Nick @internic@qoto.org

What a story!
https://www.quantamagazine.org/amateur-mathematicians-find-fifth-busy-beaver-turing-machine-20240702/

@VergaraLautaro - As you probably know, the famous economist Morgenstern helped Gödel prepare for his citizenship hearing. Morgenstern later wrote:

"Now came an interesting development. He rather excitedly told me that in looking at the Constitution he had found some inner contradictions to his distress and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime, never intended by those who drew up the Constitution. I told him that it was most unlikely that such events would ever occur, even assuming that he was right, which of course I doubted. But he was persistent and so we had many talks about this particular point. I tried to persuade him that he should avoid bringing up such matters at the examination before the court in Trenton, and I also told Einstein about it: he was horrified that such an idea had occurred to Gödel, and he also told him he should not worry about these things nor discuss that matter.

Many months went by and finally the date for the examination in Trenton came. On that particular day, I picked up Gödel in my car. He sat in the back and then we went to pick up Einstein at his house on Mercer Street, and from there we drove to Trenton. While we were driving, Einstein turned around a little and said, "Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?" Of course, this remark upset Gödel tremendously, which was exactly what Einstein intended and he was greatly amused when he saw the worry on Gödel's face."

(1/2)

Man, being old is weird. I'm old enough to remember when "anyone can be President" was a statement of hope and aspirations rather than the opening line of a horror novel.

My seventh Math Research Livestream is now available on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/gKm-5vkb4yc

In this one I decided to pick up with where I ended the previous week, writing code for my discrete neural nets paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00677). This time I did actually get a decent amount of code written!

#math #livestream #Twitch #algebra #AbstractAlgebra #AI #MachineLearning #NeuralNets #combinatorics #UniversalAlgebra #CategoryTheory

Working on projects that help to protect human rights even when the law does not is my personal equivalent of touching grass right now.

Regarding CVE-2024-6387 aka regreSSHion - the OpenSSH vuln.

- it’s a valid find and you should patch as usual

- you won’t see a logo from me

- it isn’t a ../.. style RCE vuln - requires significant development knowledge to write an exploit, which isn’t public, and requires a whole bunch of resources to exploit on Linux where ASLR is working properly

- it only applies to new SSH releases in the past few years. Many enterprise and IoT Linux distros ship older versions that don’t have the vuln

what are some things that you find confusing about the command line? Mostly interested in answers from people who use the (unix) command line but still don't feel very comfortable with it.

(thinking of writing about using the command line interactively but I'm unsure about whether that would actually be helpful)

Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution #Vulnerability in #OpenSSH server

Affected versions:
- OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1
- Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable
- Versions from 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1
https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2024/07/01/regresshion-remote-unauthenticated-code-execution-vulnerability-in-openssh-server

Today, the good people of the world commemorate the passing of Google Reader eleven short years ago on July 1, 2013.

To honor their memory (and in leiu of flowers) please add an RSS, Atom, JSON or equivalent feed to your web site and keep building towards a web that connects people in meaningful and positive ways.

-- The Times writers are all doing magicians' hand waves to get from a Biden withdrawal to a Democratic ticket that a) draws support from the party's disparate factions; b) doesn't emerge from a convention blood bath that tears the party to shreds; and c) will reassure the public at large.

I don't think most of the arrogant, above-it-all people who write and edit the Times have given much thought to any of the details.

They panicked, and reacted as panicky people do -- and are still doing.

3/

Checking in on the future site of recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis, expected to go from its current obscure, not-visible-to-the-naked-eye status suddenly to being naked-eye visible for a few days or a week, probably-maybe between now and September. This binary system last went nova in 1946, and its behavior now when viewed by powerful telescopes across the spectrum of light wavelengths is strikingly similar to its behavior then, hence the prediction. Two of my cameras see it every clear night right now; a bonus last night was the SF Pride laser rainbow flag cutting across @MtDavidson_SF on its way out to sea.

I'm not attending, but wanted to say I'm very impressed by how seriously North Bay Python ( @NorthBayPython@social.northbaypython.org ) is taking COVID. They're even monitoring CO₂ levels throughout their conference venue and posting the values. 500-550 ppm is barely higher than outside, which averages around 450 ppm most places, and at that level you'd probably be safe without a mask on (though I'd recommend always wearing a good-fitting N95 mask indoors with other people, personally). It means the air is circulating well, which clears the air of virus.

They're showing how's it done, and it's not too onerous (at least, they're making it look easy). Every conference should be doing this kind of thing if they care about their attendees.

https://social.northbaypython.org/@NorthBayPython/112706690227620773

#COVID #COVID19 #COVIDIsNotOver #COVIDIsAirborne #HealthAndSafety #NBPy

There are a lot of bigshots on YouTube who pontificate about string theory, the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and other profound issues in physics. You can't really learn much physics from most of them. It's just chat.

Angela Collier here is so much better! So much more humble - and so much more fun if you really care about physics. I actually *learned* something: how to estimate the distance of a pulsar!

When pulses of radio waves from a pulsar move through space, they get smeared out as they go, and you can actually use this to guess how far away the pulsar is. Why? Because waves of lower frequency move a bit more slowly. Why? Because they interact more with the ionized gas in the Milky Way.

But how much slower, exactly? That's what she explains - and actually this part, how radio waves interact with ionized gas, is what will stick with me.

This is the first episode of a series she calls Coffee and The Problem:

"We have coffee and I solve a problem, and the idea is that it's like a cozy weekend morning and you pull out your notebook and you solve the problem right along with me. I will give you time to pause and solve it yourself if you want and compare your answer with mine if you want. That's the game! That's the fun."

This time she's solving a problem about estimating the distance of pulsar. The problem just hands you a formula. But she's good. She doesn't just use the formula, she shows how to derive it from more fundamental principles! And also, at the end, she raises the question I was worrying about all along: how reliable is this method in practice? So she's not blindly solving a problem: she's thinking about physics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iox8Z-NGGS8

this video will not teach you qcd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOtUo25GB3c

Literary sub-genre: Novel or play retells a classic from the perspective of a secondary character or characters. The new story tracks the the original but shifts some of its action offstage. The two versions intertwine, each now commenting on the other.

Examples:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard).
James (Percival Everett).

Are there others? There must be.

#Tusky 26 has mostly improvements under the hood, it should need less ressources (your battery likes this) and make less network requests (your server admin likes this).

From @StephanieJones

The "Biden Replacement Theory": A Joke That's Not Funny

https://open.substack.com/pub/stephaniejones2/p/the-biden-replacement-theory-a-joke?r=4hf2m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I spent the last 4 years of research toward my PhD focused on how people make decisions about politics, particularly weighing risk, perceiving communication, prioritizing sources of information & thinking about trust.

I have a lot of thoughts after the #debate & #news cycle.

But social media doesn’t seem like the best place to share a nuanced perspective in a series of posts.

So I haven’t decided where & whether to weigh in. But there’s sure a lot to say.

Let's break Google's monopoly. 💪

Check out 5 replacements for Google products that are easy to use and respect your privacy 👇🧵