attachment piece. Absolutely devastated the kitchen too 🫠

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 04/04/2025

Someone should make a collage of all the posts where people predicted this the moment he pivoted to weird religious zealot

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Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Huh, weird

DOJ directs prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione
1 hour ago
CAH
CNN
Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 30/03/2025

(To be clear, this was not remotely planned and there was a mild panic when I realised what I was just about to do in front of a room full of students with smartphones)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 30/03/2025

The other day in a lecture I was using an outstretched arm like a traffic cop to indicate vectors in different directions and then after something like i+2j+k I ended up saying "whoops, nearly did an Elon Musk impersonation" moment 🙃

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Michael Wong @miquai.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 30/03/2025

I don't think so tbh. I think at some point as LIGO and whatnot improve that will really change things, but I don't hear much about Webb. That said, I'm not an expert here 😅

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 27/02/2025

Yeh for sure. The distinciton there matters too... I have no issue with someone using ChatGPT as a tool, but I don't want to be reading something that is clearly just generated by it. I'd find it more informative to just get the prompt you put into it.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 27/02/2025

It's coming... I've also got postdoc applications with the cover letter clearly GPT output too 🫠

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 27/02/2025

Students... I've noticed people on Reddit complaining about it for a while, but now started getting it myself. But really *any* email where it's not a mass email but rather a direct email from someone asking you for something, because we seem to be heading there

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 27/02/2025

How do you response to AI generated emails? Especially those where it's clear that the LLM that wrote it wasn't given full information... Like, how is this a thing

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 23/02/2025

I reckon he'll eventually get obnoxious enough that a student will complain about being recorded all the time without real possibility to consent

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 23/02/2025

Argh I trained the algorithm to show me more and each one is worse than the previous 😖

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